Archive for the “Quick Tip” Category

Last week, I decided to update our website design, due to a complaint from someone who couldn’t view it in Internet Explorer. If you’re into web design, chances are Internet Explorer has caused more than a few headaches. At least it has for me. Aside from making our new site less busy and cranking up the sexiness to 11, my main goal was creating a site that actually worked in Internet Explorer, even though I hate IE with all my soul.

So, as expected, I ran into an annoying problem. When I tried to style the rollover buttons on our new site (see the navigation links at the top right of the redesigned site for an example) to have no background color until rolled over, they worked great in Safari and Firefox on Mac and PC, but didn’t work at all in IE. Nice! After trying many different solutions, and getting to a point of insanity searching for an answer, I finally found it on the Microsoft Developer Network site.

Here’s what I learned- in Internet Explorer, in order to have a CSS background change when you roll over a link (using the a:hover pseudo selector), you also need to set the background property of the link when you’re not rolling over. So, the a tag needs to have a background color or background image, if you want to have a background color or image for a:hover. That’s it! What I ended up doing is creating a 1 x 1 pixel transparent .png file, and one that was a white pixel. While that may not be the best solution, since you have to wait for the white pixel image to load the first time you roll over, it works for now, and I’m happy.

Ever wondered why you can’t rotate or change the alpha of a Dynamic Text Field in Flash? Learn how to do it in this sweet quick tip episode!

In this first ever QUICK TIP episode, Chad tells you about a secret library of free 3D models that ships with Photoshop CS3. If you suck at modeling, or if you just like free stuff, you gotta check this out!