Wannabe

Layer Tennis is an interesting “sport.”  What happens is that one designer starts off a Photoshop file, and then gives it over to another designer who makes a change or ads some elements.  This continues for 10 rounds, with some amusing commentary thrown in.  It sounds like a nice way to spend a Friday afternoon

http://layertennis.com/

I’m trying to come to grips with Ruby on Rails, and the website Try Ruby was suggested to me.

It was a really impressive online tutorial set-up as a user prompt.  I really appreciate that it’s one Ruby tutorial that doesn’t require me to be download and installing packages willy-nilly to get started   It’s extremely newbie-friendly and is well written and utilizes some light humor to help you get through it   I think the last chapter was a bit clumsy…but may have just had one too many typos along the way.

Regardless, I’d say the “15 minute” bit is no lie and well worth the time if you’re trying to get better acquainted with Ruby or RoR such as myself.

http://tryruby.org/

Subtle Patterns is a lovely site featured some really great seamless patterns.  Best of all they’re commercial free so no worries about plugging these into your designs

The patterns are all fairly muted.  Nothing really crazy.  They’re very well made and look professional.  I was really happy to find this site, and I’m planning on using some of their textures in future designs.  Light textures like these are a great way to add a little more interest and depth to a piece of design without going overboard.

Plus patterns are “in” right now, and it’s always fun to be trendy

http://subtlepatterns.com/

I randomly made this little webpage to showcase a lot of 350×200 openers I made for online articles

It’s a pretty simple script built on top of jquery:

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<style type="text/css">
body {
    margin:0;
    overflow:hidden;
}
</style>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(function(){
    $("div").mousemove(function(e){
      height = $(window).height();
        width = $(window).width();
        percent = e.clientY * 100 / height;
        move = ($("#box").height()-height) * percent / 100;
        $("body").scrollTop(move);
 
        percent2 = e.clientX * 100 / width;
        move2 = ($("#box").width()-width) * percent2 / 100;
        $("body").scrollLeft(move2);
    });
});
</script>

The CSS hides the scrollbars and removes the default margins from the body.

Then the Javascipt adds an event handler that will fire every time the mouse moves on top of a div – which is always since the page is pretty much just one giant div.  After that it determines what percent of the window you cursor is currently sitting at, and then translates that to the same percentage of the size of that giant div and scrolls the window accordingly.  So regardless of the size of the window you’ll be able to move it around to see all the contents of the div.

Scroll around the box below to see the random goodness:

Ever come across a website and wish you could save it for later?  For offline reading on an iPod – or just to save it for prosperity?  The you’re in luck   When I wanted to save a copy of an online tutorial I looked up the site Web 2 PDF.  It was easy to use and only took a few seconds to turn an entire web page into a PDF.  I was impressed by how close it looked to the original and it kept all of the text selectable.

If you’re lucky enough to have a full version of Acrobat you can even combine all the PDFs together to make your very own DRM free eBook

http://www.web2pdfconvert.com/