http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web Love the web is a design, programming, and usability blog http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/responsive-javascript Part one of our responsive design toolkit: A handy way to trigger Javascript when media queries change. Wed, 09 May 2012 00:00:00 +1200 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/fadeslidejs-a-jquery-slider fadeSlide.js is a different kind of jQuery carousel. The previous and next items are slightly visible, giving a cool graphical effect. Great for impressive looking home pages! Fri, 27 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/where-are-my-rounded-corners-the-song Earlier this year, Paul Boag wrote a great article explaining to clients why progressive enhancement is better for their site. Inspired by this, I decided to write a song. Fri, 23 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/building-the-nz-international-arts-festival-website The NZ Festival 2012 site is live, and there's heaps of cool stuff to share from it. Thu, 24 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/using-utf8-characters-in-css-html5-and-javascript Did you know you can use sillly UTF-8 characters in HTML, CSS and Javascript? Thu, 24 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/hoverstatejs-another-jquery-plugin A handy jQuery plugin that preloads your images hover state, then displays it "onHover". Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/biglinkjs-a-jquery-plugin A handy jQuery plugin that turns container elements into links. Supports command/control click (open link in new tab). Wed, 09 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/the-invention-of-the-space I read a great book recently. It did make me a little scared about what the internet was doing to my brain though. Luckily at around the same time I discovered a tool that makes reading online more enjoyable and… Sat, 15 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/illustration-for-web An illustrators thoughts on work for the web Tue, 10 May 2011 00:00:00 +1200 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/making-ajax-calls-bookmark-able-and-linkable Ajax is awesome, we all know it. But, one of the most annoying things with it is not having a URL to specifically relate to a result loaded with an Ajax call. Well, we have a way around it! Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/how-to-increase-your-productivity How to increase your productivity, otherwise known as "Eat That Frog". Mon, 02 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +1200 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/utf8 The Springload site is now fully internationalised! どうも有り難う! Tue, 15 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +1200 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/terminal-shortcuts-for-mac I am on the command line everyday at Springload and these shortcuts are simple yet indispensable. Fri, 09 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +1200 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/influence-the-colour-range-in-8-bit-graphics Leveraging Photoshop's colour-range modification capabilities can enhance the appearance of your web graphics and save on file size. Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/javascript-drop-shadows Drop shadows can take a fair amount of time to create using CSS, up until now! Fri, 11 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/productivity-apps-textexpander This article is about a very nice little productivity application for the Mac that saves you countless keystrokes with customized abbreviations for your frequently used text strings and images. This piece of… Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +1200 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/chunked-transfer-encoding-and-ondomready The main benefit of chunked transfer encoding is that it progressively shows content while your HTML loads. Enter unobtrusive JavaScript and its often used "onDOMReady" event. Combine the two and the problem arises… Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 +1200 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/springload-on-lastfm Get an idea of our musical vibes via Last.fm! Fri, 08 May 2009 00:00:00 +1200 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/ie8-ie7-ie6-running-side-by-side-in-harmony With the release of Internet Explorer 8, browser testing got just that little bit more difficult, and getting all the browsers you need to test in, working seamlessly in one desktop environment, became almost… Fri, 08 May 2009 00:00:00 +1200 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/tinymce-plugin-release-auto-resize We frequently use the TinyMCE WYSIWYG here at Springload, and were faced with the problem of it not resizing when content gets added. This resulted in a limited overview of the content and a lot of scrolling. We… Thu, 07 May 2009 00:00:00 +1200 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/pop-open-menus Drop-down-pop-open application menus. A story of good vs. evil. Tue, 14 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +1200 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/detecting-bandwidth-with-flash-and-loading-the-right-content Sometimes for slower connections can't manage to lose functionality for the beautiful animations. Alternate content is needed and Flash is the to-go guy for the rescue! Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/choosing-a-javascript-framework-will-it-fly Determining which framework to build sites with is a choice that can make or break. Over the last few months we've looked at a large assortment of JavaScript frameworks/libraries and made our decision. Here's why… Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/power-editing-with-textmate Textmate is a powerful text editing application for the Mac that can make life easy when it comes to coding. Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/cross-browser-drop-shadow-text Give your HTML text a lift with drop-shadows. This method works in IE6 and IE7, as well as our more compliant browsers. Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/dynamic-submit-buttons Create a styled submit button that varies in length as its value changes, without relying on Javascript! Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/sticky-footers How to 'stick' the footer to the bottom of the screen Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/increasing-colour-contrast-for-improved-accessibility A brief look at the colour contrast guidelines, how they relate to your designs and the tools to check them. Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/mouse-gestures-or-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-mouse Reach out and touch the web, and speed up your browsing to boot. Mouse gestures are one of the biggest changes to my web experience since online gaming, and that’s saying something. Sat, 15 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/iphones-aesthetics-and-functionality The exciting and challenging task of designing an iPhone optimised version of Kiwibank's Internet banking pages. Fri, 07 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/backgrounds-disappear-on-horizontal-scroll Often when viewing your website on a narrow display (800x600) some of your backgrounds may disappear when you scroll horizontally. Go ahead and try it on the footer of this page. D'oh, Player has since fixed it on… Thu, 06 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/mvc-101-or-how-i-saw-the-light-and-finally-separated-the-different-parts-of-my-website When designing the architecture of a website, it pays to have some structure. Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/alternative-typefaces-on-the-web The limited selection of typefaces at a web designers disposal is an ever present headache. Sun, 26 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/is-striving-for-aesthetic-greatness-a-waste-of-time Taking web design from good to great. Is it worth it? Does anyone notice anyway? And is it likely to force more usability issues in the process? Thu, 23 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/swiss-design What could be more interesting or challenging for a Swiss designer than to start his first New Zealand project with a bank? Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/what-is-usability This series of articles starts with what lies behind the science of website usability and then explores some of the basic principles and techniques that can be applied to website design. Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/why-has-usability-become-such-a-big-player-in-contemporary-website-design Why has usability become such a big player in contemporary website design? Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300 http://www.springload.co.nz/love-the-web/how-can-we-help-users-find-the-information-they-are-looking-for How can we help users find the information they are looking for? Some basic steps to good web design. Fri, 10 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +1300