PaulSpoerry.com

Microsoft’s just-announced Live Mesh platform is, as most things out of Redmond these days are, a complex offering that can be difficult to understand with the company’s typical marketing-speak and software-plus-services buzzwords. So what the heck is Live Mesh?

Microsoft’s new Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie is the mastermind behind Live Mesh and it’s been in development for two years. Live Mesh, if successful, could change the way PCs and other devices interact with Internet services and each other. Microsoft wants data and applications to be accessible from anywhere — online and off — using any device. When Ozzie came on board many assumed it was because, while Microsoft wouldn’t admit it at the time, the focus of your computing will be moving away from a single centralized desktop. Ozzie was going to bring true “cloud computing” to Redmond.

Read the rest of this entry �

Sphere: Related Content

Another cloud service is coming, this time on your phone. Dashwire is intended to mirror your phones content onto a web based interface. I’m sure the power users are thinking “I can already do that with other 3rd party apps. Yes, you can… but Dashwire is probably not intended for the ultimate power user and it does do a good job of providing a clean, easy to use web based interface for accessing for phones information. Some of the things they list that Dashwire can do today via their Web-based interface:

• Send and receive text messages (SMS)

•  Add and edit phone contacts

•  Easily organize your photos and videos

•  Listen to voicemails

•  Set Internet favorites, ringtones, speed dials, and wallpapers for your phone

•  Transfer contacts and settings to your new phone

•  Automatically upload photos and videos

•  Find friends and people you want to follow

•  Create a personalized web page to share your media

• Add comments and star ratings

• Single click photo upload to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and Bebo

The interface is smooth, grey, and very attractive looking. The fonts are large and everything is easy to read.

On your Dashwire dashboard are your photos and videos, contacts, bookmarks, and SMS and call history laid out in movable AJAX tiles. You can click to play on your ringtones (I found this a very easy way to manage ringtones. There are tiles for phone, and text messages and you can reply to them with your keyboard. Even with a Treo or Blackjack you can’t bang out an SMS as fast as you can on a traditional keyboard. You can e-mail photo links from Dashwire, too, without your friends having to sign up to the service to view them online. Contacts you add online materialize in your mobile address book. Essentially, Dashwire is allowing you a web interface for interacting with your phone, while at the same time making an online backup of some of the most important “data”. It’s not backing up your programs, registry settings or anything like that, but all your critical stuff like contact, messages, etc.

Now it’s time for the secret sauce: how your content gets there. Dashwire begins as a mobile app that most users will probably download over the air. It installs, and then syncs to your personal page on Dashwire.com, which you’ve configured by registering your screen name and number on sign-up. The synching takes FOREVER, and might take more if your mobile network is lagging. Photos and videos take the longest to upload, and even longer the more you’ve got. I only have the “stock photos” that came with my phone and I’m sure that’s the part taking the longest. I wonder about the value of that (personally) though for people unfamiliar with other backup solutions this might be a great alternative.

The video they put together gives a great overview of what Dashwire can do, so check it out and see if this is a solution you could use. The accounts are free (not sure yet how’ll they monetize this service yet) and it’s in open beta. Some improvements they could make are faster backups. Even once my phone was sync’d it still take a LONG time during the sync process… and I wonder… why? For the moment, it only supports Windows Mobile 5 and 6, and subscribers have to specify their carrier and device model when they register. Dashwire doesn’t manage files or programs, or perform certain small tasks like deleting photos from the phone or reading and initiating e-mail. Those would be welcome additions. Dashwire also has a setting to update your status on Facebook and Twitter… though I haven’t seen HOW this works or any instructions on their site for making this interaction occur. Still… for a beta it’s not bad and definetly worth checking out.

Sphere: Related Content

Found this over at mashable, I’ve used several of these sites for many years…. it’s a great list.

JavaScript is one of the most often used languages on the web, and it seems to be gaining in popularity each day. We’ve gathered 25+ tools and tutorials which will be useful to any JavaScript programmer - novice or pro.

ActiveWidgets.com - A component library that gives you AJAX-style fuctions with common visual elements.

Agile Partners Photo Resizing Tutorial - A tutorial on how to use the Prototype and script.aculo.us libraries to build an interactive photo resizer.

ByteFX - A low-level framework for simple JavaScript effects.

DevGuru - Defines all the terms of JavaScript and gives you code samples of what they do.

DojoToolkit.org - An open source DHTML toolkit built in JavaScript and based on several other tools.

Drag & Drop Sortable Lists - Tutorial for creating sortable lists with drag & drop functions.

DynamicDrive.com - A large collection of DHTML and JavaScripts for your use.

Firebug - An extension for the Firefox browser that allows you to do web development from directly inside the browser, including JavaScript.

JavaScript-reference.info - A reference site that teaches you both how to read and write JavaScript.

JavaScriptKit.com - A list of JavaScript objects, properties, and methods that include examples.

jQuery.com - A JavaScript library with a small footprint and concise coding for as few lines as possible.

Learn JavaScript in 10 Minutes - As the name implies, learn the basics of JavaScript in 10 minutes from this very straightforward tutorial.

Lightbox2 - A JavaScript for overlaying photos on the current page with a semi-transparent background.

LightWindow - Another overlay window system that allows you to do it with multiple media file types and even other websites.

MochiKit.com - A set of JavaScript libraries that takes ideas from Python and Objective-C, and uses them in JavaScript.

Moo.fx - JavaScript effects library that works with the Prototype.js and Mootools frameworks.

Mootools.net - An object-oriented JavaScript framework for intermediate to advance users.

Prototype Windows Class - Allows you to add an overlay window to your HTML.

Prototypejs.org - A JavaScript framework that is built with Web 2.0 in mind, includes Ajax integration.

QuirksMode.org - The personal site of a professional web developer who offers over a 120 tricks for defeating browser incompatibility issues of CS and JavaScript.

Reflection.js - A small JavaScript to add reflections to your image.

script.aculo.us - A JavaScript library that integrates easily with numerous frameworks.

ThickBox - Works with jQuery to provide an AJAX hybrid for image overlays.

TinyMCE JavaScript Content Editor - A content editor written completely in JavaScript and converts HTML text areas in to editor instances.

W3Schools JavaScript Tutorials - 100 Examples to learn JavaScript by.

WebTeacher.com - Takes the point of view of teaching JavaScript to a programming novice.

Walter Zorn Drag & Drop - A cross-browser JavaScript DHTML library that allows you to turn any image in to a layer that can be dragged and dropped where the user chooses.

Sphere: Related Content

This is not my list… I snagged the list from tutorialblog.org, I’ve just compiled it all into a single resource. Below are 125 handy HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and AJAX snippets for your site or blog.

Part 1

Bubble Tool Tips - Bubble Tooltips are an easy way to add (via a bit of CSS and javascript) fancy tooltips with a balloon shape to any web page.

---

Box Over - BoxOver uses javascript / DHTML to show tooltips on a website.

---

Ajax Star rating Bar - This is a rating bar script done with PHP and mySQL that allows users to rate things like can be done on Netflix or Amazon, all web 2.0-like with no page refresh.

---

CSS Star Rating Redux - Star rating with css tutorial

---

Ajax Contact Form - An unobtrusive AJAX contact form (works even with JavaScript disabled)

---

Wufoo - Build online forms easily with this web app

---

Pretty Accessible Forms - It can be time consuming to make web forms both pretty and accessible. In particular, laying out forms where the form label and input are horizontally adjacent, as in the image below, can be a real problem.

---

Adam’s Radio & Checkbox Customisation Method - Customised check boxes using images

---

sIFR 3b1: The Mo’ Betta Beta - sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems.

---

Revised Image Replacement - Plenty of new and interesting revisions to the original Fahrner Image Replacement technique sprouted up in late 2003. This was an attempt to consolidate them.

---

CSS Rounded Corners - Spiffy Corners is a simple way to generate the CSS and HTML you need to create anti-aliased corners without using images or javascript.

---

CSS Speech Bubbles

---

Even More Rounded Corners - Another article detailing a method of doing rounded corners with CSS. In this case, single-image, PNG-based, fluid rounded corner dialogs with support for borders, alpha transparency throughout, gradients, patterns and whatever else you (or your designer) could want.

---

Vertical Bar Graphs - Who wants to use Excel to make a new graph each week? Using CSS and PHP you can create attractive bar graphs (yes, even the stacked kind) that are always up to date.

---

CSS Vertical Bar Graphs - Here’s a fairly typical vertical bar graph showing a hypothetical set of quarterly data for, say, invoice and collection totals. The difference here is that the whole thing is a simple set of nested lists and CSS. Really.

---

Suckerfish HoverLightbox - A really creative way to show a collection of images in a gallery.

---

Lightbox JS - Lightbox JS is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers.

---

CSS Image Maps - Image map that’s built entirely using CSS and XHTML.

---

CSS Image Pop-up - This is an Pop-UP image effect that is similar to the ones you see using JavaScript on mouseover or on click but THIS ONE uses ONLY CSS!

---

Sliding Doors CSS Navigation - A rarely discussed advantage of CSS is the ability to layer background images, allowing them to slide over each other to create certain effects.

---

Taming Lists - I’ll demonstrate how to use CSS to bring unwieldy lists under control. It’s time for you to tell lists how to behave, instead of letting them run wild on your web page.

---

The Art of Navigation - The main purpose of this design experiment is to see how far we can push CSS. Is it possible to create the most complex navigation (in terms of graphic design) and have it marked-up as an unordered list?

---

Navigation Matrix Reloaded - This new experiment is, as the first one, based exclusively on graphics — therefore the same usability and accessiblity cautions apply.

---

Light Weight Low Tech CSS Tabs - An example of light weight tabs by combining the Sliding Doors method with the Mountaintop corners idea.

---

Accessible Image-Tab Rollovers - I wanted to continue to use a simple unordered list for the navigation in the markup. Much has already been said about using lists for navigation, here and elsewhere. They’re compact, lightweight and accessible to text browsers, screenreaders, PDAs, phones, etc.

---

Part 2

---

Tables with style - It might not seem like it but styling tabular data can be a lot of fun. From a semantic point of view, there are plenty of elements to tie some style into. You have cells, rows, row groups and, of course, the table element itself. Adding CSS to a paragraph just isn’t as exciting.

---

CSS Shadows - So for a couple of years now, folks have been trying to find ways to work around the fact that the box-shadow property from CSS3 seems to perpetually be just a few months away from actually appearing in Web browsers everywhere. Box shadows are a very common design element, and not being able to use them on the Web is a real pain in the ass.

---

Airtight Corners - Here’s a quick number on how to produce a box with rounded corners using only one image, and off-setting that image for each corner.

---

Collapsing Tables With DOM and CSS - Each of the tables below has a class called “footcollapse” which makes the script add the arrow images in the footer allowing the table to be collapsed and expanded.

---

3D Box Model Diagram - Here’s a thing. I’ve seen umpteen diagrams showing CSS beginners how padding, border and margin work together, but not the order in which elements such as background colour and image are stacked. To try and fill this hole, I’ve drawn a diagram.

---

Docking Boxes - Docking boxes (dbx) adds animated drag ‘n’ drop, snap-to-grid, and show/hide-contents functionality to any group of elements.

---

CSS Submit Button - For some time now we have all known about how you can treat a submit button as you would any tag when it comes to styling it with CSS, we can change its background colour, border and font styles using our trusty CSS.

---

PHP Style Switcher - For your style-sheet-switching pleasure, A List Apart offers the Switcher, a piece of JavaScript that dynamically changes page styles. Functional as it is, it quite unfortunately relies on the user to have both JavaScript and cookies enabled. There’s not much we can do about the cookies, but we can sidestep client-side processing with a little help from PHP.

---

Two Color sIFR - How to implement two color sIFR

---

Styled images with caption - The problem is a simple one. A client wants to add an image to their site via the content management system. They want it to look attractive, not appear too boxy (let us say they want a nice rounded corner, as this is all the rage) and have a nice caption underneath it. However, they do not know how to use an image editor (beyond basic resizing) or how to edit HTML.

---

Simple CSS Image Switcher - This is a pure CSS image switcher that is lightweight and standards-compliant. It could be used for a gallery or any similar function.

---

Dynamic Pie Chart with CSS - This is an example of creating a semi-dynamic pie chart without the use of server-side imaging libraries

---

Replicating a Tree Table - The aim is to replicate a graphic table tree using HTML

---

Listamatic - Can you take a simple list and use CSS to create radically different list options? The Listamatic shows the power of CSS when applied to a simple list.

---

Simple accessible external links - How to identify external links

---

CSS Element Hover Effect - Using css and html only

---

CSS Going to Print - You’ve seen them before: links that say “click here for printer-friendly version” or words to that effect. Every time you follow one of those links, you load a separate document that presents exactly the same information with a different layout, and probably different markup.

---

Drop Caps with CSS - The code for the dropcap is simple, but we can fancy it up a bit. We use the inline CSS for fiddling with the look.

---

CSS: Unordered List Calendar - This is a list boxes calendar. It isn’t the most semantic method, but it does seem to be faily stable and it resizes perfectly. A monospace font like Courier New must be used to ensure proper proportions and two characters must be used. Prepared with dynamic generation in mind.

---

Visited Links - Everyone does visited links differently. Jakob Neilson flunkies use the old school blue-and-purple combo to help show visitors where they’ve been. People with actual design taste use more palatable colors, or perhaps a font-weight variation instead.

---

Smart Back to top link - Back to top link’s purpose is to quickly position the viewport back to a beginning of a web page. Sometimes you have a variable height of the content and this link is unnecessary if a particular page is shorter than viewport height

---

Displaying percentages with CSS - In turning this part of the design into something flexible on the website I saw two options; clever CSS, or ‘Lots of Images’. I decided that ‘Lots of Images’ was a bad idea

---

Unobtrusive Sidenotes - Unobtrusive Sidenotes is a simple mix of Javascript and CSS that makes it ridiculously easy to incorporate sidenotes into your web pages or blogs.

---

CSS Cheatsheet - The CSS cheat sheet is designed to act as a reminder and reference sheet, listing all selectors (as of CSS 2.1) and properties. It includes a visual example of the box model, unit reference for CSS units and the various media types CSS makes allowance for.

---

CSS Navigation Techniques - A roundup of 37 different nav bars

---

Part 353 CSS Techniques - Great roundup from our friends at Smashing Magazine

---

Accessible Map Rollovers - Create points on a map with roll-over boxes

---

Styling Horizontal Rules - Even though it’s sometimes recommended to replace the <hr> element with cascading stylesheets only using horizontal borders of other elements, I prefer <hr> as a section divider

---

Cross Browser Multi-Page Photograph Gallery - Hover over the tabs to display a page of images. Hover over each image to see a 2x image and finally, on the Portraits and Landscapes, click the image to open a new window showing the 640 x 480 pixel version

---

CSS Button - Create a button using only css

---

CSS + Javascript Fancy Menu - In this article I’ll go through the creation of a custom navigation bar with some cute Javascript effects that will certainly impress your friends

---

CSS Image Wrap - Image text wrap with sandbag divs

---

CSS Cross Fader - In this particular demo, I am going to show how to build a browser-agnostic crossfading effect using Script.aculo.us, a Javascript effects library

---

CSS Bar Graphs - Create complex Bar graphs using css only

---

Attach icons to anything using CSS - Thanks to CSS selectors it’s possible to attach icons to anything you want just by adding an attribute of your choosing to your HTML

---

HTML Visual Sitemap Tool - If you’ve ever had to produce a sitemap for a client using tools like Visio or OmniGraffle, you know that it can be tedious to visually organize a complex hierarchy of pages. Having experienced this myself, I developed a simple and efficient way to make a sitemap through the benefits of standards-based HTML and CSS

---

Digg comment style sliding divs - How to make sliding DIVs using Javascript and CSS from scratch without having the overhead of Effects libraries such as script.aculo.us

---

Ajax Auto Completion Demo

---

Thumbnail Images - Suppose you have a series of images in thumbnail and you would like the user to easily browse through them. In this script we will create three thumbnail images and a larger copy of the selected image will be displayed on the right of the screen. We will also highlight the currently selected thumbnail. 

---

Sliding Photograph Galleries - This gallery is my simplest yet. It is just an unordered list of images that are normally compressed vertically (reduction 8:1). When you hover over one of these compressed images it expands to full size

---

Free CSS Menus - Downloadable examples of css-based navigation menus

---

Image Fade - Fade an image in using only CSS

---

Time Sensitive Style Switcher - You Can Change Styles Based on Time of Day

---

Free Web 2.0 Templates - Download free xhtml / CSS templates

---

Turn lists into Trees - In this article, I will present a technique to display a multi-level unordered list in the form of a tree with lines connecting nodes

---

Custom Bullets - Use css to style list items with custom bullet points

---

HTML Text Drop Shadows - The drop shadow may not be a designer’s most important tool, but on occasion the need arises to add some punch to a headline. One example could be for branding text that is positioned on top of an image; Depending on the colors of the image, your text might get lost without a shadow to pop it out

---

CSS Dashboard effect - Ever want to alert your users to a really important message?

---

Create flickr-like Editing Fields Using AJAX & CSS - On one of my web projects I’ve been working on, we needed to allow the user to edit some information on their profile page. I could have written an HTML form page and then written the php database updater, but why use such outdated interfaces?

---

Form field hints with CSS and JavaScript - As you tab through each input field, some helper text appears in box out to the right

---

Part 4

---

Simple Accessible ‘More’ Links - “There is this information that we are hiding. But why not show that hidden information when the user is hovering the link?”

---

10 Tips for an easier CSS Life - As with most things, a logical and structured approach is the best way to go. Therefore I have put together 10 quick tips (in no special order) to help make your CSS coding as pain-free as possible

---

CSS Gallery Layout - Setting up a gallery layout is not exactly one of the jobs I am looking forward to doing. I assume you all are using lists by now to lay out thumbnail galleries, right?

---

CSS Alert Box - In various places around the net you may have seen alert boxes which, as far as I can tell, owe their origins to the K2 template for WordPress

---

CSS Tab Designer - CSS Tab Designer is a unique and easy to use software to help you design css-based lists and tabs visually and without any programming knowledge required Mini Slide Navigation - Sliding nav bar using javascript for the slide effect

---

Centered Tabs with CSS - What if we need a bit more flexibility? What if we need to place our navigation in the center?

---

Multi Column Layout - We all know the problems that arise when we try to build multi-column layouts in which the columns are of equal height

---

CSS Shorthand Properties - One of the many great possibilities in CSS is the use of shorthand properties. It lets you specify several properties by using only one

---

10 CSS tricks you may not know - 10 Handy tips

---

Snook’s Resizable Underlines - The aim is to apply underlines to paragraph text that stretch the whole width of the column (without using justified text), regardless of the lengths of the paragraph text itself

---

Layout-O-Matic - Create layouts of your choosing with this online tool

---

List-O-Matic - Create navigation bars from lists using this online tool

---

CSS Vista - Edit CSS and see the results live in Firefox and Internet Explorer simultaneously

---

Image Floats with the text wrap - How many times do you have an image floated left in a block of content, but want to keep that content from wrapping around your image?

---

Web Standards Checklist - A list to run through before you launch a standards compliant website

---

Future Proof your CSS with conditional comments - Conditional comments in your style sheets

---

CSS Star Ratings - Another handy piece of css and html for rating stars

---

CSS Typography - You don’t often see “CSS” and “typography” used in the same sentence—and for good reason. Traditional typography is a very subtle and beautiful form of design, with thousands of variations and choices

---

Zoom Zoom Zoom - Let the user change the size of the text

---

Sliding Doors box with rounded corners - The goal of the exercise was to create rounded-corner boxes with visual flare and the absolute minimal amount of semantically correct markup

---

Changing Man Layout - A liquid three column layout which featured two flexible outer columns and a fixed width centre column

---

Switch McLayout - CSS-based liquid layout has proven successful during the reign of 800-pixel to 1024-pixel screens, but as we use a wider range of devices to access the web, we need more powerful and flexible ways of managing layout

---

Styling Form Controls - A question that is frequently asked in forums like the css-discuss mailing list is how to style form controls in a consistent way across platforms

---

Part 5

---

Web Project Framework - The ESWAT web project framework is a kit that contains a folder structure and some pre-written components that I use whenever I start off a new web project

---

SwfIR - Using the dark arts of JavaScript and Flash, swfIR gives you the ability to apply an assortment of visual effects to any or all images on your website

---