noinput.net | plug it in

This weekend sophia hit me up for some of my design/css related link’age. After exporting the list from my bloglines account, I figured why not share the love. Heres some of the sites I check pretty often to get ideas and catch-up with current design trends.

Stylegala | gallery : http://www.stylegala.com/
Unmatched Style : http://www.unmatchedstyle.com
CSS Beauty : http://www.cssbeauty.com/
Design Melt Down : http://www.designmeltdown.com
Vitaly Friedman : http://www.alvit.de/blog/
CSS Insider : http://css.weblogsinc.com
cssplay.co.uk : http://www.cssplay.co.uk/
maxdesign.com.au : http://www.maxdesign.com.au
Content with Style : http://www.contentwithstyle.co.uk/
Treehouse : http://treehousemagazine.com/
Webdesign reference : http://webdesignbook.net
DarkEye Living : http://www.dark-i.com
CSS Drive Gallery : http://www.cssdrive.com/
CSS Import : http://www.cssimport.com/
Design*Sponge : http://designsponge.blogspot.com
KALIBER10000 : http://www.k10k.net/
Digg / Design : http://digg.com/design
Smashing Magazine : http://www.smashingmagazine.com
CSS Galleries : http://css-galleries.com/
CSS Bloom : http://www.cssbloom.com

Anyone have others?

For anyone who’s ever used any of these programs, you know just how far they’ve come and now how amazing just these taste of features are. For someone in the web world, the ability to export an xhtml layout directly from the layout application is huge, not to mention the Illustrator -> Flash integration.

I’ve been using the Photoshop CS3 Beta for a bit now and love the new features they’ve thrown in. Processing on this MacBook Pro with the Univ. Binaries is fantastic, effects and filters process like no other. The intelligent selection tool is incredible too.. I feel like this release will spawn a whole new level of creativity from artists all over. That is until you can export to Flex.. hehe.

hat tip -> curtis

I’ve felt a fairly low level of creativity over the past week from being a codemonkey on this project, but in that time due to my lack of enthusiasm to post, I’ve been collecting some links that double as my search-able bookmarking tool. aka. this site. If any strike your clicker finger, be my guest.

• Adobe: No Plans to Make Current Products Vista Compatible
• Calculate your caffeine intake *cough* tim.
• Social Web Borrowing with Prosper - linky to story
• June 17th, for 30 years
• 42 Design/Tech Magazines To Read via Smashing Mag one of my new fav. sites
• Adobe Apollo Launched, So Go Build Something I cant wait for some time to try this
• The Web 2.0 Address Book May Have Arrived
• Internet Radio’s Days are Getting Numbered - sign the petition, please
• Vista More Secure than OS X? - Getting damn close
• The Wordpress Plugin Repository - Fiiinallllyyy

And Just for fun, why not showoff what the new EOS-1D Mark III is capable of: 10FPS - 110frames at JPG large. Madness.

It’s already been a year since Ze started the show, amazing how fast that seemed to have went. Funny how there’s days I can’t think of a thing to post on this little blog, let alone come up with a video podcast almost daily. It was a treat to meet him at Flash Forward a few years back, the man is mental, and we love him for it. The internet world awaits his next move now, talk about track position.

Also, if you haven’t joined The ORG yet, find me on there as noinput. My favorites are the quick and dirty quack attacks. Heh.

I can’t wait for this movie to drop in LA:

Playing a little catch-up from last week and my bookmarks.

• Meta Tube: Search 60+ Video Sites at once
• Flash earth gets 5 more image sources: Still amazing.
• Adobe Releases Lots of CS3 news, Bridge CS3 Beta is available for download & lots of great PS resources
• Microsoft.com, new website, and it works in Firefox!
• Bling your Blog with google and scoble
• The Zillow Christmas light contest
• Saving is So 20th Century
• Will It Blend? the newest victim: An iPod.
• 15 Best Time wasting sites online.
• Worlds longest alphabetical email address
• StumbleUpon Video (love’n this site mang)
• Amanda Congdon, UnRSSed, she made it to the network, but I miss the old RB

More to come..

Looks like the uber-popular wine.com has now made the jump to a .NET/AJAX site with a fully user-responsive shopping cart. Some more info I found on MSDN:

One example is that by updating the shopping cart without a full page refresh, the process of adding new items to the cart is made seamless. By implementing this simple solution, the site has improved the overall User eXperience for buyers making online purchases.

A less obvious, subtle change is the description that appears when clicking on the icons associated with each wine (e.g. Professional Ratings). Rather than using an ‘obtrusive’ new browser window (which popup blockers may intially deny), definitions appear in a popup window directly on the page. If a user were forced to use a new browser window or tab, the focus on the original page could be lost resulting in a less than ideal UX.

Some nice work, I think I’ll finally have to breakdown and buy a couple bottles, you know, for shopping cart usability research reasons.