Hi, my name is David and I am an internet junkie.

Whew…it always feels better to get it all out in the open.

I have been an internet junkie for years and started collecting a list of whoozits and whatzits going all the way back from 2006 (I use blogmarks.net to collect things in case you were wondering).

I have literally hundreds of links on dozens of completely random topics. However, there are a few topics that I thought would be helpful for all of the designers and developers out there. Today I will focus on Javascript links…21 of them in fact.

Now if you are an internet junkie as well you have probably run into most of these at one time or another, but if you take a look, you may find one or two that you missed the first time around.

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Hey everyone, sorry for the dearth of articles the past few weeks, I have been crazy busy working on various projects. Not an excuse, just an explanation.

Anyway, Smashing Magazine has a cool article on the User Experiences of the Future.

Its worth checking out.

Some of the stuff I have talked about before (such as multitouch and Surface), but there are a few things that really are amazing that I hadn’t seen before. In particular, check out the video on Photosynth. It actually demos two technologies related to images that are just simply amazing. You combine that with the multitouch concept and man you have something cool there.

I will be sharing some of what I have been working on soon. Its a bit of a tangent, but I think it will help developers out…

Ok so you have all seen them: “8 million tools for web development”, “5 gagillion tools that if you don’t use you are stupid”.

So of course you click on them (after all that is why people write them) and you find out that the tools are for Mac lovers, Ubuntu gurus, or some other niche that you are not a part of. You find a couple of doodads worth looking into, but overall you find yourself disappointed…again. As a .net developer it can be frustrating because it seems the blogiverse thinks you are “eat the paste special” because you don’t use Ruby.

I am here to tell you…you don’t eat glue. You may have chosen to develop .net web apps because your employer is a Microsoft shop and you don’t have a choice, or you chose it because you want an IDE that is actually useful. Either way there are a lot of tools out there for you whether you are a .net novice or ninja.

So here is your list of tools that if you don’t use them as a .net developer then you obviously are a contributor to the “Baby Seal Clubbing Foundation”.

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Its been another busy few weeks around the web…lets see what has been happening.

Design
Thinking outside the box - Boxes and Arrows goes indepth about the ever important topic of “ease of use”.

Bulletproof Web Design - Dan Cederholm has released a new edition of his really great web design book (I have the first edition and it is a worthwhile read).

Freelancing
Project Juggling - FreelanceSwitch has a new article on how to manage multiple projects.

Motivation - A List Apart’s newest article gives a lot of helpful hints on how to stay motivated when going through the different phases of a project.

.NET 3.5 and Microsoft Goodies
What’s New in What’s New - MSDN has a new article on what is new in the new edition of the .NET framework (version 3.5) that comes with the new version of Visual Studio. My goal was to say new as many times as possible in a single sentence…I believe I succeeded.

WPF 3.5 - Here is a video of what is coming in the next version of WPF, also part of VS 2008.

Expression Part Deux - Even though Blend v1 just came out a couple of months ago, they are already releasing previews of Blend v2. Those crazy Microsoft people…

Silverlight is Suite - Component One has officially come out with an unofficial version of their new toolset for Silverlight called Sapphire.

ASP.NET and CSS - ASP.NET’s server controls are notorious for creating some really ugly code. This is supposed to change with the controls in VS 2008. The controls will, for the first time, output clean CSS driven markup. Hooray for progress!

Tools
BuiltWith - Ever wonder what technologies and libraries your favorite site uses? Wonder no longer!

XRAY - Here is a cool little tool that lets you see the properties of different parts of a webpage. It works on just about anything but IE, but if you have Firefox’s Web Developer extension you have been playing with something very similar for a while now.

Miscellaneous
All Hail the King - BusinessWeek has a great article on Jeffrey Zeldman and the rise of web standards. A great read.

CSS Navigation 101 - Sitepoint has a nice article on how to build menus using CSS. Great for beginners.

RTE Meet YUI - Yahoo has just recently released a Rich Text Editor for their YUI platform. On their blog you can get a behind the scenes look on how it was built.

User Experience (aka UX) is the backbone for everything we as designers and developers do. Whether you are building the next google, or accounting software, how the user interacts with the application is paramount.

Officially (at least according to Wikipedia) UX “is a subset of the field of experience design which pertains to the creation of the architecture and interaction models which impact a user’s perception of a device or system. The scope of the field is directed at affecting all aspects of the user’s interaction with the product: how it is perceived, learned, and used.”

What I find interesting is most people who design applications don’t seem to take the user experience very seriously at all. “Does it look cool?” is typically the only question asked. I say that because it is the only explanation for a website that hides the navigation in some way or an application that is incoherent and difficult to use (but it looks cool). Now, if that is the point of the app, then more power to you…but most sites and applications are meant to be used by people who aren’t all that computer savvy. To make those applications successful, focusing on the user should be a top priority.

So to get all the designers, and developers (or anyone else who is thinking about creating some software) up to speed here is a list of articles, interviews, books, blogs, and podcasts about the rich world of UX.

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Ok, so I have been kneedeep in Silverlight, and other Microsoft goodies for a while…lets take a breather.

Here are some links (including a couple MS ones) from around the web about various techs and design topics.

Design
The design guys over at webdesignfromscratch.com have their list of the 10 best-designed websites in the world. Not sure if I agree with all of their choices, but its not a bad list.

For those of you who are wondering what typefaces the “big boys” use, have I gotta list for you (courtesy of stylegala)! TypoWiki has a pretty big list of companies and how they lay out their stuff.

The boys over at Sitepoint have a nice little article on how to design forms with CSS.

Apple
Everyone and their sister are all abuzz about Apple. Now that isn’t all that unusual, but you would think that Mr. Jobs cured cancer or something. I like Apple…they make some sweet stuff, but I just don’t get the frenzy. Oh well…

The big news this week is, of course, that you can now get Safari on Windows. Now supposedly this ties into developing doohickies and widgets on the beloved iPhone, but I think it is just part of Apple’s (so far successful) plan at world domination. I, of course, had to download it as soon as I could.

If you want to analyze the “why” of the release a little more, you can check out an article over on ZDNet that does just that.

Now if you just can get enough about the famous fruit company, you can also go drool over their newly redesigned site.

Freelancing
If you are a freelancer like myself, its always good to find a few resources.

Sitepoint has a nice article on managing projects (an essential tool).

My favorite freelancing site has a nice article on essential marketing skills that all freelancers need.

If you are looking for a nice and simple invoicing tool, you can always try sidejobtrack.com. Its the one that I use with my clients.

Ubiquitous List
What link roundup would be complete without a list from Smashing Magazine? This time the list is a million different ways to create a shnazzy tooltip.

Microsoft Goodies
For all the MS junkies out there, I haven’t forgotten about you.

If you are using the ASP.NET AJAX Framework then you will be happy to hear that they have recently released a new version of the toolkit.

For the WPF crowd, there is a new “lab” that walks you through how to build an Outlook 2007 with WPF. Good stuff.

Completely Random
Just in case you were tired of reading about design, here are a comple of links on stuff I just found interesting.

Apparently yesterday was “alternative search engine day” (where is the greeting card for that?). ReadWriteWeb has their take on life without Google.

And in case you missed it there is a new Ask A Ninja up, although it isn’t one of their better ones (except the part about the camel/llama or cama…). My favorite is still the minjas or the ninjelephants…

Lotsa good articles have been popping up around the ole web so I thought I would pass ‘em along.

CSS
Resizing images with CSS - A cool technique for tackling the problem of images that don’t resize when the user increases their browser’s text-size.

Styling buttons with CSS - Styling form buttons can be a pain in the bootay. The filament group has come up with a shnazzy solution.

Web Design 101: Backgrounds - Digital Web has a nice intro into the CSS background property and how it really works.

WPF, Blend, Silverlight
Karsten Januszewski (say that 5 times fast) has 3 new labs out to get your hands dirty with Expression Blend.

Silverlight Developer Reference Poster - Microsoft is giving these out at conferences and such as a quick reference to the various pieces and parts to Silverlight.

WPF Example with Source - The WPF Blog has created a simple little app to show some of the 3D capabilities of the WPF framework.

Articles
Zen and the Art of IA - Clifton Evans gives a look into the recent book Designing the Obvious by Robert Hoekman Jr.. Basically it is a study on how to use and why to use design techniques to make a website “obvious”.

Abundance and UX - UX Magazine takes a quick look at a world that is built on the premise of abundance rather than one of scarcity. Kind of a neat idea.

Misc
Freebies!! - Smashing magazine a nice list of free icons and such. Never can have too many icons.