Style Meltdown | The Blog and Design Playground of Alex Hackbart

P.O.S. – Never Better (2009) Will Unique Album Art Make Sales?

In the days of MP3′s and people stealing more music than buying it, there comes a need to create a strategy to provoke fans to buy the album, not steal it online. Some labels try to add bonus tracks for download in the CD casing, some offer discount cards, some send free stickers and posters to hopefully get the fan excited enough to buy the album.

In a world where software can be downloaded for free from thousands of different sites, the same is true for music. Oddly enough, the two have similarities when it comes to how they are sold. For me, I feel the need to buy music or software when I feel an emotional connection with the company. If it’s not emotional, then it somehow should feel unique and packaged together as if it had me, the user (or fan) in mind.

Second Brain – Aggregate Your Content Libraries the Easy Way

When I am browsing the web I find it hard to keep all the good things I find organized. I’ve got del.icio.us, Youtube, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon and Flickr accounts. Whenever I want to go back to a site I found, I would have to get to search for it on the particular site that I marked it on. When I heard about a site called Second Brain I had to check it out. What it does is aggregate all of your Stumbles, Diggs, Youtube favorites etc. so you don’t have to comb through your accounts to find content you saved. In this article I will give you an overview of my user experience with Second Brain.

DeDestruct And Other Kinds of Awesomeness

Lately I have been extremely busy and haven’t had time to post much. One thing I do want to tell you guys is to check out DeDestruct, it’s one of the more recent blogs I have been working on. Lately I haven’t been able to post there either so I have been trying to do a lot of SEO/SMO stuff for it just so I can still help out. What we do is answer user submitted questions about CSS, AJAX, JavaScript, HTML and some other AWESOME stuff. Ya, awesome, I said it.

Image Sprite Navigation With CSS

Why slice a new image for each item in a navigation when you can use the same image for all of them? If you’re thinking you can’t do that without sacrificing rollovers, think again. By creating a navigation using an image sprite, you can have a complete navigation, rollovers and all, by only using one image.

What is an image sprite?

Image sprite originated from old nintendo games – what developers had to do to keep the game from having to load a new image each time a different character entered the screen was store all of the images into a grid – once they had this grid they could call different sections of it and tell it to display it on the screen. The same big image was loaded one time, from then on different sections were called and displayed on the page.

How to use image sprites to create a CSS navigation

What we are going to do is copy the old image sprite technique used in video games, and apply it to our CSS. How you ask? We can do this in by off-setting the background position of each list item in our nav. Let me break this down step by step to help understand this concept.

Mac OS X Leopard Ships October 26th

Yep, it’s true. The new Mac OS that has been pushed back more than once finally has a date on it. There has been a lot of talk about the new features coming out on the new OS. I myself have been looking forward to the new and improved Boot Camp, creating stacks on my dock, an improved finder and also Quick Look. Apple has created an organized list with all 300+ new features being released on their site, take a look through them. You’ll be suprised how many new ones you’ll be interested, i was.