Today, we have a beautiful Christmas icon freebie for you created by the talented, hard-working folks at Rockettheme. The icon set contains ten icons available as 256×256px PNGs that have been lovingly and exclusively prepared for Smashing Magazine and the Web design community. As usual, the set is released under a Creative Commons license and can be used in commercial and private projects.

First we start our buffer. From this point on, anything that is echoed goes into our buffer instead of actually being echoed. By using ob_get_clean(), we can pull the contents of the buffer into a variable (and also clear the buffer). Once this is done we can echo that variable, or pass it on by returning it if we’re in a function.

Freehand drawings and other sketched elements are a great way to show personality and convey a feeling of authenticity. Imagine getting a letter or greeting card from someone you cherish. Do you expect the text to be typed or handwritten? A handwritten note is way more personal than a computer-written one, right? On the Web, it’s similar. It might be a different medium, but content that obviously comes directly from a human is more authentic and more trustworthy. Let’s look at three

Having a predefined policy takes a lot of the contentiousness out of removing content. Instead of it being a personal attack, it is simply implementing policy. For example, you could have a policy that says if a page hasn’t be updated for a certain amount of time, it is automatically removed. Or you could specify that if a page falls below a certain threshold of visitors, it is removed from the website’s navigation or search. Whatever your policy, the key is to have something that ca

There are various ways with which one can share content across websites — RSS and Atom feeds, APIs and embeddable widgets. RSS feeds on WordPress are usually restricted to posts, while APIs are not easy to integrate on other websites without adding some extra code. This leaves us with embeddable widgets — like the ones used by Google AdSense to display advertisements on websites or Facebook “Share” and “Like” buttons — all of these rely on embeddable Jav

There are various ways with which one can share content across websites — RSS and Atom feeds, APIs and embeddable widgets. RSS feeds on WordPress are usually restricted to posts, while APIs are not easy to integrate on other websites without adding some extra code. This leaves us with embeddable widgets — like the ones used by Google AdSense to display advertisements on websites or Facebook “Share” and “Like” buttons — all of these rely on embeddable Jav

What they do is so much more than just telling you what you should have already done by now. They’re telling you what you could become working for them. I especially like the fifth point, “[You] know which details matter and how to push back and say ‘no.’” It tells you not to be submissive, in a career of following orders and meeting deadlines, but to be independent and to create independent and healthy relationships with clients. It’s similar to Mule’s

[1] The definitions of responsive design and adaptive design are manyfold. Jeffrey Zeldman argues that restricting the term responsive design to a technological approach may prove too limiting and that the overall goal is device agnosticism, and we should thus include fixed breakpoint designs in our definition of responsive (web) design. Moreover, Aaron Gustafson defines adaptive design as “creating interfaces that adapt to the user’s capabilities (in terms of both form and function)

Second, you need to get Apple’s attention. Making connections within Apple can be invaluable. As a general rule, though, you need to make your own splash before Apple will make you a bigger one. Apple has an editorial team. They find apps to feature. You need to get to the places they are looking. Based on my experiences, they probably look at new apps that are “charting” — moving up the charts. For that, you need to generate a good number of launch-day sales. It takes at

There are various ways to prevent this. In Backbone, ensure you always dispose old views and references using dispose(). This function was recently added, and removes any handlers added in the view’s ‘events’ object, as well as any collection or model listeners where the view is passed as the third argument (callback context). dispose() is also called by the view’s remove(), taking care of the majority of basic memory cleanup needs when the element is cleared from the scr

“The first Version was released in February 2012 and had around 120 glyphs. Actually, the only reason why I designed it was that I myself needed a well-designed pictogram suite for my own projects. I also wanted a suite with a more illustrated style than the ones available out there. So I started with the 20-30 glyphs that I needed at the time — ending up with 120 glyphs. And since I already had done the work, it was an obvious choice to release them free to the Web design community

We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And as designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one—desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. This creativity mission has been going on for over four years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing e

The solution to all of these issues is to temporarily unmask the password so that the user can fill in the field quickly and accurately — i.e. unmasking the password for a moment so that the user can see what they’ve typed. Temporary unmasking decreases typos and makes it easy for users to catch and fix any typos they make. And the user doesn’t have to worry about snoopers stealing their password because the unmasking is quick, e.g. if we unmask a couple of last characters type

Coding style is how your code looks, plain and simple. And by “your,” I actually mean you, the person who is reading this article. Coding style is extremely personal and everyone has their own preferred style. You can discover your own personal style by looking back over code that you’ve written when you didn’t have a style guide to adhere to. Everyone has their own style because of the way they learned to code. If you used an integrated development environment (IDE) like

Future of Web Apps Prague 2012“Future of Web Apps (FOWA) is a first-class conference for web and mobile developers and entrepreneurs, bringing together visionaries to discuss the technologies and platforms you should use to build the next generation of successful apps. This year, we’re in Prague for the very first time! As if that wasn’t exciting enough, FOWA is also joining forces with Future of Web Design (FOWD) giving you two conferences for the price of one!”