Bill Napier Design

smashing magazine now offers a great collection of links to CSS-based forms.

They note with Web 2.0 registration and feedback forms are everywhere. Because they are the first contact from your company to the consumer (your potential customer) they need to be well-designed, in addition to be easy to use.

They showcase a number of “modern” solutions that a company or web designer can use. One browser based solution is jotForm in which you can actually design and stylize your form inside of your browser. Pretty cool for non-developers.

Interested in FREE web design templates?

Well, I’m afraid you get what you pay for. A short trip to Google will reveal that. However, I stumbled across a interesting site this morning which offers templates for reasonable prices.

Template Monster offers WordPress, web design and PHP nuke templates. (The WordPress templates were mostly $50. Not bad.)

What interested me, of course, was the fact that I could become an affliate. That is, I could sell my templates to Template Monster and earn 20% commission.

Could be higher, but enough to get my attention …

I’m posting this in the interest of helping someone else with the same problem. If you experience a problem with your Special Characters palette (where it blinks repeatedly with each window … opened or closed), you may want to try Rich’s suggestion.

I appreciate their support. My own frustration stemmed mainly from the fact that I couldn’t get it to go away immediately and that the only way it went away was resetting my Preferences back to what they were August 1.

Bare Bones Software response:

Hi Bill,

Thanks for writing in.

>By mistake I have selected, Special Characters under the Edit menu in TextWrangler, version 2.1.3.
>
>I am not registered but I’m running it a Mac OS 10.4.8, Dual 2.3 GHZ, PowerPC G5. Now, the darn thing won’t go away.
>
>Actually, I never was able to see it. It just blinks now. Regardless, of application launched. I’ve quit TextWrangler and re-started my machine and it still pops up.

I must admit to being rather confused. If I understand correctly, you chose the “Special Characters…” command from TextWrangler’s “Edit” menu, and the palette has remained on the screen since?

If that is so, I’m mystified. The Special Characters palette is a system facility; the command in TextWrangler simply asks the system to open it. Once it’s open, though, you should be able to click its close box which will make the window go away (and this has been my experience, regardless of what application is used to open it).

If the Special Characters palette itself is malfunctioning, that would not be something that’s under the control TextWrangler (or any other application, for that matter).

>I’ve tried deleting the com.barebones.textwrangler.plist under user/library/preferences. And I’ve tried deleting a similar file under the com.barebones.textwrangler.PreferenceData folder.

I would not expect that to have accomplished anything except to reset TextWrangler’s preferences to their factory defaults. It looks like the system preferences for the Special Characters palette can be found in the file “com.apple.CharPaletteServer.plist” in your own Preferences folder; so you might want to see if deleting that file makes any difference.

Rich Siegel
Bare Bones Software, Inc.

While using Bare Bones TextWrangler app, I ran into a real problem yesterday.

By mistake I selected, Special Characters under the Edit menu in TextWrangler, version 2.1.3.

I am not registered but I’m running it a Mac OS 10.4.8, Dual 2.3 GHZ, PowerPC G5. Now, the darn thing wouldn’t go away.

Actually, I never was able to see the Character Palette window. It just flashed, regardless, of application launched. I quit TextWrangler and re-started my machine and it still popped up.

I’ve tried deleting the com.barebones.textwrangler.plist under user/library/preferences. And I’ve tried deleting a similar file under the com.barebones.textwrangler.PreferenceData folder.

I sent 2 emails to Bare Bones support email address with no reply.

So, I went to my external hard drive and replaced my Preferences with a folder from August 1 and shut down for the evening. When I re-booted this morning, no more blinking Character Palette window. Cool.

But now I had a Network problem. My preferences didn’t contain the correct IP Address, Router or DNS Servers. So, then I scrambled. Without having that info handy (or being able to talk to a network administrator right away.) I did some research. I located the IP address of the other Macs in the office and determined my address. Then got connected back to the printers.

Bottom line to this story? Save your Preferences on your back up often. Also, save your Network connection as screen captures and/or prints.

Always be able to restore everything.

Last week, I viewed a GREAT Acrobat online session on Apollo hosted by Mike Chambers, Senior Product Manager for Developer Relations at Adobe. (Actually, I picked up the link from Mike Potter’s blog.)

According to Adobe, “Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to the desktop.”

Apollo is similar to the Flash stand alone player. That is probably the best way I can describe it initially. It runs as a stand alone environment. And uses all the technologies listed above both while on and off line.

To learn more about Apollo, visit Adobe Labs, ApolloDeveloperFAQ.

Reading Professional CSS last night. At my core I suppose I’ll always be a designer and anything which can offer liquid design with great search engine optimization is the way to go (at least right now.)

But as the editor mentions in the first part of the book, “CSS is not a silver bullet.” It is not just that you need xhtml/css solutions and you’ll be Ok. You need more than that. And sometimes you need other programers.