I came across the following demos of the new 3D CSS Transform functionality in the latest WebKit builds. These will be making their way into Safari, Google Chrome, iPhone, and Android sometime soon. Snow Stacks Download video Image Fly Download video

Historically, I’ve always preferred to use Apple’s built-in Apache 2.2 and PHP 5.x that comes with Leopard. However, after trying to compile PHP 5.3 from scratch and connect it with Apache, I decided to just use the MacPorts installer instead. That did mean giving up control of a finely-tuned Apache installation, but in the end, I think I’ve ended up with a better localhost system. Prerequisites Install MacPorts Also, make sure that your MacPorts install is completely up-to-date with:

These days I’m looking to save money anywhere I can. How about you? Whereas VMWare Fusion (as awesome as it is) runs around $80 USD per copy, Sun’s VirtualBox is a free, open-source product for virtualization that runs on Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. Update: Microsoft’s images are broken, and don’t work on anything except VirtualPC now. Mac and Linux users are out of luck for the time being. More information on the subject can be found at MSDN. If you’ve not yet read the related post, “Run Internet Explorer 6 (or IE7, or IE8) images in VMWare Fusion on Mac OS X, you should.

I remember back to the late 80’s when I would play Super Mario Bros. with my friends. The one defining aspect of playing that game back then was that I would try to make Mario jump by jerking my controller up in the air. Of course this didn’t do anything, but it was just a natural reaction to playing the game. My mom did the same thing for years. Fast-forward to today. My 7-year-old is just starting to learn to play video games.

The DOM I hate the DOM. Actually, I take that back. I love the DOM, but I hate the fact that generating DOM nodes in JavaScript is so verbose and unintuitive. You need to construct a new element, then add properties, then construct a child element, then add properties, then append the child to the parent, and the parent to whatever DOM object you want that’s already in the page. A few years ago I discovered Builder.node(), a component of Scriptaculous.

By now, most front-end web developers have heard of the Standalone Internet Explorers (Wikipedia article). Although these are incredibly useful, they’ve always been hacky at best. Because of that, we need to go the long way. We’ll download the “officially sanctioned” VirtualPC images containing a time-limited version of Windows XP SP3 and Internet Explorer 6.0, and then we’ll convert these images to the kind that work with VMware Fusion (which works on Mac OS X). This should only need to be done every 3 or 4 months when the images expire.