Natalie Downe gave an extremely good presentation at BarCamp London on the use of CSS Systems in order to standardize your site's stylesheet design, and make it much easier to maintain.

Lots of good pointers in this one, definitely worth a look.

True Multitouch demo

• NASA World Wind

A look around the Digg office

bit of a rapid re-design here, not much but fixes a lot of problems and makes it a bit more un-cluttered and sparse.

the black-on-white icon is very ss but i’ve used that .psd on all my other sites it’s become something of a trademark so included it better here.

enjoy, there’s a lot of features and bugs still to iron out and in no means perfect but it’s getting there.

John.

www.atompad.com

While surfing digg.com my daily source of up-to-the-minute news and views , I ran into a nice list of how-to guides to make your text look really decent.

PhotoShop Text Effects

Kudos to the author, there’s some really good guides in the list and with my Atompad.com note-taking project finally coming together I may finally get the chance to really push my new copy of Adobe CS3 Production Premium (been pining for After Effects for years).

Excellent stuff

Design patterns are recurring solutions to software design problems you find again and again in real-world application development.

Reusable solutions to commonly encountered programming challenges.

The Gang of Four (Gof) are categorized as the foundation of Design Patterns. Narrowed down to 3 categories. Creational, Structural, and Behavioral.

C# provides code in:

• Structural, uses type names as defined in the pattern definition and UML diagrams.
• Real-World, situations where you may actually use them.

.NET provides a third:

• .NET Optimised, situations that exploit built-in features within .NET

Creational

Abstract
p. …an instance of several families of classes (encapsulate multiple classes into one but not providing it’s own)

Factory
p. …an instance of several derived classes (e.g. build documents from data)

Prototype
p. …specify type of objects to create, and create new objects by copying the prototype / template (create new color palette using prior colors)

Singleton
p. …a class with only one instance of it existing

Structural

Adaptor
p. …converts the interface of one class to fit the interface of another (e.g. providing an adaptor for a legacy interface)

Decorator
p. …adds extra responsibilities / functionality to an object dynamically (e.g. adding off-road facility to a standard car obect)

Behavioral

Iterator
p. …provides a way to access aggregate elements without exposing it’s core structure (e.g. iterate over a collection of objects)

Observer
p. …provides one-to-many relationship between an object and it’s members. So if one changes state all the others know about it. (e.g. stock checking, when a stock price changes, all bidders are notified)

…note, there are many other Design Pattern models, this is merely a small collection to get you started.

All the best,

John.