I’ve been a web designer/developer (probably more developer) on Ubuntu Linux for quite awhile now, and I’m here to tell you that it’s possible. Here are some common and serious problems and their solutions.
Since releasing BlueTrip, I’ve come across many a doubter who argue that CSS Frameworks are unnecessary, non-semantic, or sometimes just downright annoying and inflexible. I’ve fought this battle so many times that I’ve slowly gathered a response to all of these charges, and I’m going to stick them all here, in one place, as one big steaming billboard of I LOVE FRAMEWORKS propaganda.
I can’t believe I’ve never seen this before. One of those most common complains with CSS frameworks (like BlueTrip…ahem) is that they include a lot of code that you won’t ever use (you’re probably never going to have a project where you use EVERY single column width or EVERY single possible typographical markup.
Let there be Dust-Me Selectors. It’s is a Firefox extension that finds unused CSS selectors and notifies you so you can remove them from your stylesheets. Awesome.
Mac and XP users get all the love. How many times have you used a font family like Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif? Look familiar? With articles like Christian Montoya’s floating around, more and more designers are adding Vista-only fonts to their stylesheets. And yet, nobody is throwing anything in for Linux users, instead relying on the generic fallback to handle it.
I’ve always been a proponent of reset stylesheets. Jonathan Snook made an almost convincing argument against them a few months ago, which was backed up by Jens Meiert quite well.
10. Share IM client settings on multiple computers.
For anyone that uses Pidgin, Gaim, Miranda, etc. on multiple computers, this could be a godsend. It’s just a pain to maintain a few different sets of usernames and passwords/protocols/options on different computers.
As I’m sure you all know, Google has created an international holiday for geeks across the world with the release of Chrome, a potentially revolutionary browser. I’ve been using it for the day, and I’d like to offer my very humble thoughts on it so far.
First off, I think we all need to realize that this is a VERY early release of a huge project for Google. I have no doubts that it will receive tons of critics based on bugs, missing features, and generally things that Google will obviously be fixing as the project matures. The last thing I want to do is point out the obvious shortcomings (limited bookmark management, few options, no progress bar for page loads, etc…guess I pointed them out anyway), because these things will be coming soon. Google’s, while perhaps a bit optimistic and overconfident, is not stupid by any means. So whatever you say about Chrome, please don’t go and complain about the lack of things that are almost certainly on the way. Or else you’ll annoy me. That’s right!