Using Design is extremely simple:
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Drag the Design link below to your bookmark bar (or add it to your bookmarks by right clicking the link and selecting 'Add to bookmarks/favourites'):
- Load any web-page you want
- Click Design in your bookmark bar
- Load the design component you wish to use by clicking on it in the Design control panel.
Design features the following components:
- Grid - overlays a highly configurable layout grid over a web-page. Grid can be set to match any set of dimensions, allowing easy development of CSS layouts in the web-browser.
- Rule - displays rulers on a page, with all the expected features of the rulers found in a desktop design application, including guides which snap to block display elements and origin location control.
- Unit - allows measurements to be made between any two points on a web-page, giving basic information about each of the points clicked on, and drawing a line on the page for the measurement.
- Crosshair - draws a crosshair cursor on the page to assist in layout alignment. Cursor information is also presented in a tooltip.
Once Design has loaded, you can load each individual component by simply clicking on the icon representing that component in the Design control panel. You can then disable that component by clicking the icon again. Any combination of the Design components can by loaded on a page, and they will all work effectively together. Indeed, Design is often at it's most useful when using several of it's components at the same time.
About
This site is the playground and sand box of Allan Jardine, a user interface developer focused on web-based technologies, seeking to push the boundaries of HCI. I currently work as a UI developer for U4EA technologies creating interfaces for networking devices.
On this site you will find some of my experimental software, as well as my musings on UI development and the state of web-development. This site also hosts projects I have been working on such as Design, Alert and SprySpell.
Reflections
Previous experiments and thoughts on current developments in web-development.
The web today
Scientistis from Manchester has developed an exciting new technique to capture a 3D depth (and a reflection) map using only two photos of a surface
Bet you thought that a paper map really had only one UI paradigm right? Well this guy throught otherwise and has produced a spatial map - very cool - excellent thinking!
The folks at Mozilla labs have been busy recently! Ubiquity is a tool which allows users to create their own mashups easily
John Resig has a nice little tip for using the src attribute of a script tag at the same time as having code inside the tag. Neat
It takes a lot of talent to get it right, but when done correctly, photos with heavy motion blur can look absolutely fantastic. Here is an excellent collection
Javascript engines are getting incredibly fast now, and they just keep getting fast (more more!). TraceMonkey has gone into Firefox trunk bringing dramatic speed improvements