Gmail is probably the most widely used e-mail provider between creative people. It is always simplistic, modern and always works.

Personally, besides my personal e-mail, I use their "custom domain" feature for handling the e-mails of all my projects.

As expected, the content there is very valuable and hard to risk losing. Gmvault is an open source tool that saves the day by backing up Gmail accounts to your drive smartly.

It can backup the entire Gmail account at once and can synchronize afterwards by only picking the non-backed-up ones (there is also an optional encryption).

If we ever want to restore them, Gmvault can do that as well. They can also be restored to another Gmail address (including labels).

There is a Windows installer and ashell/batch client exists for Linux, Mac OSX and Windows.

There are lots of jQuery plugins around that handle specific tasks and, for JavaScript-heavy apps, we may end up in using many of them.

Working with such many different resources at the same project is sometimes hard and can be time consuming as they all have their way of coding, different APIs, styling support…

Infragistics, a creative company focused on building user interface development tools, has a professional and complete jQuery Toolset that solves many JavaScript-related tasks beautifully.

The toolset is HTML5-powered and works cross-browser/platform with support for mobile + all of them are optimized for high performance.

What is inside?

Charts

First of all, it has a full-featured charting library with support for 15+ chart types (pie, bar, line, area, bubble, radial) where they can be used side-by-side too.

Charts are interactive, they can respond to events like hover or click and can be zoomed to better see a specific range.

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Many of us probably heard the EU Cookie Law already and thinking about "what to do" and many others should be saying: "cookie what?".

What is it?

It is a European Union e-Privacy Directive that will become active on 26th May 2012 and "requires website owners to take the permission of the user before placing anything (cookies, HTML5 local storage..) to their computer for tracking them (cookies exist in analytics apps, many sign-up/login pages, widgets, etc.).

Which websites need to take action?

It binds any EU-located individual and organization's website, no matter where the website is hosted at. Some EU countries are already applying it and UK will begin to enforce it by 26th May 2012 (also, websites breaking the law can be fined up to £500,000).

jQuery Plugins For EU Cookie Law

In order to make our websites compatible with the EU Cookie Law easily and quickly, here are 2 handy jQuery plugins that will help managing cookies + asking user's permissions for storing them:

Cookiecuttr

This is a beautiful plugin that handles many scenarios you may need to obey the EU Cookie Law.

It allows you to hide any given parts of a website (the parts which generates cookies), and display sensitive modal boxes to users with asking for permission to use cookies.

Also, the plugin can show a "reset button" that can delete all the cookies for that website.

cPrompt

The plugin displays a notification to visitors asking "if they let cookies by this site to be enabled".

Depending on the status (the first time user visits the page, cookies are rejected or accepted), the notification bar changes colors.

Learn More About The EU Cookie Law

• UK Information Commissioner’s Office guidance on cookie usage
• The EU Cookie Law
• No Cookie Law

What do you think about it?

What are your thoughts about this law?

Do you think it is applicable?

Does it fit the nature of internet?

Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

I'm usually a fan of hosting all the files used in websites myself, under the same location with the website itself. When an image or JS file needs to be updated, no need to update it from a remote URL but just change the file hosted under the same website/FTP account.

However, this is not how things work the fastest. In order to speed up websites by distributing requests to multiple hosts and serving them from the fastest location to the end users, keeping stuff in CDNs (content delivery networks) is a very good and widely used solution.

The same logic goes for JavaScript frameworks. To speed up things, hundreds of thousands of websites use hosted JavaScript libraries. Actually, they all use a single hosted platform: Google Libraries API which is the focus of this discussion.

There is a serious speed and bandwidth gain in this structure as the JavaScript frameworks are cached in the user's computer and user won't re-download them each time when visiting a Google Libraries API-powered website.

Today, if we have used jQuery, MooTools, Dojo, Prototype, etc. while developing our websites (almost every website uses one of them -including many WordPress, Joomla, Drupal themes-), there is a high chance that we are calling these frameworks from Google Libraries API.

So, what happens if Google Libraries API gets hacked? 

To be more specific, what if the contents of https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/ver.../jquery.min.js is changed?

It gets hacked and the jQuery (or MooTools, Dojo or Prototype) JavaScript file included in our websites now contain malicious code (that includes iframes or posts forms to another URLs, etc.)?

I simply can't think of the damage it can create.

Btw, I'm aware that Google Libraries API is built with very good intentions and it does the job perfectly (thanks to them) and sure that Google's CDN is probably one of the safest places on the web. But, this security concern is worth discussing considering the effect it can create and every datacenter>server>data can possibly be hacked.

So, is this structure totally wrong or benefits are worth the thread? What do you think (really wondering here)?

Credits: Hack The Planet visual.

Socialite.js is a JavaScript library for having more control over social sharing buttons.

The library is lightweight (2kb minified-gzipped), standalone and helps the social widgets to load when you want them or only when needed/requested to speed up web pages.

It has support for the major players: Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Spotify. There is no need to install the widget codes for each library as Socialite.js does that for you.

And, the library is extensible, any new social networks can be added with ease.

Desktop apps definitely have their own advantages over web apps like speed, ability to reach the filesystem, working in the background, notifications, etc.

However, for us (the web developers), it is a challenge to create one as they need  to be coded in a non-web programming language (yes, there are exceptions).

AppJS is an exciting resource that allows us to develop desktop apps using web technologies (HTML, CSS and JavaScript).

The project uses Chromium as the core (so that the latest HTML5 APIs are supported) and Node.js as the backbone.

P.S. It is in the early stages of development, Linux and Windows ports are functional and Mac part is not available yet.

Ok, right now, we can't stop ourselves from using the exciting CSS3 features. But, what about their compatibility? In which browsers they work ok? 

Browser Support is a simple search engine to find out which CSS properties are supported in which browsers.

With an auto-complete-powered search, it displays you all possible properties while typing and brings the results for all major browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, IE, Opera).

Optionally, you can click the browser icons in the homepage and see the all properties supported for that browser with a breakdown of versions (IE6, IE7, etc..).

When working on a new web project, during the HTML coding process, using Lorem Ipsum as filler content is a common approach (yet, there great Lorem Ipsum alternatives).

Fixie.js is a simple JavaScript library (with no JS framework dependencies) that automatically analyzes your semantic HTML5 tags and adds the right type of content inside the related elements.

It is not limited to simple text but can also add links, sections and images. Just add the fixie class to the element you wish and the matching dummy content will be displayed there.

Previously, a post at WRD had shared the 9 well-known and free forum softwares.

Here is a fresh alternative named esoTalk, which focuses on removing the complexity of forum apps with a simple + modern interface and functionality.

It is built with PHP-MySQL, includes the main features a forum would need and has a plugin system for extending it more.

esoTalk is still in the early stages of its development, not as feature-rich as many other alternatives. But, maybe, something simpler is what you are looking for.

JQVMap is a jQuery plugin for rendering vector maps by using SVG for modern browsers and VML for the rest.

It is a heavily modified version of another plugin, jVectorMap, and comes with ready-to-use maps of "world, USA, Europe and Germany".

There are several customization options for beautifying the maps including colors, borders or their opacities.

Maps can have zooming enabled or not, show tooltips of data when hovered and there is callback for clicks.

Also, it is possible to select any regions on initial load or after any custom event.