Inspect Element

Inspect Element on Google+

Tom Kenny — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:45:45 +0000

You can now add Inspect Element to your web design and/or development circles on Google+!

CSS3 Secrets: 10 things you might not know about CSS3

Tom Kenny — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 10:21:47 +0000

Great presentation by Lea Verou about some things in CSS3 you may not have known about. You will learn something here guaranteed.

The Death of Time

Tom Kenny — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 10:04:46 +0000

The HTML5 element is no more (along with the pubdate attribute) and has been replaced by . I don’t think there is anyone who thinks this is a good idea, especially as it has been out in the wild for a good while now. Gone is the ability for machine readable dates and times as nothing will now follow a common standard. Madness.

CSS3 Image Styles

Tom Kenny — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 09:32:43 +0000

Very nice things you can do with CSS on images. The embossed styles are similar to how I created slick CSS3 buttons with box-shadow and rgba.

Convert Single Line Text in Photoshop to Paragraph Text

Tom Kenny — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 10:18:52 +0000

A very simple tip from TJ Taylor that I was completely unaware of until now even after all these years of using Photoshop. You know when you create a single line of text in Photoshop and you actually want to manipulate the height and width but you can’t? Well, right click the text with the text tool and you’ve got the option to ‘Convert to Paragraph Text’. Not the biggest problem in the world but should improve productivity nonetheless.

My Response to @netmag’s Plea on Twitter for Positive Feedback about Adobe Muse

Tom Kenny — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 11:03:24 +0000

I think it’s good to see Adobe thinking differently and trying new things despite the fact they’ve failed so miserably with Muse. Adobe’s cluelessness is a great opportunity for the little guys though. The independent app developers who do get it will thrive under the failing of a big company. I hope to see a few companies take this opportunity to be innovative and do something new and exciting, something that will make us use our bloated, expensive tools less and less. Also, in that scenario there will be more competition which is only a good thing for advancing the way we work.

I’ve emailed this over to them. Share your thoughts on this with me and my followers on Google+.

The Future of Inspect Element and Some Stats

Tom Kenny — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 16:00:24 +0000

It’s summer here in London which means I have less time to sit at a computer and write. Combine that with moving into a new place with my girlfriend, starting a new job and not having home broadband for two months thanks to the useless idiots at Virgin Media (with a dose of stupidity from O2 and British Telecom) and you can see why Inspect Element hasn’t been updated anywhere near as much as I would have liked. It sounds rather familiar to a similar situation last year! Fear not as it will all change soon. We have super fast internet, I’m settled in my new job at Factory Media and I’m raring to get going with the new Inspect Element.

That’s right Inspect Element is changing although don’t worry, it will still have the blog at the heart of the machine but there are going to be a couple of additions. I can’t reveal exactly what they are just yet but what I can confirm is:

It will still be run and maintained by myself (with possible contributions from elsewhere further down the line)
It’ll be more than articles and tutorials (and snippets)
There will be a more even balance of both design and development (HTML and CSS)

It’s also worth noting that it’ll be a good few months until it’s ready purely due to the amount of work to be done and it could be ready potentially as long as early next year but stick with it as it will be worth the wait, I can assure you of that. At some point I will give you a peek at the design so keep an eye on @tkenny on Twitter to find out when.

Stats

I’m a bit of a stat geek so let’s get it on!

Inspect Element launched on June 8th 2009 and at the time of writing has had:

1,039,676 unique visitors
1,520,712 total visits
2,650,607 page views

The most popular posts have been:

Code a Backwards Compatible, One Page Portfolio with HTML5 and CSS3 with 136,782 page views
10 Fantastic and Creative Web Design Styles with 104,902 page views
Create a Button with Hover and Active States using CSS Sprites with 89,031 page views

The single page HTML5 portfolio site I created seems to be extremely popular so I’ll be doing another one which will be much better and possibly with a PSD file for you to download. To be honest, that one was a bit rushed and doesn’t look that great as I designed it in the browser as a quick experiment which I clearly didn’t have the hang of just then!

A very big thanks to every single one of the million+ visitors. There’s no doubt with your support I’ve become a better designer and writer since Inspect Element began. Judging from my experience, one of the best things you can do as a designer is start a blog and just get your thoughts and ideas out there.

Firefox UX Team’s Proposed New Firefox Designs

Tom Kenny — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 18:43:03 +0000

I’m not the biggest fan of Firefox. It’s clunky and slow and feeling a little old as a result but these proposed redesigns from the Firefox UX Team are really refreshing. Unfortunately I don’t have anymore information than what’s on the linked page but I really hope they push forward in this direction because it looks great.

The Expressive Web

Tom Kenny — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 10:08:47 +0000

We recently launched a beta of new site we have been working on, called theexpressiveweb.com. This is a project we have put together with the help of Big Spaceship with the goal of creating both a resource and showcase that highlights some of the most creative and expressive features being added to the web today (see Figure 1). In addition to highlighting and providing information on twelve new HTML5 and CSS3 features, the site itself makes extensive use of new features such as CSS3 transitions, CSS3 transforms, web storage and more to provide a visually compelling resource for learning more about HTML5 and CSS3.

This is a stunning example of what can be done with HTML5 and CSS3 and believe it or not it’s from Adobe. It just shows that when they embrace the latest technology they can produce some seriously impressive work. Now Adobe, please fix Photoshop! We know you can.

Google Offers To Re-Write Your Webpages On The Fly, Promising 25% To 60% Speed Improvements

Tom Kenny — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 11:40:06 +0000

This is both scary and potentially absolutely awesome at the same time!