A while ago, I reviewed the jQuery 1.3 and PHP book. This book is published by Pack Publishing and they asked me to review another book for them. This book, written by Keith Pope, is called Zend Framework 1.8 Web Application Development. As you could have guessed by the title of the book, it shares great information about the Zend PHP Framework. This book was an eye opener for myself too, since I'm a regular user of the CakePHP framework.I've read the book and

Bokeh - In photography, bokeh is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light." (from Wikipedia). I'm pretty sure you've seen this effect before, since there are loads of wallpaper roundups and tutorials using this technique. Currently, one of my favourite wallpapers has to be this bokeh effect from -kol.Today, I want to add another addition to the bokeh "hype", by crea

"Inspiration can be found everywhere". But what if you're simply empty and have no fuel in your creativity tank left? You can always get stuck at a creativity block, which could have a very big impact.To prevent this phenomenon from happening to you, I compled a list with 10+ offline ways to keep your creative fluids going to prevent a creativity block. As you can see by the title of this article, this list aims at the offline ways (by not using your computer) in orde

Although the success of 3d movie "Avatar" seems unstoppable, another movie in 3d is coming to the cinemas soon. With the tagline You've got a very important date, the latest version of "Alice in Wonderland" will be released in theaters in one of the upcoming weeks.Since the story about Alice is one most people will know from their childhood, loads of fan art is created around it. Because of the upcoming movie, this post is a inspirational roundup with Fan Art about Alice in Wonde

Remember the "good old days" when you were still using Windows XP? If so, I'm pretty sure you remember the loads of error dialogs that would pop up at a totally random time. Although these dialogs always show up at a bad time, you could do something pretty neat with them. Drag the window around and it would duplicate itself over and over!Sadly, I haven't seen this effect alive in Windows 7, so to keep those memories alive for XP, I re-created the effect using HTML/CSS

A couple of days ago, Mozilla released their newest version of their ever popular browser: Firefox. It was in beta before, but now version 3.6 can be officially downloaded. This version of the browser brings us a couple of improvements on several aspects, like using Personas (themes), improved (JavaScript) performance and an extended version of the CSS engine compared to the 3.5 release. Today, we're going to look at a couple of the new CSS3 properties

Combining both jQuery and PHP can be very powerful. One of my very popular articles called A fancy Apple.com-style search suggestion is combining these two techniques too, to achieve the desired effect. There are loads of tutorials on the net that also use both techniques, but Kae Verens wrote a complete book about it. The book is called jQuery 1.3 with PHP (by Packt Publishing) and shares great information on how you can combine jQuery and PHP for use on your own web

A little bit of sad news; This will be the last post on Marcofolio on 2009. I'm going to Austria for two weeks and enjoy a winter sport vacation. But don't worry, I'm planning on finishing this year with another great article.Just like last year, I contacted several (web)design bloggers and asked them the following question: Could you provide me with the URL of what you think is the best article that you wrote in the past year (2009)? If you do, pl

As you might know already, I'm not a big fan of animations that are added in CSS3. Yet, several people on Twitter told me why they really like the feature. At that point, I wanted to play around with it too.At the same time, I wanted to see if those animations with CSS3 could be created with jQuery too (especially for those browser that don't support CSS3 animations yet). So today, I present you Five examples of CSS3 animations and their jQuery equivalents. Th

Although I don't understand why animations have been added in CSS3, this upcoming standard does have a couple of very neat features added to the CSS we're using today. I wanted to take a couple of these new things, and create a Sweet tabbed navigation using CSS3. This tutorial takes on the following CSS(3) properties: rgba opacity text-shadow pseudo selectors rounded corners gradients box-shadow As you could expect, this demo only works in bro

Remember jTypingHero? This was a fun little game to test your typing skills based on the ever popular Guitar Hero. Lately, I came across some news about a new "Hero" game: DJ Hero. Since I really love Proof of Concepts/experimenting, I wanted to bring the vinyl to the browser. That's why I present to you: jQuery DJ Hero.By combining CSS3 and jQuery, I created two records that you can start spinning (faster and slower) and even scratching is e

Style Sheet switchers (or "colour theme choosers") are not really that new. Apart from that fact, they still are pretty fun to use and cool to see. I was wondering how jQuery could help me achieve this technique. While searching, I came across several solutions.There is a problem when using these techniques, which I will explain later. I created a little work-around to create a better jQuery stylesheet switcher. We'll simply change some colours for t

The use of HTML lists (<ol> for an ordered list, <ul> for an unordered list) is very common these days. Today, we're going to look a little bit further than creating regular lists, by showing 8 different ways to beautifully style your HTML lists with CSS. We'll use some pure CSS techniques to make a bored list look awesome (and even have some extra functionality). As a reminder, here's how a default ordered list and a unordered list look like&#

Last week, I started experimenting with Microsoft Silverlight. I've never worked with the technique before, but after using it, I was impressed. It works pretty good and the separation of the XAML and CS file is great.Today, we're going to create a Smokey Mouse Follower in Silverlight. This was my first experiment too and pretty fun to see. I have to admit that the layout can be improved in loads of ways, but this tutorial is intended to be for beginner Silverlight us

Planet Collision: Free November 2009 Calendar Wallpaper was originally my entry for the Desktop Wallpaper collection on SmashingMagazine. Sadly, my wallpapers weren't selected to be included in the list, but I still wanted to share them with the rest of the world. I hope you enjoy them and use them as your wallpaper. These wallpapers are totally free for all kinds of use. Next to the versions that has a calender on them, the non-calender version has been included (in

As you might already know, I'm Dutch. This simply means that I was born and live in a country called The Netherlands (a.k.a. Holland). When looking at prejudices: The country of cheese, wooden shoes, windmills and (legal) drugs.But I'm not the only one having roots in this part of the world. A couple of (big) companies started their business here. Some of them became really big and grew to international sizes.Today, I presen

Don't you wonder sometimes, when looking at something, how you can create something like that yourself? I have to admit that I do. This is why I came up with the Skype for Mac and the iPhone examples in your webbrowser. Today, we're trying something new in this Proof of Concept category: creating a theatrical movie trailer with jQueryThis technique could be really well used when creating a slide-show that just needs some text. Using the CSS letter-spacing property, we

Today, I'll be showing you a neat little CSS trick to Debug your HTML and CSS. Take note that this will not be actual debugging, but it can help you find the element depth on a web page. Also, when you didn't properly close a tag, this piece of code will expose it for you. Simply check out the demo to view what we're going to create! At first, the demo looks like a regular web page. But when you start hovering the elements, you'll be able to see the HTML struc

Formatting and submitting invoices may seem like a headache at times, but this essential component of the billing process is a critical part of doing business. Record-keeping would be nearly impossible without a paper trail that includes invoices submitted to clients, customers or employers. This is where one should consider the help offered by web based invoicing software, a surprisingly simple and easy way to automate your invoicing paperwork.There are a plethora of online invoici