Harmonic Northwest

The Harmonic Northwest $houtout is an effort to give some money and recognition to those selfless developers who offer up their expertise to help the development community in exchange for a voluntary donation.

This $houtout for the CSS Browser Selector falls under the category of “code snippet I’ve been using forever but for which have not yet given a donation”. It’s a super handy little javascript file that determines what browser and platform are being used to view a web page, then adds a special class to the top of the DOM tree that allows you to implement styles specific to those parameters. I’ve used it on just about every HTML project I’ve done in the past few years to optimize site layouts for different browsers.

CSS Browser Selector

¡Muchas graçias Rafael Lima, eres lo máximo!

Filed under:
$houtouts, CSS, JavaScript, Web Development by Gage

Take a look at this site that Harmonic Northwest developed recently for Jeremy Bittermann:

http://www.bittermannphotography.com

It’s the first site I’ve put together with the iPad as the primary target platform. That meant making use of swipe gestures, avoiding touch-unfriendly actions and making the general shape and size of the site iPad-optimized. We also wanted to have the images (which are really the focus of the site) take up as many onscreen pixels as possible. So that meant having the whole page be responsive to current size of the browser window and dynamically changing with browser resizing or rotating (in the case of tablet/mobile device).

It was a lot of work, but I think it turned out rather nice in the end. Everything shrinks and grows fluidly with screen size. Probably the area where the dynamic sizing helps the most are the project slideshows. The slideshow image is always a big as it can be within the browser window and within the framework of the design elements without any cropping or adjustment of the aspect ratio. The effect is enhanced on iOS by the ability to swipe through photos rather than using the arrows.

All of this was done in WordPress, by the way, making it pretty easy for Jeremy to go in and add/edit his portfolios. He can use the WYSIWYG editor to drag and drop images to change their order or to add/remove photos. The captions are set in the description text associated with an image in the Media Library. The images in the background of the home page have their own special page in WordPress where they can be edited in the same fashion as the slideshow photos.

Design credit on this one goes to Josh at Plazm, who provided these very clean, very user-friendly page layouts.

Filed under:
HTML, iOS, JavaScript, mobile, Web Development by Gage

The Harmonic Northwest $houtout is an effort to give some money and recognition to those selfless developers who offer up their expertise to help the development community in exchange for a voluntary donation.

I finally got around to buying NeoOffice. It was free for a very long time, but for the most recent version the developers began charging $10. This is a pittance for what you’re getting. NeoOffice has eliminated the need for me to buy Microsoft Office, which is awesome. I could go on about how well all the application features work, but that’s really the deal cincher.. not having to shell out a bunch of money to put a suite of Microsoft products on my machine.

Back when I started using NeoOffice, it was the only one that could be used natively on the mac. Now both OpenOffice and LibreOffice have a freely downloadable suite of similar tools that run on the mac platform. It’s possible that NeoOffice could be doomed by its free competitors, but I for one am very grateful to the NeoOffice team for getting the ball rolling ahead of everyone else on the mac-specific implementation.

Thank you to the development team of NeoOffice, you guys rule.

Filed under:
$houtouts by Gage