Psyked*

it’s easy once you know how.

Christmas Games – Online & Downloadable

Posted by James - 17/12/07 at 12:12:52 pm

It’s that time of year again, when production schedules relax just enough for the Marketing guys to get a look in, and we get to knock up a nice festive game for our Christmas E-mails. Last year we canibalized an old promotional game - spruced it up with some snazzy graphics - and unleashed it upon the world. [See the 2006 Game] This year (2007) MMT Digital is continuing - and improving upon - that fine tradition, bringing you a trio of festive games, available online or via download.
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Identifying link targets with CSS

Posted by James - 05/12/07 at 09:12:19 am

So, you have links that open in new windows, and links that open in parent windows. Inconsistant behaviour is the primary usability nightmare, and your standard web browser doesn’t give you any feedback on just what is going to happen once you click that link. Popups galore? or damn-I-was-reading-that syndrome? If only there was some visual clue we could give about those pesky link behaviours.

Well, this isn’t something I’ve seen anyone do yet, but technically it should be possible. What we should be able to do is transport the same techniques we use for detecting file types - ie. the CSS 2.1 attribute selectors - and link them to the target attribute. Thankfully, this should be a pretty short bit of code, as there’s only really four target options that anyone uses anyway. These would be ‘_blank’, ‘_self’, ‘_top’ or ‘_parent’. So, working on our existing knowledge of detecting link file-types, we simply add the code;

a[target='_blank']

… and we should now be able to automatically attach icons to those links that target a new browser window. (_parent, _self, and _top nearly always open links in exactly the same window) Links to other websites already have a standard icon - pretty much set by wikipedia - but it’s not often that target-based links are seen, so there’s not much of a standard. Or is there?

Sitepoint has a short article on the problem of link targets - ‘Beware of Opening Links in a New Window‘ and also has a pretty simple icon to use for new windows. Perfect! Just like internal links don’t have an icon, and external ones do, so only links that open a new browser window should need this icon. Save the icon to your webserver, add your new CSS, and you’re away.

Pimp My PC - Improving the look, feel and general efficiency

Posted by James - 02/12/07 at 07:12:29 pm

From time to time it’s fun to give your computer an overhaul. Here’s a few simple, and not-so-simple ways rejuvinate your humdrum old Windows machine. And I’m assuming that we’re using Windows XP here - not ole’ Vista.

 

#1 A New theme!

You mightn’t like Vista, but I challenge you to say that the glassy Vista styles aren’t a million times nicer than the playdough style default XP ones. Microsoft it seems, missed a potential killer market by locking down the Windows themes to only Microsoft-certified ones. (Probably because they knew of hundreds of critical security flaws.)
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