Blaze New Media

This is a seriously cool piece of work. It’s one of those gems that you find now and again and think “how in the world did they do that?”

Colour Mod is a colour selector tool that can be used on a website to let users dynamically change stylesheet colour settings. One of it’s most practical applications that I’ve seen so far is on Color Combos, where you can change any colour within a combo dynamically without any page refreshes.

The entire tool is coded in javascript & css, and surprisingly (thanks to some proprietary DirectX alpha filters) works in IE6.0 ( although not IE5 Mac). Anyway, what really caught my eye was the actual color palette, where you can drag a bullet around just like you do in Photoshop. The effect was so seamless that it took me several uses to realize that this was all thanks with some very creative javascript – and not just a regular form element.

The tool can be downloaded and plugged into your own website ( which also gives people like me a chance to study just how on earth it was done ) as well as a dashboard widget for OS X 10.4.

Even if you don’t end up using this tool, just take a look at how it is done. Clever and creative, I love it.

If you’re a regular user of CSS, you may have come to realize that there are many limitations with borders and backgrounds.

Kevin Lawyer, who is AOL’s representative to the CSS Working Group is looking for your feedback on the CSS3 Borders and Backgrounds module. This is a rare opportunity to put forward your ideas, and perhaps influence the final recommendation.

Some of the things that really interest me are the ability to set the radius of individual corners of a border, as well as multiple backgrounds for an element. Gradients would also be a plus, as long as they were highly customizable, and will degrade gracefully at lower bit depths. Without that I think people would skip it, and just use photoshop to get the exact gradient they want.

Go ahead and have your say.

It feels good. Just the thought of having finished sitting through endless lectures and scrambling to complete numerous assignments sends a smile over my face.

Yes, I’ve graduated – and with a BSc (Hons) in Multimedia Technology & Design (1st Class).

Not only that, things have been very busy with me over the last month. I’ve upped and left the UK, moving back to Victoria, BC, Canada to rejoin Etraffic Solutions as lead developer.

Hopefully now that I can concentrate my work efforts on web development full time, I’ll be able to kick this blog into full gear.

It’s the start of my post-school career, and I’m excited.