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Investigating Crazy Egg's heatmap and visitor tracking tool today, I found a nice bit of UI in their plans and signup process. The plans page itself looks sweet: But the really slick part comes when you click the "Sign Up" button: The other plans fade out and the signup form slides in - no page...

I had an issue. iTunes is a fine program, with loads of great features, and it's essential for the iTunes store and syncing my iPhone. Trouble is, in my house, we've got a central media server which reports 1037 albums - pulled from the CD collections of four music lovers. The combination of network access...

The Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook by Jorge Ramon is now available. As Jorge says in his introductory post: The Ext JS 3.0 Cookbook is for developers who want a book of useful techniques, with explanations, that they can refer to and adapt to their purposes. I was a Technical Reviewer for this book, and it...

Rails 2.3 delivered a new feature that allows you to easily write forms in rails that can process nested attributes for related objects using the accepts_nested_attributes_for method in your models. Now there is a plugin to make adding and removing nested forms a walk in the park! I am not going to go into detail...

One of the hidden gems of System.Net is the ability to change from using an SMTP server for sending your email. Instead you can specify a pickup directory which will receive all emails sent from your application as a .EML text file. There are clearly uses for this in production - you may have a...

Having used flash extensively for the last few years I have really come to rely on using Scale-9 scaling on UI elements in the rich internet apps I design and develop. It is a great technique for things like rounded rectangles, button graphics etc and ensuring the rounded corners do not distort when stretched. I...

I have been meaning to blog about Phusion Passenger for a while as about 3-4 months ago we migrated Stubmatic from using Apache / Mongrel Cluster to Phusion Passenger A.K.A. mod_rails. Mod rails is extreamly easy to install. Make sure you update gem first: gem update --system Then install the Phusion Passenger gem gem install...

iPhone and Adobe Air developers (as well as any others that use SQLite 3) Menial has just released an excellent little app for creating, managing and running queries against SQLite 3 databases called Bases. The application is simple to use, very user friendly and has worked well from the testing I have done. It costs...