I was going through my rss feeds from Smashing Magazine, being one of the creatives I thought that "Strategic Design: 6 steps for building successful websites" would be a good read. While reading through the post I came across something familiar! Carbonica! Nicely slotted in under "3. Determine your brand image", amazing!

It's really great to see something we've all worked so hard on popup on great sites like Smashing Magazine!

Thanks to everyone who has worked hard on this project and a big thanks to Smashing Magazine for using Carbonica.

we scored another seminar for early next year with the guys from NxtGenUG

Simon and I will do another whirlwind tour of the Blend tools, wiring up the C# to make it all dynamic

Sign up and come see us in action

http://www.nxtgenug.net/ViewEvent.aspx?EventID=176

Hope to see you there, we're booked for Janurary 19th so plenty of time to get signed up

Back to the land of browser inconsistencies :¬(

I had such high hopes for the silverlight plug-in.  Cross-browser incompatablities can be the most time consuming areas of web development, so a browser plug-in overcomes these by sandboxing the application so it handles all of it's rendering internally

Or so I thought.  Having developed all my silverlight under Internet Explorer, everything renders fine with the default 100% heights and widths.  Rendering the controls is important for templated controls and the loaded event only fires when the control is rendered and the loaded event is important in order for the control to pipe up and accept some data from the dartabinding process. 

To my amazement, and slight relief, Firefox actually requires a fixed height in order for it to render.  By default, you are given a silverlight plugin, set to 100% height and width, wrapped in a div with a height : 100% style attribute.  Just change the containing div to a fixed height and your controls now render fine in Firefox :¬)

so from this

to this

<asp:Silverlight ID="Xaml1" runat="server" Source="~/ClientBin/NavTeqBannerMain.xap" MinimumVersion="2.0.31005.0" Width="100%" Height="100%" InitParameters="ctlid=SilverLightBanner" />

</div>

Finally it happens!

Silverlight is released, to much fanfare. After anticipating this release in the Creativer Jar Studio for over a year, it's very exciting news!

http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Silverlight2IsOut.aspx

http://www.liveside.net/main/archive/2008/10/13/microsoft-releases-silverlight-2-on-tuesday-oct-14.aspx 

Of course - check out our own Silverlight Portfolio http://silverlight.creative-jar.com/ 

Silverlight is already installed on a quarter of PC's. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-13Silverlight2PR.mspx

Going through my archive's I came across a font that I created a while ago when fontstruct popped up on the scene.

Fontstruct is a free modular font creation tool using Flash.

I wanted to create the smallest pixel font for small web/flash use.
You can download the file from here.

Also check out some of the other cool stuffs people are creating on fontstruct.

pxls.zip (3.98 kb)

Project account management room:

Server room:

Stairs artwork:



Tech room:



Time-lapse video of tech room: 

We had a problem where a website looked great on Windows and Mac – all browsers, but on Linux there were several issues. On analysis, these were caused by the differing font styles used by Linux. So we came up with the ultimate work around.

Before the fix we had the following CSS:

Body { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, Sans-Serif; }

Arial is not installed in Linux so the closest font (tested on Ubuntu and Kubuntu) is Freesans.

We then changed the CSS to:

Body { Font-family: Arial, Freesans, Sans-Serif; }

As a browser will pick-up the next font to see if it is installed or not. In this instance that will be Freesans, which is installed. If any operating systems don’t have Freesans installed, the next font of the font-family will be Sans-Serif, which doesn’t look too bad.

What about Windows and Mac OS? In case Arial is not installed (what is very unlikely to happen) it will simply skip Freesans (Windows and Mac OS don’t have Freesans installed) and use Sans-Serif as a font to render the page.

That’s how crossbrowser and crossOS compatibility works.

Tested on Kubuntu (version 8.04) on Konqueror and Firefox 3, Ubuntu (version 7.04) on Firefox 2, Safari 1.3 and Firefox 2 in Mac OS X (10.3), IE 6, IE7 and all other windows browsers as usual.

Looks good.

Embedding custom fonts into your Silverlight Application couldn't be easier. This video is downloaded from http://channel9.msdn.com/ 

Two days after the VBug presentation,  Simon and I have been asked to do a similar presentation at the Conchango offices in London

Promises to be a high-profile event with a good mix of developers and designers attending

 http://blogs.conchango.com/michelleflynn/archive/2008/07/21/uk-silverlight-user-group-date-confirmed.aspx

It's happening on the 14th of August and they're still filling designer spots.  Pop Michelle an email if you're a designer and wish to attend :¬)

Plenty of the CJ team will be there

Heres a quick comparison of the <font> tag with a 'size' attribute and a <span> tag with an inline style. This shows what size in pixels the 'size' attribute actually relates to. This only works if the browser text settings are set to display text at medium size and have a DPI of 96, I'm not going to go into the benefits of EM over PX in this post - this table is what it is. Especially useful when attempting to create a HTML email that correctly renders in Outlook and GMail.