animate.css is a bunch of cool, fun, and cross-browser animations for you to use in your projects. Great for emphasis, home pages, sliders, and general just-add-water-awesomeness.

Create custom build or Download on Github

To use them in your project, simply add the class to the element, or call the animation yourself in your CSS file. The classes and the animations have the same name.

Test the animations below by clicking on their name. All of the animations demonstrated below have a 0.25 second delay, last for a duration of 1 second, use a timing-function of “ease”, and have a fill-mode of “both”. You’ll have to set these yourself in your own CSS – the class name only sets the animation name.

Original Source: Danden.com

The basic design concepts and terminology should be familiar to anyone familiar with CSS and Photoshop.

 The Options

• The Basics:
• border-width
• border-color
• background-color

• box-shadow
• Horizontal & Vertical Position
• Blur amount
• Spread
• Shadow Color
• Normal or Inset
• Background gradient
• toggle on/off
• from #color
• to #color
• Gradient Direction
• top to bottom
• left to right
• right to left
• Background Opacity
  

Shortly after, I learned that #B00B1E is hex for a red that doesn’t make my eyes bleed.  

Then through some twitter magic conjoured by my new-found favorite colors (and @patrickmcgovern) I was hipped to the existence of spritecows a CSS sprite code generator. Up till this point, I’ve been using Adobe Fireworks to manually measure out sprite positions. While Fireworks is pretty accurae, it’s an extremely time consuming process.

To be completely honest, tools like this make me very uncomfortable. I don’t like taking shortcuts on processes that I don’t feel like I’ve truly mastered but I think I’ll have to let this one slide. In a production environment my petty insecurities are completely irrelevant and the only thing that truly matters are results.

Will wonders never cease!?

Over the last few decades, Steve Jobs has been one of the most important people in global culture. His ideas and devices have been instrumental in completely reshaping the world as we know it. The technology that he worked on directly and technology that has evolved and changed indirectly through his influence continues to have a huge impact in our lives and will do so for many decades to come.
Thanks Steve, for everything you’ve given us in your life time.

You continue to be an inspiration to so many people, myself included.

There’s lots to learn about the man. Here’s a good place to start.

This is My Next has a great synopsis of Steve’s history.

Google was somehow made  aware of the bug and they rolled out a fix within 7 hours of receiving the report. While Google’s response time was great; this bug had the potential to cause serious harm had it been found by a more nefarious party. Heck, who’s to say that it wasn’t already being employed to kill the traffic to someone’s business or political competitor? Once again I’m forced to ask myself if so much power should rest in the hands any single company or entity. Sure this particular bug was fixed as far as the public is concerned, but what about the people closer to the source? All it takes is an opportunistic engineer with a bit too much access to cause some serious harm to the lives or livelihoods of the many denizens of the interwebs.

For now all we can do is hope and pray that everyone at Google believes in the mantra: “Don’t Be Evil”.

{tinfoil hat- free zone}

For the complete story, head on over to James’ Blog.

Screen Shot by James Breckenridge

Screen Shot by James Breckenridge

The next service to receive a visual update is Youtube with its experimental “Cosmic Panda” design… which is filled with magic… and pandas… and kitty toast!

If you want to take the new design for a spin, head on over to youtube.com/cosmicpanda. The most obvious changes can be found on the video playback pages so be sure to watch a video once the new design has been enabled. Youtube suggests the Nyan Cat video but that might be a bit too fabulous!! for some.

Google Checkout’s customer service system is no exception to the rule. The merchant help forum can be found at http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/checkout-merchants but getting responses can be hit or miss at times. Sometimes you’ll receive a useful reply right away, sometimes you’ll receive no reply at all… The forum setting also makes it difficult to get support for issues that are private in nature or at the very least require you to share sensitive company or customer information.

There is a direct email address which Google checkout service members use to reply to all service requests:  checkout-support@google.com however, if you try to initiate communication directly via that email address you’ll receive the following message:

Hello,

Thank you for writing to Google. We’d like to assist you, but we only
respond to messages submitted through the contact form in our Help Center.
Submitting your question through the Help Center will allow us to assist
you faster. For your convenience, we’ve provided a short list of support
resources to help you resubmit your question:

Buyer Help Center
http://checkout.google.com/support

Updates or questions about an existing mediation
http://checkout.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=claimb

Merchant Help Center
https://checkout.google.com/support/sell/

All other Google products
http://www.google.com/support/

We apologize for any inconvenience, and we look forward to hearing from
you.

Sincerely,

The Google Checkout Team

If you follow the instructions in the email, you’ll wind up at the Google Checkout Merchant Help Center, which is home to a fairly expansive list of self-help topics, in order to usher you to a resolution of your issue. While these topics do offer support for a myriad for issues from setup and integration to return policies and charge-back procedures, they’re almost useless if you run into an unexpected issue, bug, or if you simply don’t understand your problem and are not sure what category it may fall into. Handling issues in a timely manor  has a great amount of influence in customer’s perception of your company and their overall happiness with their experience. Being forced to sift through a myriad of help unrelated help topics with the hope of finding an answer to your time sensitive issue can be… well, infuriating. Especially because many of those issues can be  easily resolved within a few minutes by a live, knowledgeable support representative.

If you’re unable to find an answer to your problem, you can use the The “Contact Us” link located on this page. You’ll be presented with a paltry list of support options which almost assuredly will not cover your issue:

• Getting started
• Manage your money
• Manage your account
• Integration
• Increase revenue with Google

As far as I’m aware, your best bet is to pick a random option and send a request for contact. You’ll receive a generic canned email response from checkout-support@google.com giving you additional details about which-ever subject you chose. Go ahead and reply to that email with the full details about your actual problem. An actual person tends to respond within a within a few days or so. I have had to wait for over a week for responses, even in the middle of a conversation. It seems to me that these email tickets are bounced around from representative to representative. Occasionally it will become apparent that a different person is responding to you because they’re completely clueless about the issue, even though you’ve responded directly within the same conversation.

For the record: this is also the type of service your customers can expect if they experience an issue with a payment they’ve made to you. If the issue happens to be outside of the realm of what Google has accounted for, you’ll quickly find yourself with a disgruntled customer and no way to provide support yourself… that’s just bad business.

My buddy, C. Vincent Plummer decided to start a little project/social media experiment which he named Daily Cafe + Video. He committed himself to posting one artistic or interesting video per day. Today marks Daily Cafe + Video’s 366th day and Vince has posted a list of his top 20 favorite videos throughout the last year. The list is filled with fun, interesting, and quirky videos from all around the net.

Here’s a Sample of Some of the Videos in the Top 20

CHOP CUP

Atlas Air Promo Video (Massive Attack Sound Track)

Birdman in Portugal

If you like what you see, head on over and check out the full list.

I’ve been listening to Little Dragon for a little over a year now but in the last few month’s I have become completely obsessed with them. I found this BBC video of a live performance in Glastonbury via my Little Dragon spark on Google+. Ritual Union is a song from their soon to be released CD with the same name.