Have You Tried “The Smashing Book” Yet?

Smashing BookHave you tried Smashing Magazine’s The Smashing Book yet? I haven’t, but the full-color 313 page paperback is very tempting at it’s $29 price. Most computer-related books are much costlier than that, and they’re not by an online publication notorious for “smashing you with the information.”

The topics covered include “The Art And Science Of CSS Layouts,” web typography, “User Interface Design In Modern Applications,” usability principles, color theory, branding, and a brief history of Smashing Magazine.

They have some scans and a PDF sample chapter on the website, which look pretty good to me.

Have any of you read the book? Is it worth the money? It seems like a promising book to me, and I’ve been wondering about it lately. (Digging into WordPress, as well, as caught my attention.)

Showcase Your Images with WebAssist’s PowerGallery

Looking for a PHP photo gallery package that’s super easy to use? Look no further than WebAssist’s PowerGallery. It has a slick interface that far surpasses any I’ve seen in similar scripts. It looks good, it’s clean and simple, and it feels polished, which…

Microsoft Rips Off Plurk

It seems that Microsoft China has ripped off the design, UI and code of Plurk, China’s most popular microblogging service. Microsoft’s “MClub” (club.msn.cn) doesn’t just look uncannily similar, a lot of the JavaScript looks to have been copied and pasted. We were first tipped…

Usability Tip: Link the Logo

Here is a basic, and easy to implement tip, that will do wonders to make your website easier to navigate: Link your logo/banner to the front page. If a user clicks on the logo, they should wind up on the home page of the…

BlogBuzz December 12, 2009

Rolling Your Own PHP Framework

Fuel Your Coding has a three-part series worth checking out. It covers how to build your own lightweight PHP framework for your projects. There are quite a few php frameworks out there. Some huge, some small; Some useful, some not. I often hear developers,…

The CSS3 “Super-Awesome Button”

Tired of messing around with image files to create tasteful (and expandable) button graphics? Why don’t you just use some CSS3 techniques to build them on the fly? Smashing Magazine’s Pushing Your Buttons With Practical CSS3 describes how to use box-shadow, text-shadow, and border-radius…

Google Chrome Arrives for Mac

The Mac version of Google’s Chrome web browser has arrived as a beta. The search giant has deemed it stable enough for the general public’s consumption, but a few features are still under development. One notable feature missing is the bookmark manager. I’ve tried…

BuySellAds Announces “Premium” and Pay Per Click Ads

BuySellAds has announced two new ad programs that are currently in beta stage: “premium” banners and Pay-Per-Click text ads. As you know, we have traditionally sold display ads at fixed 30-day rates. It is important to note that we are not abandoning the sponsorship…

Version Control With Dropbox

I’ve mentioned Dropbox before here, but I didn’t mention this neat trick you could do with it… Anyone in the programming industry will recommend that you use version control software like SVN or Git to save yourself headaches when you make a mistake and…