Ben Griswold on June 14th, 2010

I was thrilled to find Cory LaViska’s jQuery Context Menu Plugin a few months ago. In very little time, I was able to integrate the context menu with the jQuery Treeview.  I quickly had a really pretty user interface which took full advantage of limited real estate.  And guess what.  As promised, the plugin worked [...]

Continue reading about jQuery Context Menu Plugin and Capturing Right-Click

Ben Griswold on May 11th, 2009

I was just speaking with a coworker about the tool I used to mockup screens in a recent requirements document.  If you aren’t familiar with Balsamiq Mockups, you are missing out.  Maybe you are responsible for application UI design or you simply like to sketch out your screens before you develop them?  If so, take [...]

Continue reading about Screen Design with Balsamiq Mockups

Ben Griswold on July 8th, 2008

I’m a fan of Pandora Radio.  I really love the product and I complete dig the simplicity and slickness of their Adobe Flash GUI…with one exception.  I have an issue with the play/pause control.  Pandora has chosen to recognize the current state of a song (playing, paused) by highlighting the associated button.  The image to [...]

Continue reading about Pandora Radio and User Interaction

Ben Griswold on July 2nd, 2008

I am not a CSS expert, but the following technique can be used to easily apply an image next to virtually any link.  First you need to define your CSS class which sets the background to a referenced image.  .icon-cancel { background: url(../images/icons/cancel.gif) no-repeat left top; display:inline; padding-left:18px; margin-left: 10px; padding-right:10px; } Once defined, assign [...]

Continue reading about LinkButton Image

Ben Griswold on January 20th, 2007

I don’t remember anyone asking my opinion on this, but apparently over the last few years, image maps became out of favor.  I haven’t had to do anything remotely close to image maps for years now, but I still would have liked to be consulted. As I understand it, the cool kids are now using CSS [...]

Continue reading about Image Maps – When Not To Use CSS

Ben Griswold on November 8th, 2006

I have preferred PNG over GIF and JPEG for sometime now.  It isn’t that I’m an expert on image types, but I know that PNG files are generally smaller in size than GIF and they have consistently rendered nicely for me in Firefox and IE, so I stick with them.   With this said, my faith in [...]

Continue reading about IE7 Support For Alpha Transparency In PNG Files

Ben Griswold on October 29th, 2006

Lorem Ipsum is the defacto standard text we use on our web page mockups. Most often it is used as a placeholder until finalized content is available. However, there are believed to be other benefits. It has been thought that “real” text tends to draw focus away from the overall presentation. With this in mind, [...]

Continue reading about Lorem Ipsum is Latin for Dummy Text

Ben Griswold on October 26th, 2006

In a previous post, I discussed that 9Rules was reviewing the first round of potential new member websites starting yesterday, October 25. I took a look at what 9Rules was looking for in a site and I shared that they claim to put content ahead of design. In the article, I said, “I appreciated what [...]

Continue reading about Selling Beer in a Champaign Bottle