A friend of mine Ari sent this to me and it made me laugh (only because it’s so true to life)

I’ve finished a new Google desktop gadget. I used a sample gadget that came with the API download. A simple countdown to Christmas. It’s a little large but this time of year it’s okay to be a little over the top. The countdown JavaScript is Google’s but the images I created. Feel free to download a copy for yourself here. Of course you’ll need Google Desktop to run the gadget. Enjoy!

Yesterday I gave the second in a series of talks on web standards. The topic was a high level look at CSS. Below are the slides.

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If you’ve ever written CSS you’ve probably run into issues related to CSS styles which are in conflict. For instance:

.blue { color: blue; }
#red { color:red; }

<p id=”red” class=”blue”>Sample Text</p>

The id is trying to make the text red and the class is trying to make it blue. Who wins? It all depends on specificity. Below is a table that explains CSS specificity.

With the example above the text would be rendered red because the ID has higher specificity than the blue class. To figure out what style takes precedence you work your way across the table. Inline style? Nope. ID? Yes. then that rule is more specific. If they both have IDs then you move again to the right to classes and elements.

The above example would render the following:

p = 0,0,0,1 - not a very specific rule but will cascade quite nicely
p.error = 0,0,1,1 - the introduction of the class negates any piling up of elements (e.x body div ul li span em )
#special p.error - the ID  is higher in specificity. Attributes which are in conflict will use the ID’s attribute values.

For a full explanation see the W3C’s specification.

Last week I installed the Microsoft Expression Studio. I’ve been playing with Expression Blend and watching a few of the packaged tutorials.

First impressions: The interface is very dark (I wasn’t expecting that) although, I’m sure it ’s customizable somehow. The organization is done well. The pallets can be docked, closed or floated.

There is a GUI which represents the objects you create as well as a second panel which shows you the generated XAML. What is XAML?

(Extensible Application Markup Language; pronounced “zammel”)

XAML is a declarative XML-based language that defines objects and their properties in XML. XAML syntax focuses upon defining the UI (user interface) for the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and is therefore separate from the application code behind it.

From what I understand XAML is the common language between the Studio products. More to come later…

I recently gave an internal Web Standards at Iron Mountain Digital. This is the first of three parts. The audience was other UX designers as well as engineers. I’m playing with my presentation style feel free to comment.

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Here’s a fun game for you web standards geeks. How many HTML elements can you name in 5 minutes? Below is my badge for naming 76! It’s not exactly fair since I’ve been studying them for the last week. I gave an XHTML/Web Standards talk last week and needed to brush up on my elements. The timing was great. How many can you name?

76

Here’s the update on Expression Studio:

Installing the applications from Microsoft wasn’t that easy or intuitive . There are several applications available for install:

Microsoft Expression Web
Microsoft Expression Blend
Microsoft Expression Design
Microsoft Expression Media

With little no explanation of what each of these applications include. I’m a designer for the web who produces media files. Hmmm what do I install? So what the heck, it’s only disc space. I installed them all. After one system freeze and a blue screen of death. I have them on my system. I’ll try to use Expression Blend just because I like to see things blend…

Below are the images for Round Four of the Crestock Photo contest.

I think this was the hardest round to be creative. The human forms they provided were both cropped oddly and the male form is more of a “concept” photo already. I chose to only use the tree and have some fun with photoshop brushes. I downloaded some star brushes, fairy brushes and some aurora brushes to create the effect. The moon is straight from the NASA public domain imagery.

Below is what I came up with…

If you would like to vote for my entry you can vote here.

Yesterday I downloaded the Google API for creating gadgets within Google desktop. I’m reading through some tutorials and some of the documentation. Overall they seem pretty simple to create. At the core there is some XML and some JavaScript. If you can edit/write those you have what it takes to make a gadget.

Included in the API are some tools for building (Designer) and a debugger. I was able to create my very own gadget within minutes. Granted it was only a “Hello World” gadget but I’m still learning