Pixelmatrix Design

This is just something that’s been on my mind a bit lately. I feel like i’ve learned this lesson several times over, and would like to pass it along. It seems like we as humans have a tendency to hold onto things. This seems like a good thing up front, but it really isn’t. Down the road you may regret it. This isn’t to say that some things shouldn’t be held onto, but things need to be balanced. Here are a few examples from my own life & experiences that illustrate this point a bit more.

So, if you’re just tuning in, i’ve been posting about my experiences in switching from Photoshop to Fireworks. This past week, I didn’t learn too many new things, but I did find something big. At least big to me.

A few weeks ago, CS5 was released, and with it, a new version of Fireworks. I decided to download the trial and give it a fair shot. Fast forward to today, and i’ve pretty much completely converted. It’s a hard process to learn a new tool, but I thought other people might be interested in learning about my experiences.

Here’s some of my initial observations. 

After the overwhelming response to CSSDesk’s alpha launch, I started to put together some ideas to improve the service further. Today i’m proud to say a few of those ideas have been launched.

Permalinks / Sharing

You can now share your code with others on blog posts, as an advanced paste (ala gist, pastie, etc), or just to keep for the future. There’s a button in the top now labeled “Share”. You can click that, and it will give you a permalink (permanent link) for your code. Once you get your permalink, you can update this code any time you visit the permalink by hitting “Save”. This will let you (and only you) make changes to your saved code. Just for fun, here’s an example of how you can use webkit’s animations.

New Backgrounds

I heard some great ideas for added backgrounds, so I decided to put a couple of them into action. You can now choose between 12 or 16 column backgrounds in addition to the original list. This could be quite useful if you wanted to align things to a grid. Currently these use the standard 960gs column setup. In the future I might add hinted lines for the baseline grid as well.

UI Improvements

This is all stuff that you may not even notice, but I made some slight UI tweaks to make the interactions smoother. There’s now some tooltips in the nav to explain each button’s function. Lots of little things not worth mentioning in detail.

No more Flash

Previously I was handling downloads with Doug Neiner’s awesome Downloadify jquery/flash script. It’s a great way to go if you don’t want to mess with anything on the server-side. However, now that I have a server-side to CSSDesk, it no longer makes sense to have any flash on the page. Now downloads are handled natively.

What’s next?

I have lots of ideas. Some things i’m pretty sure about: IE compatibility (although, in a much stripped down interface), Attachments (!?), More ways to share, etc. Stay tuned!

Check out all the new stuff over at CSSDesk

Today i’m announcing a new side-project of mine: CSSDesk. Do you ever find yourself needing or wanting to try something out in CSS and HTML but don’t want to open up a text editor and throw together all the pieces to get started? That’s where CSSDesk comes in. Simply edit the placeholder code, and you’ll see the result updated live.

This is definitely early alpha software. I started building it last week, and built it over a period of a few nights. I plan to add more features to it, but I want to see how users are responding first. There could be a lot of potential features I build. Right now it’s definitely broken in IE, but I think i’ll make a stripped down version for IE. If you want to test what you’re doing in IE, use the Download button and then fire it up in IE.

Anyway, check it out. Let me know what you think. Hope you like it!

I’ve been seeing more and more websites offering great navigation with the keyboard, and I started wondering how i’d put it to use in my own work. That gave me an idea to make a jQuery plugin to make it super easy for anyone to add keyboard navigation to their site. I love keyboard navigation a lot, so please use this plugin!

mapKey lets you simply target any link on your site or call a function with a keyboard character. Using it is pretty simple:

$("a#next-page").mapKey("right");

Or, to call a function:

Check out the demo, download it, or view the source on GitHub.

I haven’t been blogging much lately, as i’ve been super busy, but here’s some updates.

Uniform 1.5

I released a new and improved version of Uniform a few weeks ago, and it’s had a very positive response. New in 1.5 is a new sprite-based theme system, various speed and logic improvements, lots of bug fixes, and a new type of form control to style: File inputs. You can check out the mini-site here, and fork me or post bugs on github.

Contracting at Jive

I have been contracting in-house at Jive for the last month or so, and it’s been a great experience. I was mainly there to fill in for Sig as he became a new father, but i’ve been able to help out with a lot of cool things. It looks like i’ll be contracting there part time for the rest of March at least.

joshpyles.com

If you haven’t seen it, my personal tumblr is up in full force at http://joshpyles.com. I’ve been meaning to skin it for quite a while and I finally got around to it.

New domain alias: pixelmatrix.net/.org

I have been after pixelmatrix.com for a while, and finally pixelmatrix.net and pixelmatrix.org opened up so I swiped them. Probably keeping pixelmatrixdesign.com as the main URL for quite a while, but if I had pixelmatrix.com i’d definitely make that the main one.

New business cards

I had some new business cards letterpressed recently, and they look awesome. If you see me, ask me for one. Don’t forget that I still have some buttons too, which leads me to my next point…

Heading to SXSW this week

I’ll be in Austin, TX this week for SXSW Interactive. Make sure to say hi! I'll have buttons and business cards to hand out.

With an update so big that it had to skip a whole point, i'm happy to announce that GetGravatar is now updated to 1.2. Now with 100% less PHP required, and 50% less AJAX calls!

Basically, I removed the dependency on the PHP file, and integrated a couple of functions from the awesome php.js project in order to speed things up significantly.

Quick download link