Jeremy Keith’s HTML5 for Web Designers is now available as an epub at books.alistapart.com.

If you bought the paperback, watch your inbox for a special discount on the ebook. (To take advantage of this offer, enter the discount code in page 2 of the shopping cart’s checkout process, after you put in your billing information.)

Also, be on the lookout for our second book, CSS3 For Web Designers by Dan Cederholm, forthcoming this Fall. Upcoming A Book Apart topics include progressive enhancement, content strategy, responsive web design, and emotional design by industry-leading authors Aaron Gustafson, Erin Kissane, Ethan Marcotte, and Aarron Walter.

“After some searching I found out that unless explicitly told mobile Safari will change the appearance of buttons & controls to resemble a native Apple control. Thankfully there’s a simple fix.”

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A bunch of great free PSDs for you to download.

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No, it isn’t a Happy Cog project (it’s by Simon Willison and Natalie Downe) but we couldn’t love Lanyrd, the social conference directory any more if we’d created it ourselves.

Lanyrd uses Twitter to tell you which conferences, workshops and such your friends are attending or speaking at. You can add and track events, and soon you’ll be able to export your events as iCal or into your Google calendar (the site is powered by microformats). Soon, too, you’ll be able to add sessions, slides, and videos.

The site’s not for everyone. It’s for people who attend web/UX conferences, and as it was created by inhabitants of the UK, it presently focuses mainly on Western European and North American events, but that will change as more people use it.

Congratulations and thank you, Natalie and Simon.

  

Desktop wallpapers can serve as an excellent source of inspiration. However, if you use some specific wallpaper for a long period of time, it becomes harder to draw inspiration out of it. That’s why we have decided to supply you with smashing wallpapers over 12 months. And to make them a little bit more distinctive from the usual crowd, we’ve decided to embed calendars for the upcoming month. So if you need to look up some date, isn’t it better to show off a nice wallpaper with a nice calendar instead of launching some default time application?

This post features 75 free desktop wallpapers, created by designers across the globe. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free.

Please notice:

• all images can be clicked and lead to the preview of the wallpaper;
• you can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our desktop wallpaper calendar series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?

So what wallpapers have we received for September 2010?

UpHype is an interesting service where users make unique offers for how they can promote your business.

The design is colorful and fun and highlights the rather bizarre nature of the idea.

This design was featured on the 31st August 2010 . It falls under the category of Community, and has a layout style of Two Column.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

Sometimes the simplest idea can make the strongest statement.

Here we see only a large circle and a navigation area but the visual statement is quite unique and attractive.

This design was featured on the 31st August 2010 . It falls under the category of Portfolio, and has a layout style of Other.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

There is no shortage of documentation on WordPress’ famous content-spewing structure, but I still feel like there is more confusion and mystery surrounding “The Loop” than there should be. In this screencast I try and explain what it is, how it works, related parts, and then demonstrate some alterations and various tricks. Things like running multiple loops, writing your own custom queries, and handling pagination with your own custom loops.

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A couple of months ago I advised people to Be careful with non-ascii characters in URLs. We’ve been discussing that at work lately, more specifically whether characters like ":" and "/" are allowed unencoded in query strings or not.

I may well have made mistakes trying to understand the specification, so any help clarifying any errors in the following would be appreciated.

The summary of my previous post is this:

In essence this means that the only characters you can reliably use for the actual name parts of a URL are a-z, A-Z, 0-9, -, ., _, and ~. Any other characters need to be Percent encoded.

But what about those query strings? After studying RFC 3986 - Uniform Resource Identifier (URI): Generic Syntax I’ve come to the following conclusions.

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Posted in Web Standards.

“In this CSS (2 & 3) round-up article we have focused on highlighting as many varied techniques covering as many aspects of web, mobile and application development as possible. And believe me, it wasn’t easy!”

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W3C is pleased to announce the creation of the HTML Speech Incubator Group, whose mission is to determine the feasibility of integrating speech technology in HTML5 in a way that leverages the capabilities of both speech and HTML (e.g., DOM)... W3C Staff

“Here are more than 35 of the best sets of mini icons out there (most featured here are free, though we’ve included a few premium sets, too).”

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“This article will share methods and simple tools for building better portfolio pieces, having happier clients, and imbuing your work with more value.”

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A few years ago, you might not have pointed out during a meeting with a potential client that you maintained a blog. Over time, though, blogs have evolved from the being a personal hobby to a serious work tool. In fact, today, web designers are supposed to know much more than just how to design and build websites. Customer's expectations have increased, and unless you are in position to choose your favourite clients, meeting them requires hard work.

Hence, it's important to keep learning about the variety of design-related fields every single day — be it marketing, psychology, business, copywriting, publishing or blogging. This article doesn't cover "traditional" web design discipline as we know it, but goes a bit beyond it, exploring various writing, blogging and online publishing strategies. Apart from that, we present some useful writing style guides that may help you educate your clients on their copy for their upcoming project.

Using percentage values for certain things can have slightly unexpected results in WebKit based browsers. For instance, if you have a series of columns set in percentage widths with percentage padding, WebKit can calculate their sizing rather strangely.

The red lines indicate the column as rendered with WebKit. The background shades of gray are accurate placement of those columns in percentage widths.

It’s percentages in general that seem to be the issue. I haven’t been able to dig up a ton of information on it, although I do seem to remember reading something about it quite a while ago. I think it’s related to how subpixel values are calculated. For example, if a container is 657px wide currently, and has four columns at 25% each, they would be 164.25px each wide, and WebKit doesn’t handle that well (rounding issues?) Other browsers handle the “subpixel” value OK.

Firefox, IE, and Opera are fine.

Thanks to Nicolas Gallagher for pointing this out to me. If I’m way behind the times on this, feel free to yell at me, but throw me some links and information so I can update this post with the most accurate information I can. This link seems to indicate the issue has been around a while.

Remember this is only really an issue if you are doing something like shown in these examples with solid color columns. If you didn’t have any visual separators, it might not be a big deal, just a slight cross browser difference very few people would ever notice.

Photographer sites are best when the designer lets the photos speak for themselves by making them the largest element on the page.

This designer definitely got it right. The classy minimalist design really helps highlight the work o display.

This design was featured on the 30th August 2010 . It falls under the category of Photography, and has a layout style of Other.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

This site is dominated by a large image slider containing extremely simple but attractive graphics.

If you scroll to the bottom you will see the features listed in yet another slider with large great looking icons.

This design was featured on the 30th August 2010 . It falls under the category of Software, and has a layout style of Other.

If you'd like, you can visit this site, or view all our other featured designs.

“I’d like to share my experiences with both mobile web and software development to guide your future developments on the iPhone platform.”

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In this post we release a yet another freebie: Academica WordPress Theme, a free WordPress theme designed specifically for educational websites such as universities, schools etc. It's a flexible and versatile free theme that can be easily customized and branded for any university, academy or non-profit organization. The theme is designed by ProudThemes (the server is currently not working) and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. As usual, the theme is free to use in private and commerical projects.

The theme was developed for WordPress 3.0+, allows enabling/disabling of a jQuery-based content slider on the homepage for showing your photos, has 9 sidebar widget areas and 3 custom widgets, 3 custom page templates and 2 custom post templates and provides dynamic image resizing (TimThumb script). The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. Please link to this article if you want to spread the word. You may modify the theme as you wish.

“One of the widgets I love is Twitter’s “Follow” button. Let me show you how you can implement this functionality with three popular JavaScript toolkits: MooTools, jQuery, and Dojo.”

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