StyleMeltdown the Design Portfolio of Alex Hackbart

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. (more…)

Arnold is making a visit down to San Diego to talk about the wildfires. First I was skeptical, how is he going to help? Then I remembered, duh he’s Mr. Freeze. Out comes the freeze gun and hopefully down goes the fire.

But honestly, I hope someone can stop this fire soon I’ve had many family and friends that evacuated already; good luck and many thanks to the firefighters working hard. For more emergency/evacuation details you can go to the San Diego emergency fire information website. Please pray for all those who have houses, lives and loved ones in jeopardy. Maybe instead of Arnold coming down to do nothing we can get some more able bodied firefighters so we can hopefully solve this problem sooner. (more…)

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.

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Today is Blog Action Day, it’s purpose is to make people more aware of the environment. The website blogactionday.org is getting as many bloggers as possible to post about the environment to raise awareness. Think about it, 20,000 blogs who have a total RSS feed of 15,000,000 people, that’s milions of people getting the message of environmental awareness. Not a bad number. Next year I plan on participating in full with a bigger post but for now this is going to have to do. Support the cause. Next years will be in August or so so keep a heads up for that.

I’ve been pretty busy recently working at my new job and haven’t had much time to make updates to the site. Partly because I have been really busy, but also because I haven’t had a good computer to work off of at home. Well I finally cracked my piggy bank and bought myself a MacBook Pro. I love it, I’ve had a Mac before but it wasn’t a nice portable computer like this one is. Also coming from a PC most recently, I feel a lot more comfortable working on it, especially now that I have installed a few applications that are going to help my design, coding and overall productivity.

Since I hadn’t downloaded apps for a mac in a while, I got some help from my friend Jay Swain on which apps I needed most, and also which ones would just be nice to have. These are the ones I have so far, and I’m sure there are more to come:

1. Transmit – Transmit is an easy to use FTP client for OS X, it isn’t expensive and in my opinion, it can transfer files faster than Dreamweaver or anything else I have used. In version 3 it now supports more things like Automator, Amazon S3 and iDisk. I highly recommend this program for your Mac FTP needs.

2. Adium – Every new Mac comes with the instant messaging app called iChat. It works great and with my new MacBook Pro, I can even have video conferences on the nifty little camera. I was trying to figure out how I could get my Google Chat working through the same program; answer: Adium. This program can connect to over 10 different chat programs and display them in the same buddy list, this is nice for those of use that have multiple chat apps and want them all thrown into one. The only thing it doesn’t have that iChat does is support for video conferences. I would expect this on the next update though.
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