Hello, and welcome to the newly redesigned enjoy|smile. I've always played with the previous version of the site while I was bored, letting it grow organically and gradually changing the design- but I'd had enough. I decided I needed to do something radical, something that would redefine the site and set the approriate tone for what it actually is.

Less is Always Better

... at least when you're trying to get your point across. I've spent many hours nailing down the best way to bring you content while not hiding important bits of imformation to the corners of the site. What you're looking at is an extremely minimalistic website governed by one and one-half handfuls of css rules. I took it a step further by abstracting my css classes properly so most elements are styled by just four css classes. This is only possible because of the ability to give multiple classes to one element.

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*in this example I use an image to further demonstrate the capabilities of CSS. The buttons look just as good without the image!

I talked briefly about CSS3 in my last post. I want to take some time and demonstrate some of the possibilities created by CSS3. Here I will show you how to make some nice looking buttons using just CSS! While reading through this post, you might feel overwhelmed by the amount of CSS, don't worry; because of browser compatibility, it is required that we specify CSS rules for multiple browsers. Once you get past the multiple-browser support, it's quite simple. Let's jump right into it!

Buttons typically have a few states. The button we're putting together here will have three states: normal, hover, and active- the purpose of each seems straight-forward so I'll save the explanation for another day. The code below shows our setup for the normal state.

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I'm finding it difficult to squeeze time out of my day to work on my personal projects. There have been barely-noticeable changes on my projects, but I assure you- I'm still working on them! I've been wanting to write about these things for a while now, but I didn't think there was enough interesting content to post them each individually. I've decided to combine my experience with all three subjects into one higher-level post, great!.

If you look at my portfolio page, you'll see I'm working on an online radio-type project. To collect information on songs playing I use the iTunes Music Store Search API. This API is quite extensive and returns just about everything you want to know about a song- including it's album artwork! I can't remember when I stumbled across this API, but ever since I started using it I've had such a strange problem. The API lets you set what type of media you're looking for, songs in my case. The API reference I used instructed me to set the entity to musicTrack. All was good until my application's search function started returning music videos. This issue was easily reproduced, so I turned to the Apple Support Forums. Turns out I was reading an old API reference. Please, if you ever decide to work with this API, use this reference.

Now for the interesting stuff! On my idle time while traveling to and from work I've been reading this book. It has proven to be very interesting and quite the primer on HTML5. Most believe the most exciting feature of HTML5 is probably the canvas element. This element allows us to draw nearly anything (the standard only lists 2D drawing for now) on an area in the browser. When we combine this with the power of javascript DOM and HTML5's audio and video features, amazing things can be created. The goal of all this is to hopefully remove the reliance on Adobe's proprietary Flash software for multimedia on the web. It is catching on, even YouTube has been experimenting with HTML5 for serving content.

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