Codrops, a creative web design and development blog, has created a detailed tutorial on creating a beautiful slider powered only by HTML and CSS3.

The slider not only uses the transition property but also changes the background-position of the given background images accordingly to create a parallax effect.

Slides can be browsed either with the bullet-navigation (styled radio inputs) and/or with the prev-next links.

Both of the effects are very smooth and the slider adapts itself perfectly to any width (responsive).

Real Shadow is a simple-yet-effective jQuery plugin for creating realistic shadow effects for any HTML element.

With a simple function, it works by targeting any number of elements and manipulating the value of box-shadow CSS property for the elements in accordance with the mouse position.

So, the shadow's location and size is determined by the element's distance to the mouse pointer which ends up in a cool effect.

Like said, the plugin accomplishes a simple job but can help creating attractive outputs when used smartly.

Cubism.js is a plugin for D3.js, a JavaScript visualization library for HTML and SVG, to display time series in real-time.

It requests the data incrementally by polling only the most recent values and reduces the load on the server.

Charts are rendered incrementally as well by shifting charts one pixel each time to the left.

Cubism is data-source agnostic. It has built-in support for Graphite and Cube, and can be readily extended to fetch data from other sources.

CSS3's properties enable us to create many different shapes by styling a single element.

CSS3 Shapes is a project that shares the styles for many different shapes including triangle, diamond, star, comment bubble, egg, heart and more.

For sure, not all of them are functional for daily use but they are definitely good for inspiration and improving our CSS(3) skills.

Parallax scrolling, creating an illusion of depth by moving web elements in different speeds while scrolling, can help offering an attractive browsing experience.

Skrollr is a lightweight (7kb minified – 3k gzipped) and standalone JavaScript scrolling animation library that simplifies bringing such parallax effects to life.

It allows us to animate the CSS properties of any element according to the horizontal scrollbar position. Defining key frames for each element at certain points in top offset is enough for that.

And, the library is perfect for designers who are not good at JavaScript as -almost- everything is defined inside HTML elements and no JS coding.

MiniJs is a free and open source suite of jQuery plugins that are written in CoffeeScript.

The plugins are perfect for everyday-use and include: slider, tooltip, notification, Twitter feed and counter (new ones are on the way).

They are all built with simplicity in mind and very easy-to-use with only few important parameters.

Also, for CoffeScript developers, a MiniBoilerplate is provided for developing new jQuery plugins faster.

E-books have a regularly increasing popularity and they are a great way of distributing any type of content.

Easybook is an open source, PHP-powered project for creating good-looking PDF books, websites and e-books.

Books are designed with modern and standards-based technologies; HTML5, CSS3 and Twig.

The books can be customized completely from chapter labels to table of contents, margins, custom themes and even highlighting syntax.

Easybook works very fast, very easy to learn and configure (also, it has a detailed documentation).

WordPress is an amazing CMS and can be customized completely in means of design and functionality with the flexibility it offers.

In order to create a new theme for WordPress, you should know how it works, the logic of its loop and functions.

However, if you want to build a theme without touching any code, WPThemeGenerator reaches to help.

WPThemeGenerator is a professional web app (with a free and paid version) for designing WordPress themes without any coding, all web-based.

There are 1000+ pre-designed objects including menus, backgrounds, shades, dividers, icons, buttons, boxes, fonts, sliders, frames, colors, shines, and patterns or textures that can be used.

Multiple options exist for each element (for ex: you can choose from different popular image sliders) and all other stuff like fonts (there are 50+) or colors can be customized too.

With the provided framework, it is possible to mix 7 different combinations of positions to get countless layouts with the dynamic sidebars generator (use images, text, menus, galleries, contact forms, etc.).

Although new elements are added to the this WordPress theme generator daily, you are not limited with them and can upload your own designs too.

Once a design is completed, it is available both as a HTML/CSS template and a WordPress theme.

The themes created are automatically updated with the added new features and they will be compatible with the latest WP version.

WPThemeGenerator is created by the talented team of Iconshock + WordPress Theme Shock and a gallery of themes created with the application present the flexibility offered.

Read the rest of this entry »

strftime, the popular function for formatting date-time (with PHP, Ruby, Python and C) has many parameters which are usually hard to remember.

There are several web-based references that ease the usage of strftime by enabling us to view the details of each parameter and test them instantly. Here they are:

strfti.me

Strfti.me simply lists the parameters for dates + times separately with an explanation to each and allows us to view the output of any custom format.

Strftime.net

The website displays all the parameters where each of them can be clicked to create the custom function.

P.S. It would be much better to see the result of the function instantly (feature request).

For a Good Strftime

Besides presenting the parameters, there are presets for for the widely-used formats.

Also, there is a drag 'n' drop custom format builder.

Other References

• PHP strftime reference
  
• Ruby strftime reference
  
• Python strftime reference
  
• C strftime reference
  
• Strftime cheatsheet (this & that)

DesignModo, a website providing informative design, development + art-oriented articles and releasing design resources, is giving away 3 Personal Licenses of Impressionist UI (details on joining the giveaway can be found at the bottom of this post).

What is Impressionist UI?

It is a huge pack of user interface elements with over 300 elements for web design and includes almost any design element we can imagine.

The pack comes as a .PSD file where each element inside is created as a Photoshop shape (they can be resized to any size).

There are edit boxes, tabs, buttons, notification windows, menus, windows, backgrounds, graphics, sliders, informational blocks and much more in it.

Web elements are not the only stuff in Impressionist UI but there is also a slick set of 200 icons accompanying them. The items in the set are well-chosen and will fit perfectly to any web project.

What is it good for?

Such a giant user interface set is a very handy resource for quickly creating good looking, consistent interfaces.

As each element is a layer, we can easily prepare high-quality prototypes, customize colors (if needed) and get going fast.

DesignModo offers other UI packs too:

The UI packs DesignModo offer are not limited to Impressionist UI and there are others as well.

For example, Pandora UI is another UI pack created specially for iOS interface designers.

How to join the giveaway?

DesignModo is giving away 3 Personal Licenses ($39/each) of Impressionist UI to WRD readers.

If you want to join the giveaway, you can choose one of the methods below or do both to increase your chances:

• comment to this post
• tweet this post (click to tweet easily)

Winners will be selected randomly on 30 April 2012 (1 week later). Good luck to all.

P.S. You can also follow DesignModo both on Twitter and Facebook to get notified about the updates on these UI packs and any new ones.

The winners

Here they are:

• Ben (comment #568279)
• Flavio (comment #566940)
• @vitorneves

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to everyone for joining.