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StumbleUponI don’t remember what I was doing or where I was when I heard about Twitter, but I certainly remember the impressions I had. What is a “microblog” and how on earth could that ever be useful? As a web developer I certainly thought of myself as embracing new web technologies and platforms (I cringe to use the term “Web 2.0″ because of the buzz-wordy, hype status it has now obtained), but this Twitter… Why would I ever want to send the internet-at-large a sparse 140-character message on what I was up to. I mean, what the heck? I’m not even interested in what I’m doing at times. Now this web app comes along and expects me to remember to stop what I’m doing and compose a message devoid of most vowels like: “In bdrm thnkng abt wht 2 do on satrdy.” Pass.
Jan 12, 2009 0
Parallax navigation
My first major web design conference experience was last August at An Event Apart 2008 in San Francisco. It was an awesome conference and if travel restrictions are lifted at my day job anytime soon I’m hoping to go back in ‘09. During the conference, or more specifically, during Dan Cederholm’s presentation, Implementing Design: Bulletproof A-Z, many of us were first introduced to Clearleft’s Silverback application’s website and it’s clever use of CSS to mimic an animation technique called “parallax scrolling”. Paul Annett, Clearleft’s designer, gives a great explanation of the effect and the underlying CSS over at Vitamin.
When I first saw the technique in action, I was blown away by both the simplicity of the technique, as well as the cleverness of it all. Sometimes at the ol’ 9 to 5, I don’t think I’ll ever have opportunity, let alone the time, to devise and implement such innovation. While the artistry is not lost on me, I felt the parallax effect could be used somewhere more visible to the masses in order to give a page’s design some sense of motion. In order to do that, I wouldn’t be able to rely on CSS alone, so I turned to the all-powerful jQuery.