Recently I wrote an article for A List Apart about Forward thinking form validation and I introduced a script I wrote that emulates some of the new HTML Forms chapter functionality in older browsers, allowing a developer to use all these new features and have it work the same across the board.

Google in their quest to keep me busy in trying to figure out how they do their innovative features in Gmail are at it again. First it was drag and drop uploading which used a clever trick to make it work in Chrome which currently doesn’t support the FileReader in their stable release. Now they’ve added the ability to drag out attachments to your file system, allowing you to bypass the usual method of the save dialog.

The classic tree view, we all know it, it’s used everywhere and it definitely can be useful in the right context. I’ve seen various examples about doing it with CSS and they’ve all required JavaScript. Not content with any of those solutions I investigated doing it with pure CSS, I got a good head start from my Custom Radio and Checkbox inputs article. From there I’ve come up with a solution that works pretty well.

Recently Gmail pushed out an update that allowed users to drag and drop files from desktop to Gmail and have them automatically uploaded. Being the web geek I am I had to figure out how it functioned. Firefox was easy and I have covered drag and drop uploading already. They also mentioned in their post that Chrome was supported but I know Chrome is yet to implement the File API. Most intriguing was that it doesn’t work in Safari?

So I recently released a revised version of Futurebox which added a lot of functionality. But one thing was nagging me, the fact that it utilised the target pseudo-class to hijack in page anchors which has a few side effects that can create some major drawbacks to the technique. One being that if you click multiple futurebox links and then click the browser back button it will go through all the previous overlays that were activated due to the natural behaviour of in page anchors. The other drawback, clicking an in page anchor can cause the page to abruptly jump as it tries to bring the anchor location to the top of the page.

Why yes it is…

I’ve been sitting on this little idea for a while and as a bit of fun I finally got around to putting it together and properly testing it. Basically on an iPhone with geolocation support (3.0+), I have set up a little web app that will get the speed from the GPS and move the speedometer needle according to your current speed in kilometres.

In my never ending quest to find weird and wonderful ways to abuse CSS and all its little intricacies, I have come up with a pretty good way of using CSS to create custom radio and checkbox inputs without JavaScript, that are accessible, keyboard controlled, don’t use any hacks and degrade nicely in non supporting browsers. The journey wasn’t easy and I was on the brink of filing it in the “to crazy” folder, never to be seen again. Luckily I had a brain wave that paid off and actually allowed this to be a very viable solution that degrades beautifully and works in 80% of the browsers. This is my story.

Web Notifications allows users to get updates on a webpage even if they’re not looking at it, shown to them through small notification boxes, think growl. This opens up some great potential for the current web apps out there. When you get a new email it could popup a little notification much like our desktop email clients do now or your twitter page could let you know when new @replies have come in, the possibilities are endless.

Recently I read an article on better image preloading using CSS3 which presented a clever idea using CSS3 multiple background images to preload images on one element as opposed to another method of having containers for each image. As of writing the support for multiple backgrounds is fairly sparse with webkit having the best support (Safari 3+ & Chrome 1+), Firefox is introducing this in the upcoming 3.6 release.

Earlier this year I unleashed futurebox into the wild. It got a whole lot more attention than I anticipated and I got some great feedback. Since then, I have been slowly working on a new version of futurebox which incorporates many new features.