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  • 5 Best Articles to Learn Metro UI Design

    5 Best Articles to Learn Metro UI Design

    Microsoft Windows 8 is about to release. It will bring a totally new way in computing experience. Microsoft has changed the UI from classic bar button pattern to Metro Design Pattern. I think this is one of the most trending news in web designers world now.

    Have you had any chances to learn Metro UI Design language? If not, here are 5 good resources  where you can learn Metro UI Design.

    Metro Design Principles

    Article by Arturot, an architect – he talks about core principles behind the Metro Design Language.

    Link to article

    Metro design guide for developers, v1.00

    He is a developer, who codes yet shares the learning from Windows Phone design.

    Link to article

    8 traits of great Metro style apps

    One more video to see, quite lengthy – BUT it will give you straight views on why you should consider Metro pattern. Must watch.

    Link to article

  • Win The Smashing Book #3

    Win The Smashing Book #3

    One of the most awaited book by worlds all web designers, The Smashing Book #3 has been released few days ago. How many of you have got your copy? Or planning to get one?

    Win The Smashing Book 3

    If not, how about getting one for free? Here we are announcing our first giveaway contest and bringing a chance for you to get a single printed copy of ‘The Great Smashing Book #3’ – for free.

    Winner Update

    Winner has been chosen randomly – check if it’s you: Winner Annoucement.

    How to Win?

    All you have to do is, follow these simple three steps to participate:



    That's it. Cool! right?

    You're all done.

    Make sure you knock us back on May 29. We will be choosing a random winner based on entries mentioned above and announce the lucky one.

    PS: Smashing Media is not associated with this event. 

    Thank you for participating.

  • Product Showcase PSD Template

    Product Showcase PSD Template

    We have an excellent PSD template freebie today. It’s super cool design helps to showcase your product in very well manner. I must say, it is a most attractive psd template released under CSS Junction.

    Product Showcase PSD Website Template

    Images used in the template are creative common from Behance gallery and fonts are from Google Fonts. Heading type is Tenor Sans and body copy is Buenard.

    This template has been designed by Nepalese Web designer Sanjay Shrestha, a young and talented creative. You can follow him @shresthasans and here is his portfolio.

    Isn’t it awesome that you can get this template right away. Yes it is. Get it:

    Download PSD

    Have something to say, spread words about this in the comment section below. Don’t forget  to follow us @CSSJunction and Subscribe our RSS feed for more attractive free PSD templates.

    More PSD Templates:

  • It Fits :: Free HTML5 CSS3 Responsive Template

    It Fits :: Free HTML5 CSS3 Responsive Template

    We have something very special today for all of you great visitors. Its an HTML5 CSS3 Responsive Template, with 5 pages excluding 404 page. This template has something not just merely HTML5 new tags, it’s coded using WAI-ARIA roles for enhanced quality. Uses very less images, taking benefits from CSS3 features. Even icons are fonts – hmm super fast page loading.

    UPDATE: New Version 2.0 of this template is available.  Check Version 2.0 –  IT FITS.

    HTML5 CSS3 Template

    Page you will have:

    • Home page
    • Portfolio page
    • Regular page
    • Blog page
    • Contact page
    • 404 page – (default from HTML5 Boilerplate template.)

    I have used LESS css for this projects – for better and faster CSS coding, but you will notice there is pure CSS file is in use. Reason – what I used to do is I do code in LESS and compile it using any software like WINLESS and then I use the compiled pure css files. When you download the template source code, you will find three .LESS files but all complied in one css file that is main.css.

    Too much talk? Head over now:

    Demo

    Browser compatibility:

    All modern browser works fine. Responsiveness is missing from IE7 and IE8. IE9+, Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari works fine. You can see how it looks on the smaller device by re-sizing your browser. Or head over to The Responsinator, then give the demo URL and see.

    In terms of visual appearance, IE7 and IE8 has graceful degradation – no support for CSS3 so as, but template presentation is fine.

    IE6??? I don’t talk about it.

    That’s it guys – not much talk. This theme has been released under Creative Common  CC 3.0 Attribution (by) license, so feel free to use anywhere.

    Download now

    Let me know your views and feedback. Please follow us @CSSJunction, if you want to follow the author of template – @shekhardesigner

    More HTML5/CSS3 Templates:

  • jQuery Accordion with Carousel – Accarousel

    jQuery Accordion with Carousel – Accarousel

    Before a week one my friend had requested me to suggest any jQuery plug-in that is carousel with accordion effect inside. I tried to find one suitable plugin – but couldn’t make it. That made to write my own custom plugin that consist both carousel and accordion effect. Another one requirement was to flyout the most closed sibling elements to outside and hide rest of all when accordion expands.

    Accordion

    So here I come with a solution and made it a plugin so that it might be useful for all of us. I love to code for re-use.

    Demo

    Usage:

    Here is the how you can you can use this plug-in to work on your side:

    HTML Markup

    <div id="accarousel">
       <ul>
    	<li>
                  <a class="stand">Initial visible contents</a>
                  <div class="detail-panel">Contents for accordion when exapands</div>
            </li>
       </ul>
    </div>
    

    You can add as many <li> as you want and any kinds of contents inside ‘.stand’ and ‘.detail-panel’. Pagination will occur according to your choice to group how many items should be visible on stage. Now you need to initialize the plugin. Before that you must include he plugin source in your html page. Include our plugin file after you added the main jQuery library.

    Carousel

    Scripts

    <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.cjAccarousel.min.js"></script>
    

    Now add the following script on the page, better you put this script at end of the page:

        $(document).ready(function() {
            $('#accarousel').cjAccarousel(); //#accarousel is your selector ID, see the html mark up above.
        });
    

    Further more you have more options to customize to fit your requirement and ease of work. Till the date, you can set your own values for following options:

        $(document).ready(function() {
            $('#accarousel').cjAccarousel(
              {
                  stand		: '.stand',        /* Visible stands element selector (class basically) */
                  panel		: '.detail-panel', /* Expandable element selector (class basically)   */
                  pagerClass	: 'pager',         /* Pager CSS Class */
                  x			: '.detail-panel', /* Panel Collapse handler */
                  groupOf		: 5,               /* Number of stands for visible group*/
                  scrollSpeed	: 1000,            /* Carousel Speed */
                  ease		: 'swing',         /* Use jQuery Easing Plug in for more easing effects */
                  flyOutGap	        : 3,               /* Gap between expanded and other two flyouts */
                  nextPrev	        : true             /* set false to disable Next/Prev Nav */
    
              }
    	);
        });
    

    You can add our basic styling CSS to get started and after all you can edit/modify it according to your need. That’s it.  If you’re happy to get a copy of my scripts, get it here:

    Download

    I will be working more on it, adding more features and effects. I would appreciated if you guys can give me valuable feedback on it. Also if you encounter any problem, let me know in the comments below.

  • Check (Glossy) Icon Freebie

    Check (Glossy) Icon Freebie

    Time is to get something glossy yet free today :). I have designed a glossy check icon. Here it is:

    Glossy Check Green Icon

    For your convenience, PNG icons are available in 16×16, 24×24, 48×48, 64×64 and 256×256 sizes. Get it now, layered psd

    PSD & Icons Download

    Let me know if it helps or you wish for something different @shekhardesiger

  • Detect Landscape/Portrait Mode using JavaScript

    Detecting device mode (landscape or portrait) using CSS3 is now very much easy and it is state of art. But it wont work on certain situations like I had. I failed to make @media queries detect device orientation on iPhone. So I came to write a JavaScript fix to get work done.

    Check my orientation test using CSS3 @media queries here. The demo page should show text ‘Portrait’ on portrait mode and ‘Landscape’ on respective mode. But it does not. You might want to try with you own device. Some of my friends said it is working.

    I Googled for the solutions, but I must say I couldn’t find any reliable one :(. If you prefer to use CSS3 media queries, check out the post on Stuff & Nonsense. And here it goes my JavaScript function that will detect the landscape/portrait mode.

    First, let us create a function called ‘checkOrientation‘ so that we can evoke it by just a name instead of repeating whole lines.

    Inside this function we will check the device orientation degree which we are going to take from window.oriantation method. If we get the degree 0 – its the mode portrait else its landscape.  Since we will be using window. orientation method, this function will only work in handheld devices. So here it goes our function:

    function checkOrientation(){
          var currMode = "";
    
          switch(window.orientation){
    
               case 0:
               currMode = "portrait";
               break;
    
               case -90:
               currMode = "landscape";
               break;
    
               case 90:
               currMode = "landscape";
               break;
    
               case 180:
               currMode = "landscape";
               break;
         }
         document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0].setAttribute("class", currMode);
    }
    

    I have used switch statement to set the currMode variable, which we are going to use as class on required html elements. I set that class on body.

    Now its time to call the function, you can call it directly or on window.load method. I think window.load method is better and safe. So lets call it:

    window.load = function() {
         checkOrientation();
    }
    

    When our page is ready, check the class of body element. We are done. But wait what if we change the orientation now? Yes, we need to update the class on orientation change.

    For this, we have window.onorientationchange method, which is also available on devices only. We will recall our function inside this method:

    window.onorientationchange = function(){
          checkOrientation();
    }
    

    Thats it. Now we are completely done. Check-out the Landscape/Portrait Mode detection demo.

  • 7 Ways to Code Faster HTML CSS

    7 Ways to Code Faster HTML CSS

    7 Ways to Code Faster HTML and CSS

    Are you a fast coder? Yes? If then how fast you can code? Being a fast typist isn’t about coding faster. Faster coding is about getting more things done with less effort. Here comes the role of productivity tools.

    Listed below are some very useful productivity tools – for Frong End Developers. The tools below will help you code must faster and saves a lot of time. After all we are not a typist :), so why don’t we use these tools:

    HTML

    1.) ZEN CODING

    Zen Coding is an editor plugin for high-speed HTML, XML, XSL (or any other structured code format) coding and editing. The core of this plugin is a powerful abbreviation engine which allows you to expand expressions—similar to CSS selectors—into HTML code.

    Best learn resource: http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2009/11/21/zen-coding-a-new-way-to-write-html-code/

    2.) Halm

    Haml is a markup language that’s used to cleanly and simply describe the HTML of any web document without the use of inline code. Haml functions as a replacement for inline page templating systems such as PHP, ASP, and ERB, the templating language used in most Ruby on Rails applications.

    Best learn resource: http://haml-lang.com/tutorial.html

    3.) Sparkup

    You can write HTML in a CSS-like syntax, and have Sparkup handle the expansion to full HTML code. It is meant to help you write long HTML blocks in your text editor by letting you type less characters than needed.

    Best learn resource: https://github.com/rstacruz/sparkup

    CSS

    4.) LESS

    The dynamic stylesheet language. LESS extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations and functions.

    Best learn resource: http://webdesign.tutsplus.com/tutorials/htmlcss-tutorials/get-into-less-the-programmable-stylesheet-language/

    5.) SASS

    Sass is a meta-language on top of CSS that’s used to describe the style of a document cleanly and structurally, with more power than flat CSS allows.

    Best learn resource: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/other/mastering-sass-lesson-1/

    6.) Prefixr

    CSS Prefixr is a CSS pre-processor tool, that generates the cross browser css from given codes. Forget about writing multiple browser prefixes and start using Prefixr.

    7.) SpriteCow

    Sprite Cow helps you get the background-position, width and height of sprites within a spritesheet as a nice bit of copyable css.

    All of the above tools are my daily usage tools. Once you get the rid of using these tools – you will thank me for listing.