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August 25, 2011

Sybex

Sybex has always been one of my favorite computer reference brands. I was happy when Wiley acquired them so I could get discounts on the books. Now I'm also happy that I could contribute to the website. For the past few months, the development team in Indianapolis has been working on a redesigned site, updating the previous one which was in a very old style. It wasn't even 1024x768 yet! We used a lot of jQuery to make the navigation rich and compatible across browsers and platforms. It also helped in customizing around the restrictive template we were working with.

The template we were moving Sybex into is a mini-site that actually lives in Wiley.com. Many of the past ones visually look like part of Wiley, but with Sybex, we used a lot of style overrides and inserts to really make it stand alone. The dominant dark colors take the attention away from the green Wiley tab in the upper right. And the techie community will appreciate the nice graphics and visual effects. The new site also does a great job of highlighting all of the titles.

Click here to visit the new Sybex

August 21, 2011

Dummies Videos on iOS

A couple of weeks back, Dummies.com added a quiet update. There's now a JavaScript detecting iOS and Android mobile devices whenever a video page is accessed. When detected, it'll switch to an HTML5 video player (rather than the default Flash one). Now users accessing Dummies videos on the iPhone or iPad won't get a blank box or error. This is a very useful update because the iPad is a great tool for how-to instructions, which Dummies.com has a lot of.

Android users probably won't notice a difference because those devices were already able to play the Flash version. It just serves up HTML5 if Flash is not installed.

August 14, 2011

MoMA 2011

 
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