i love innovation

Tiled backgrounds designer (bgpatterns.com)

I freaking love this. I’m a total sucker for patterns and so naturally, tiled backgrounds are something I’m really passionate about. I stumbled across this today and wanted to share. It has a really simple interface: you select colors, canvas texture, icon to repeat, and rotation. You can get pretty nice images with pretty little effort. Really nice little tool.

While we’re on this topic, check out www.stripegenerator.com. It’s an equally cool stripe background image generator.

I stumbled across this today at Webappers. I think it looks potentially pretty cool. Like a lot of technologies, I am sure it could be abused if put in the wrong hands–anything that autoplays is evil–but, it could also be used for really cool stuff too. Muxtape for example, is a pretty sweet site that uses similar technolgy (I think).

Description from the SoundManager 2 site:

SoundManager 2 is an attempt at providing the sound API which Javascript has been missing. It’s a Javascript library which wraps and extends Flash’s sound capabilities, bringing cross-platform audio functionality to Javascript.

SoundManager 2: Javascript Sound for the Web

The iPod® Gramophone from Hammacher Schlemmer

Handcrafted entirely of slip-cast ceramic to replicate the curvature and passive amplification of a French horn, this is the iPod® gramophone that augments sound from an iPod® without requiring auxiliary power or speaker components.

I received my Hammacher Schlemmer catalog this week and was taken by what was on the cover. There are so many iPod accessories/companion electronics out there now, that finding anything that is even mildly original is tough. The iPod Gramophone from Hammacher Schlemmer, however, stands apart by being a one-of-a-kind accessory. In this product, there is a juxtaposition of the old and the new. It is interesting, fun, cool, and even useful as it doesn’t require additional power for the amplification component.

Nice.

This isn’t really innovative, it’s just dang sweet. A sink shaped like a shell so the water spirals down the drain. Very cool.

• Nice pictures and description from Trendir
• Actual Product Page

I don’t do this too often, but I am going to post some innovative things I’ve seen from the realm of web design. I am a designer for my job and so these things are pretty interesting (and often helpful) to me.

A New Layout Technique

Here’s an article that was posted on A List Apart the other day. It’s a pretty cool way to handle some of the problems that arise when using the modern table-less layout techniques (floats and absolute positioning).

I haven’t had time to try it for myself, yet, but it’s pretty cool.

Tableless Calendar

Now, I was to preface this with saying I don’t have a problem using tables for calendars. Tables are designed for tabular data and calendars are basically tabular. However, semantically, it might make more sense, at times, to present that information in a list. For example, the following is very logical to me:

• Day
  • Event
  • Event
• Day
  • Event
  • Event

Then, furthermore, when you take into consideration that oftentimes the same data is being accessed by multiple types of devices, presenting the information as a list begins to make even more sense.

So, in light of that, here’s a great article about styling CSS lists as calendars.

The styling in the author’s examples is kind of weak, so I’ve tried my own. Check it. I haven’t resolved all the issues in this example, but it works well in the Fox, and Safari. There’s a small spacing issue in Safari. It displays pretty close in IE6, but the numbers from the <ol> don’t show.

That’s all for today, friends. Enjoy.