DharmaMike

“The most important thing is to know what you’re doing”

My mission with Aptitoo.com is to provide affordable, practical web design and development training for designers, developers, and small business owners who want skills that will help them achieve success in their field.  I’ve had over 13 years of experience as a web development professional and spent several years teaching college courses in web design and development.  I know the difference between practical use and academic theory.

This article on Webdesigner Depot speaks to the fact that formal education (read: a college degree) can give one an edge when looking for a career or changing jobs in our industry.  But, even without a degree, one can still be competitive in the job market if you know what you’re doing and continually work to increase your knowledge.  At Aptitoo we know how. So will you.

The folks at Google have set up a righteous portal of demos, tutorials, and resources for HTML5 development.

A collection of articles relating to HTML5 and how it can be used now, before the specification is formalized.

Here’s a useful post on Smashing Magazine written by a member of the Zurb team explaining how and why to add the following jQuery goodness to a site:

• Image uploading with the Ajax Upload plugin
• Validating textual form input with a textchange plugin
• Image annotation with a couple of annotation plugins
• A CSS grid with the handy CSS Grid Builder

As a (soon to be) provider of training, I’m curious about this.  Do the majority of people learn best from books on their own, by viewing other peoples work, by being taught, or some combination of those?

Learn the proper way to handle “nowrap” and “pre” with CSS.

a Firefox extension integrated with Firebug…brilliant!

So Apple decided to put up a showcase of HTML 5 features but, in their infinite wisdom, decided to only let Safari browsers display them.  The issue appears to be that they’re doing simple checking of the User-Agent header rather than using something more robust like Modernizr which would allow them to display demos based on browser capabilities.

An open source jQuery plugin for creating mobile websites that look and feel like native iPhone apps.  Some additional documentation is available in the project Wiki on Google Code http://code.google.com/p/jqtouch/