Links of Interest

by: Chris Coyier on February 9th, 2008

Arial or Helvetica?

Once there was a typeface called Helvetica. It was extremely popular. Later came a software company called Microsoft. Can you tell the difference between the original and the rip-off in these ten examples?

Blind Text Generator

In my option way nicer than lipsum.com. I HATE how you have to tell lipsum.com “how many paragraphs you need” before it gives you any text to copy. Seems like a cheap attempt to get two page views per visitor instead of one. Blind Text Generator doesn’t do that and actually has some useful features.

Web Developer Crossword Puzzle

Ya’ll better know the answers to 6 across, 7 down, and 22 across =). I just wish this crossword puzzle was a little more filled out.

FancyZoom

Cabel Sasser has released FancyZoom. If you have ever seen the Coda website, it’s the same thing they use to show screenshots of Coda (he designed that website). This is by far the nicest image enlargement javascript-y thing ever. The lightbox phenomenon is getting a little out of control. Lightboxes can be pretty great if you really need to focus a users attention on something, but for the most part, they are context-jarring and overwhelming.

Responses

1

Just because lipsum.com is sans-ajax doesn’t mean it’s bad.

Comment by Anon — February 9, 2008 @ 12:11 pm
2

I’m not saying it’s bad because it doesn’t use AJAX, I’m saying I find it annoying that there isn’t just a chunk of it you can copy right there really easily. Instead you have to enter a number and click a button. Just seems like a cheap way to get an extra page view and ad impression.

Comment by Chris Coyier — February 9, 2008 @ 6:54 pm
3

If you use firefox, theres an addon. Dummy Lipsum. You just right click in any textarea or input box and it will fill it with a “smart” ammount of text. I find it pretty useful for doing tests myself.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2064

Comment by gregf — February 10, 2008 @ 3:38 pm
4

Just wanted to say that FancyZoom takes it toll on Firefox/Xubuntu. The lightbox is easier loaded. Machine testing on is 2.0 Ghz CPU, 1GB DDR memory. In Firefox/Win it’s not a problem at all and the zooming is fancy. Yet I prefer absolute image-links instead. More controllable.

Comment by koew — February 12, 2008 @ 6:16 am

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