Scarf*oo

An slick new 50$ mac application from Clearleft for web site usability testing. Seems like a well designed app that could really come in handy. See for yourself.

Silverback screencast from Jeremy Keith on Vimeo.

Oh, and just in case you are holding back on the purchase, 10% of all profits go to save the gorillas!

Opera software released 21 tutorials on web development targeted for the masses. All in all it seems to be a well-rounded collection covering the basics, so if you are into more advanced stuff, you may find the stuff covered oh-not-so-tasty.

From the Opera site:

“Learning Web Standards just got easier. Opera’s new Web Standards Curriculum is a complete course to teach you standards-based web development, including HTML, CSS, design principles and background theory, and JavaScript basics. It already has support from many organizations (including Yahoo! and the Web Standards Project) and universities. The first 23 articles are currently available, with about 30 more to be published between now and late September.”

Jump to the first article in the series if you are still interested.

The People at RNIB have released the Surf Right Toolbar, which is — you guessed it — a toolbar for IE, which is designed to bring to the surface the often hidden accessibilty settings, such as turning javascript and images on/off, changing text size and so on.

Quoting:
“The Surf Right Toolbar is really for anyone who wants to adjust the way they view content on the web to make it easier to read. This could include people with mild disabilities, the elderly, people with reading problems, cognitive problems, using dial-up, photosensitivity and so on.”

You can grab the beta, right here.

An informative new website dedicated to webfonts & @font-face embedding. Features a list of fonts, which specifically allow @font-face embedding and fonts with an OpenFont license, so you can pat yourself on the shoulder, knowing you are a good boy/girl. Now I’d love to hear how many of you are jumping into font embedding, because I am actually considering it myself for a while now… Go.

Google Doctype is an open encyclopedia and reference library. Written by web developers, for web developers. It includes articles on web security, JavaScript DOM manipulation, CSS tips and tricks, and more. The reference section includes a growing library of test cases for checking cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility.

A welcome addition to my virtual library, I guess.

The W3C announced today that the WCAG2 Candidate Recommendation is likely to go live by the end of the year. With their words, “Candidate Recommendation means that we think the technical content is stable and we want developers and designers to start using WCAG 2.0, to test it out in every-day situations.”

If you are interested to help them, you are warmly welcome to do so by building your content following the recommended guidelines outlined here.

Hey fellow web developers and designers, there is a new LinkedIn group available for your collaborating and stay-in-touch necessities called “Web Standards Design + Development“, enstablished by Greg Storey from airbagindustries.com. The membership is free, but you’ll have to be approved to join in.

And you are waiting for… what? Sign in.

WebKit, the development version of Apple’s Safari web browser now supports another advanced CSS feature, which keeps blowing it way ahead of the competition…

Competition?

For more info on the subject, visit Surfin’ Safari Blog.

“Bring your data to visual life with web standards, and roll you own Google-style maps.” is the theme for the latest issue of ALA.

The first article by Wilson Miner shares us techniques for incorporating data visualization into standards-based web navigation patterns, while Paul Smith teaches us how to build our own mapping application using open-source software and how to integrate it into our web site.

Enjoy the read!

Google App Engine is a new fully-integrated development environment, which offers you to run your web applications inside the Google infrastructure, which means you have their software framework, processing and storage power to work with. In this preview release you can sign-up for a free account with 500MB of persistent storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page views. For now you are limited to python-based web applications, but they promise to support more languages in the future.