* Or unsurprisingly for those who have followed Microsoft’s ongoing efforts to reach out to the development community and embrace open technology.

A little info from their about page reveals the goal of the site:

By providing solutions-based articles, videos and code samples, developers will be able to have a concise resource to go to for the latest in web application development techniques.

There have already been a number of great articles posted on ScriptJunkie, but here are two to get you started:

• “How to Debug Your jQuery Code” by Elijah Manor
• “Be a CSS Team Player: CSS Best Practices for Team-Based Development” by Emily Lewis

I feel very privileged to have been asked to contribute some articles to ScriptJunkie as well! If you are feeling up to learning about the jQuery UI Widget Factory, I’d love you to check out my first SJ article: “Introduction to Stateful Plugins and the Widget Factory”.

Do we need “another” resource?

In a world where our RSS readers are overflowing with “content,” it becomes difficult to embrace newly launched sites. I think ScriptJunkie is a site that is worth embracing. Though it has just launched, the material already present on the site reflects a wealth of techniques and information for any client side developer. I hope you will take a moment to check it out, and even give some feedback to Microsoft about what you want to see covered on the site.

What do you think? Are you excited to see Microsoft embrace and support the client side development community? Are there topics not yet covered on ScriptJunkie you feel are really important? Be sure to leave a comment with your thoughts!

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ScriptJunkie Launches!

Congratulations to our winners: mojo, Dan, and Dan!! We’ll be contacting you via email with details on claiming your free license. To everybody else, thanks for entering! I’m sure we’ll have more awesome giveaways coming along to help your fuel your coding!

We’re very excited to provide the chance at three (count ‘em, 1, 2, 3) free licenses to the excellent Mockups app by Balsamiq Studios!

I’ve been using Balsamiq Mockups for more than a year and couldn’t be happier with how quickly I can turn an interface idea into something tangible. For example, I mocked up this simplified version of the FYC homepage in about 20 minutes:

The best way to see the power of Mockups is to watch this video wherein iTunes’ interface is mocked up in less than 3 minutes:

Convinced yet? Want a copy you can call your own?

Enter to win by commenting on this post telling us why you need Mockups. Be genuine, be creative, but most of all be persuasive!

We will choose our three favorite comments and announce the winners exactly one week from today (Monday, June 7th 2010).

On your marks. Get Set. Go!

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Giveaway: Balsamiq Mockups [Winners Announced!]

After a number of comments, and a trip to random.org, we finally have a winner! A big congratulations goes out to Cristalia Garcia as the winner of the Voices That Matter Giveaway! If you didn’t win, all is not lost! The Early Bird Special discount has been extended until May 21. That means if you register on or before May 21, and use the special FYC reader discount code (WBNBLGA), you will save a total of $250 off the ticket price!

Original Post:

The kind folks at New Rider have offered FYC readers a chance at a free pass to their upcoming Voices that Matter: Web Design 2010 conference!

What’s this conference all about? In their own words:

New Riders’ Voices That Matter: Web Design Conference, now in its fourth consecutive year, will take place June 28-29 in San Francisco and the timing couldn’t be better! Web design is undergoing an historic transformation: while the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript haven’t changed, the new and evolving functionality in the HTML5 and CSS3 specs, the number of new ways in which people access the Web, and the rise of social media mean that Web designers need to know more than ever.

Don’t miss this opportunity to meet face-to-face with industry greats and discuss Web design’s most critical topics! We’ll open with a keynote address from Jesse James Garrett, author of The Elements of User Experience: User-Centered Design for the Web and close with a keynote address delivered by Steve Krug, author of the well known book Don’t Make Me Think and the brand new book Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems. From start to finish this conference will blow you away.

Enter to win a free pass (a $595 value) to the conference by commenting on this post (just say anything you like!) and we’ll pick one lucky commenter at random one week from today (Friday, May 14th)!

Bonus: Special Savings

All FYC readers can save $150 off the conference fee by providing priority code WBNBLGA when registering. Register before May 14th and save $250 as this $100 discount is combined with the early bird pricing!

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Giveaway: Voices That Matter Web Design Conference Pass [Winner Announced!]

From the release post:

Now it’s even easier to build your own widgets or extend ours, whether you use the jQuery UI Widget Factory, the jQuery UI CSS Framework, or both. This release is a collective effort spanning more than 9 months with contributions from hundreds of developers, designers, testers and users.

Top Additions:

Though the release signifies the completion of major milestones, optimizations and additions, two things in this release really have me the most excited:

Autocomplete

For anyone who has tried to use one for the many autocomplete variants, they know just how annoying and/or difficult they were to work with. It seemed I always had to hack the plugin I was using just to get it to cooperate. Because of my experiences, I am super excited to see the jQuery UI team bring on, rebuild and fully support the Autocomplete plugin as one of the core UI plugins.

Widget Factory

I love working with jQuery Plugins and I extensively structure my websites by building little (or large) plugins to handle abstracted functionality. The issue that always came up was the idea of a plugin maintaining state, and having that state able to be altered at any time. The reworked Widget Factory has been abstracted into its own file, with no dependency on the jquery.ui.core.js file. This means plugin developers now have a design pattern they can follow to build stateful plugins for their projects.

I hope the release of the updated Widget Factory pushes jQuery plugin development further in a big way!

Congratulations

I want to wish a big congratulations to the jQuery UI team for all their hard work in bringing 1.8 to a releasable state.

Be sure to head on over to jQuery UI to download the latest version. Remember, it requires jQuery 1.4.2!

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jQuery UI 1.8 Released!

Dev(Chatt); will be held in Chattanooga, TN on March 26–27, 2010.

From their website, Dev(Chatt); is described as:

…free, technology focused conference and expo for software developers, engineers, technologists and technology enthusiasts. Combining the best approaches from the unconference movement and more traditional conferences, Dev(Chatt); is both a place for attendees to grow their knowledge and to educate each other.

Great Information to Take In

Jacob Kaplan-Moss (Co-Creator of Django) and Chris Mills (Developer Relations Manager for Opera) are the two highlighted speakers, but the remaining sessions will be delivered by developers and engineers that have volunteered to speak. The topics lined up so far range from Facebook and HTML5, to Haskell and LISP.

Giving Back

Giving back to the community via participation in open source projects is really important. Just as important, however, is giving back in the form of teaching and knowledge sharing. Dev(Chatt); has a place on their site for you to register to present. I strongly encourage you to consider presenting at this event and think of it as your contribution back to the developer community!

Look Out for Jonathan

I wanted to thank one of the contributors over at Fuel Your Interface, Jonathan Cutrell, for tipping us off to this great conference. Jonathan will be in attendance at Dev(Chatt); so be sure to look him look him up if you end up attending!

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Dev(Chatt);

Technologies

Firerift

Firerift launched earlier this year as a completely new breed of Content Management Systems.  Firerift is, at its core, a JSON server with an amazing user interface. The mind behind Firerift Drew Wilson refers to it as a Client side CMS. All the tagging is done using CSS classes and valid markup. Released along with Firerift was Titan, an open source JSON templating engine built on top of jQuery. Firerift is a glimpse into the future of highly dynamic, AJAX powered websites.

LESS Framework

The LESS framework for CSS provides simplified execution of advanced CSS. With support for variables, mixins, nested rules and mathematical operations. LESS lives up to its name by letting you write shorter, optimized CSS. Though it is packaged as a Ruby gem, it can be used to prepare CSS files for any technology, even straight HTML/CSS websites. Since it uses CSS syntax, it’s as easy as renaming your .css files to .less and parsing through the LESS engine.

BuddyPress

BuddyPress is an amazing addition to WordPress MU (soon to be merged into WordPress core) that turns WPMU into an open-source social networking platform. From their website:

BuddyPress is a suite of WordPress plugins and themes, each adding a distinct new feature. BuddyPress contains all the features you’d expect from WordPress but aims to let members socially interact.

New Browsers All Around

This year saw major advances in pretty much all the major browsers. Safari 4 saw extreme speed increases in its JavaScript performance as well as support for advanced CSS3 properties. Firefox saw many of the same improvements and support with the 3.5 release. Even the browser developers love to hate saw significant improvements with the release of Internet Explorer 8. (Sadly, still no border-radius support!). Google Chrome seems to see major version number updates much faster than the other browsers, but of significant importance was the final release of a slightly limited Chrome for Mac Beta. Opera continued to improve and innovate their browser as well, but I think a great change this year was that Opera got an icon facelift and the dreaded drop shadow on the “O” is gone!

Notable Events

jQuery Joins The Software Freedom Conservancy

The jQuery team has been planning for a while to join the Software Freedom Conservancy to protect the jQuery project, open the door for future growth, as well as to move the copyright from John Resig’s own name into the Conservancy’s name. From the overview page:

One of the principal benefits of joining the Conservancy is that member projects get all the protections of being a corporate entity without actually having to form and maintain one. These benefits include, most notably, the ability to collect earmarked project donations and protection from personal liability for the developers of the project.

The jQuery team made the first step this year by joining the Conservancy as planned, and are now working to move the copyright as well.

Fix Outlook

A great movement from the guys over at Campaign Montior launched Fix Outlook as a web campaign to make Microsoft aware of how many people disliked the limited email rendering engine in Office 2005 and newer. The campaign saw over 20,000 tweets in the first 24 hours! Microsoft at first responded rather negatively, then changed face a bit and became very thankful of the effort raised by the website. You can read the full account for more details.

Books

Digging Into WordPress

Digging into WordPress is a fantastic new book by Chris Coyier and Jeff Starr. It is only available currently as a PDF book, but a printed version is coming soon. Written in an extremely down to earth manner, this book will provide useful information for anyone looking to take WordPress to the next level. This isn’t a book solving hypothetical problems: the authors only present techniques they have used themselves.

jQuery Enlightenment

Written by jQuery core team member Cody Lindley, jQuery Enlightenment picks up where the jQuery docs leave off. The book is probably 80% code examples and 20% explanation. This is a no fluff, crystal clear presentation of intermediate to advanced jQuery techniques, though I think even beginners would learn a lot through reading this PDF book. An additional innovative feature that I hope other book writers pick up is that almost every code example is linked to a live example on JSBin.com so you can actually play with his examples, even changing the code, to see how they work.

Operating Systems

Windows 7

After nothing less than a PR nightmare with Windows Vista, Microsoft released a fantastic new operating system this year in Windows 7. Far more stable than its predecessor, Windows 7 takes many of the principles and innovations introduced with Vista, but makes them both useable and reliable to users of Windows 7.

Snow Leopard

The innovative and trendy OS for Macintosh computers saw an upgrade this year with the release of Snow Leopard. As its name indicates, this OS is not that different an animal from the previous release of OS X (Leopard). Maintaining the same look and feel, Snow Leopard introduced many innovated technology features to further speed up the already finely tuned Mac line of computers. This has to be the first time in history that the install of a new version of an operating system actually gave you back 7GB of hard drive space!

iPhone 3.0

In the third version of the popular OS in use on iPhones and iPod Touches, users finally were allowed to Cut, Copy, and Paste! In addition, Multimedia Messaging (MMS), Spotlight Search, Voice Memos and Voice Dialing were also introduced. From a developers perspective, Apple opened up over 1,000 new API’s to allow iPhone developers even more freedom and power in their development process.

Android 2.0

For those that prefer an alternative to the Apple iPhone, many users have gravitated to the Android phones. This year saw an upgrade to the Android 2.0 OS and several UI and functional enhancements. Support for Exchange accounts, Combined Inboxes, and Macro Focus and White Balance for the Camera were all features added in this release.

Web Tools

Build It With Me

Some developers can do everything themselves from marketing, to design, to development. The rest of us would rather work on the part of the project we love, and leave the rest to someone better suited for the job. BuildItWith.me is the goto place to meet other developers that either have ideas or time on their hands to work on your ideas. Form new partnerships, find great projects to work on, all within the stylish interface of BuildItWith.me. I love their tag line: “Skip the funding.”

Notable App

Notable provides a great way for web developers to seek responses from their clients during the design process. Simply use one of the provided tools to make a screenshot of the a web page you are working on, and send it to your client for approval. The client can draw on the screenshot and make notes, all through a simple web interface. If you are a developer that works remotely from your clients, this service might be just what you are looking for.

Flagrant Self-Promotion

Downloadify

This year saw the release of Flash 10 and with it, the support for client-side file generation and download. Why is this important? Now developers can make web applications that can run fully in the browser, including file saving capabilities, without a round trip to the server. As a personal project, I built and released Downloadify to provide a JavaScript bridge to this amazing Flash functionality. Since the alternate server methods (dataURIs and IE functions) are all prone to usability problems, Downloadify provides a nice simple way to repurpose client side data and turn it into a savable file.

WANT MORE?

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Best of 2009 in the Coding Industry

To help celebrate with our good friends at HTMLRockstars (formally known as CSSRockstars) we are giving away (4) copies of Snow Leopard.

HTMLRockstars provides PSD to HTML service in just 3 days, for only $149. They take your existing design and transform it into valid, high quality, hand-coded markup. They also offer templating/skinning of the hottest CMS, Shopping Carts, and Blogging platforms such as WordPress. With semantic markup, microformat inclusion, documented HTML / HTML, and a money back guarantee, HTMLRockstars offers one of the most feature complete packages available. You can also follow them on Twitter.

Enter for your chance to win Snow Leopard! You will have 2 chances to win 1 of 4 copies courtesy of HTMLRockstars.

Here’s how:

• All you have to do is follow Fuel Your Coding on twitter & Retweet this: (RT @HTMLRockstars Launch + 4 will WIN a copy of Snow Leopard! Enter to Win on @fuelyourcoding http://twurl.nl/2r5jnl #FUELCONTEST)
• Then head over to Fuel Your Creativity to enter for a second chance. *please note: directions differ on Fuel Your Creativity.
• Contest will end on both sites, Sunday at 12 Midnight EST.

Twitter Winners Announced:

1. @brookeduckart
2. @madmanstudios

*To get your copy, please DM me @adellecharles

Be sure to check out Fuel Your Creativity if you didn’t win here!

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Winners Announced: HTMLRockstars Launch + 4 will WIN a copy of Snow Leopard!

Through testing an early beta of Outlook 2010, the folks over at Campaign Monitor discovered that Outlook 2010 continued to render email the same way as Outlook 2007. This prompted them to launch fixoutlook.org so Microsoft could hear the voice of developers and users around the world who say “Enough is Enough!” Less than a full day after the site launched, Microsoft issued a release on their Outlook blog.

Microsoft’s response was largely smoke and mirrors and they went as far as to claim security as a benefit for using Word to render emails (A feature they say isn’t available in browsers). I am sorry to say, Microsoft, that pretty much every browser out there lets you turn off Javascript now if you really want to… so the fact that Word can’t process Javascript is not a security feature.

I was able to reach David Greiner, co-founder of Campaign Monitor, last night for a statement. We had a great call and he was extremely gracious concerning Microsoft’s response. He mentioned that Microsoft is the biggest software company in the world with the biggest product in the world… we have to be understanding of what they are working with. He also mentioned that he has personally dialoged with some of the Outlook team and said they are a great group of people. His reasoning on Outlook’s deficiencies was simple: “HTML Email, whether you like it or hate it, is not going anywhere. Its broken, so why not fix it.”

David did express that he was slightly hurt by Microsoft’s response but he gathered hope from their claim to support email standards should a true standard emerge. Toward the end of the call David also mentioned that  since a standard for HTML already exists, email clients should just support the existing standard… it is HTML Email after all!

For more information, I encourage you to visit the following sites:

• FixOutlook.org – The site that started it all
• Microsoft’s Response
• Jeffery Zeldman’s Response
• Campaign Monitor’s Response
• Email Standard Project

Be sure to subscribe the feed over at the Email Standards Project for the latest in email news.

Feedback! Be sure to leave comments on this post! I want to hear your thoughts on the subject. Is Microsoft right or wrong? Is FixOutlook.org worth getting involved with?

Disclaimer: I am a current customer of Campaign Monitor… and I happen to respect the team over there quite a bit.

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Outlook 2010 and HTML Email

What is it?

It is simple: Do you have a question, a problem worth solving or a subject you’d like to learn more about? You can shoot us the questions!

We’ll then pick a question we like and write an article / quick answer to it. You can ask us anything… OK, OK… not anything, but anything about front-end development to back-end development. We’ll see what we can do!

How it works:

Just put the content of your question in the comment box below and submit the question. We’ll get the questions and nobody will see them but us. It’s as easy as that!

Be aware that we are not tech support, but we assume you all know. If it’s a time sensitive question, we suggest you ask at an online forum or at StackOverflow.

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Ask The Editors

• Shane Keene: Personal Press
• Andy: News Plus
• MMP: Magazine-News
• Blair C. : Image Blogger

Congratulations to the winners and a really big, big thanks to Brad Mahaffey from Zidalgo Themes. The winners will be contacted within the next few days with information on how to claim their themes. For those who didn’t win this time around, be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed to be notified of future competitions. Please keep Zidalgo Themes in mind on your next project!

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Zidalgo WordPress Theme Winners Announced!

What Do The Themes Look Like?

Each image below links to a detail page on the Zidalgo site.

Personal Press

News Plus

Magazine-News

Image Blogger

What Makes Zidalgo So Great?

I asked Brad to give some more information about his themes, and I think the following sums it up nicely: “We design blogs people love to use. With years of experience, we carefully craft effective, innovative, beautiful websites. … At Zidalgo, everything is created in-house, and with the utmost attention to detail. Designers, developers, or casual bloggers alike planning to customize their wordpress theme will fall in love with Zidalgo’s straight-forward framework. Easily customizable designs, built from the ground up with clean, documented code.”

How Do I Enter?

• Simply leave a comment below letting us know which one of the four themes is your favorite and what you like best about it. We can’t guarantee each winner will receive his or her favorite, but we will do the best we can!
• The contest will end at Friday at 10:00 AM, EST
• Four winners will be chosen at random and will be announced Friday afternoon

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WordPress Themes Giveaway: (4) Zidalgo Themes!

Nick from Elegant Themes does an amazing job at designing & developing these wordpress themes. I feel, everytime I go to the site there is a new one! They are really high quality, luckily I already bought a membership otherwise I would have had to sneak and only giveaway 2! ha!! No I wouldn’t do that. So let’s giveaway 3 memberships today! 

Might as well break in the new Fuel Your Coding site with a giveaway! Wait – Have you subscribed YET?

How do I enter?

• All you have to do is leave a comment below on this post telling us what you’d like to see in one of his new themes. 
• The contest will end next Wednesday (or maybe Thursday).
• 3 winners will be chosen at random.

What do I win?

Each winner (3) will receive a one year membership and get all these amazing themes, 5 pages worth!

Winners announced!

Congratulations to the following lucky people:

• Saurabh Shah
• Rudy
• Emrah Omuris

All persons have been randomly picked using random.org

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Big Giveaway (3) Memberships to Elegant Themes! (Winners announced)

• Links to Useful Resources and Downloads
• Links to Tutorials
• Links to Inspirational Work (*really good* work only please)
• Links to Articles

You can submit your links below using the form. They are generally approved within 24 hours.

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