IE8 Compatibility

As most know IE8 is now available to download. Yet another browser to test in. Think I'm up to 3 IE's, Firefox, and then Safari and Opera on the Mac. Life would be so much simpler if all browsers rendered the same but that will never happen.

Just a little pointer to help you guys out. If you have it looking right in IE7 and want to force IE8 to render it properly you can simply add:

(<)meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7" /(>)(<)!-- IE7 Mode --(>)
without the rounded brackets obviously. The code tag doesn't seem to work with blogger posts for some reason.

just below the title of the page. This isn't a proper fix. Ideally you should be making it work in IE8 with a separate style sheet if needed but if you have a load of sites you want to temporarily make work while you look into any issues then this might be useful.

Nypocreative in a design book

I am pleased to say my portfolio site has appeared in a new design book by Patrick McNeil called Web Designers Idea Book. It is actually the old version of this site that you can access here. It appears in the Muted Colours section and I would like to thank Patrick for including my work in his very useful resource that you can buy here.

Pixel Perfect - an amazing tool

I colleague recently told me about a firebug plugin called Pixel Perfect. I thought the idea sounded good so had a look - creating looks of concern from the surrounding developers who already think I pixel push too much already. I was amazed. This simple tool creates another tab in your Firebug extension and allows you to overlay a jpeg visual in the actual browser. This has two benefits:

1/From a designer/bug checking point of view it allows you to overlay the visual and see what is out of place.

2/From a developers point of view it ensures precision by allowing them to overlay the visual when creating a layout, lower the opacity so they can see what they are coding below and ensure the visuals are met exactly. This will result in fewer visual issues needing to be fixed at the end of the project.

This tool seems to be feared by many developers who are happy enough to make it close enough to the design. However, they know deep down that the designer will only come along and say move that 2px up please so they might as well start harnessing the power of this tool and improve their accuracy and standard before it's spotted.

www.pixelperfectplugin.com