Have you ever wished you could style checkboxes, drop down menus, radio buttons, and file upload inputs? Ever wished you could control the look and feel of your form elements between all browsers?

If so, Uniform is your new best friend.

Uniform masks your standard form controls with custom themed controls. It works in sync with your real form elements to ensure accessibility and compatibility.

You can also submit patches via github (or even new themes!) if you’re so inclined.

  $(document).ready(function() {
    ProvideHtml5.autofocus();
    ProvideHtml5.datepicker();
    ProvideHtml5.forcenumber();
  });

You’ll notice in the snippet that these methods are only being executed if the browser does not support a native HTML5 version. For example, here’s the definition for autofocus:

  autofocus = function() {
      if (!Modernizr.autofocus)
        $('input[autofocus=""]').focus();
  }

Since Modernizr only detects HTML5 functionality, this is a good example of how a script can be used to fill in the gaps caused by varying browser support.

ImportError: No module named django.core.management

As it turns out, django — though installed in the right place — wasn’t in my PYTHONPATH so it couldn’t be loaded. You can test this by changing directories to your django project and issuing this command:

python

… which starts the python shell. And then from the shell, type:

import sys
print sys.path

You should get some output like this:

On Mac OS X version 10.6 (Snow Leopard), django gets installed into /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/django (which you’ll notice is absent from the sys.path output). There are a few ways to fix this. Probably the easiest is to simply add a file named django.pth in /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/. In this file put the path of the django library:

/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/django

Save and quit and you should be good to go.

Another approach would be to add django to your PYTHONPATH by adding this to the .profile or .bash_profile file that’s in your home directory:

export PYTHONPATH=/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/django:$PYTHONPATH

Alternatively, if you’d like to potentially use a different version of django for each project you can symlink the django directory you want to use into your project:

ln -s /Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/django ./django

More info can be found here:

1. Python Installation Docs
2. Snow Leopard’s Python 2.6 site-packages
3. How to install Django on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

We use some JavaScript and CSS magic to apply a two-color gradient to any text. Shadows and highlights can also be applied.

This works especially well on big sites or dynamic content where it’d be impractical to create images for every instance.

Similar in spirit to what sIFR or Cufón does in that it dynamically replaces text that you might otherwise need to use static images for. Might be a nice stopgap measure before CSS gradients are fully realizable (in a practical sense) across all browsers.

Modernizr is a small and simple JavaScript library that helps you take advantage of emerging web technologies (CSS3, HTML 5) while still maintaining a fine level of control over older browsers that may not yet support these new technologies.

The “What Modernizr Doesn’t Do” section might make its purpose more clear:

Modernizr does not add missing functionality to browsers; instead, it detects native availability of features and offers you a way to maintain a fine level of control over your site regardless of a browser’s capabilities.

Here’s an example taken from Mark Pilgram’s Dive Into HTML5 book:

if (!Modernizr.inputtypes.number) {
  // no native support for type=number fields
  // maybe try Dojo or some other JavaScript framework
}

The underlying secret to beautiful user interface design is realism: making 2D objects on your screen appear to sit in 3D space with volume, surface properties and undulations that might appear in real life. These faux 3D objects have highlights and shadows just like objects on your desk might have, and they have textures that emulate real objects from glass to sandpaper and everything in between. Designing beautiful user interfaces has more to do with the why than the how.

He goes into some detail about what he calls “Thinking in 3D” and how it can help you craft a compelling user interface. He also provides some downloadable Photoshop layer styles so you can see how he’s constructed his examples. Great read.

Do you have multiple email addresses that are “aliases” to a central email account? If you do, you can configure Mail in Mac OS X so that it can easily get and send email from all of your addresses. Here’s how.

This is a built-in (but extremely hidden) feature of Mail, so don’t worry… no hacks required. It would be really nice if this also works on the iPhone after a sync, but I haven’t tried it yet. (And I really doubt it.)

UPDATE: Wow, it works. After syncing my iPhone via iTunes, the email aliases show up on the iPhone under the “From:” field when sending a message.

(Via Daring Fireball.)

Below is a recap of all of the iPhone app development tips we posted in the month of December advent-style. We hope this serves as a one-stop shop for many aspects of iPhone development that are commonly encountered.

The tips range from how to simply open a URL in Mobile Safari to more complicated tasks like string comparison using NSString. The tutorials are clear, easily digestible and should serve as a good resource for commonly used iPhone programming patterns.

The old way to track clicks and outbound links in Google Analytics was to call the _trackPageview function on the click event, passing it a label that could then be searched for in Analytics. One of the problems with this method was that the clicks were counted as pageviews, affecting your total pageview number.

Now Analytics offers an event tracking feature. It can be used to track downloads, outbound links, mailto links, AJAX events—any click event. But the event tracking function still has to be implemented for each event you want to track. Here’s some jQuery that handles the implementation for you.

Google Analytics event tracking isn’t all that new, but I haven’t seen many articles written about integration with jQuery. There are several jQuery plugins that already do this (e.g., here and here), but Flaherty’s article gives a good high-level view of how to do this without using a plugin while defining things like event category and event label in an automated way based on the type of link that’s being tracked.

@font-face {
  font-family: 'Graublau Web';
  src: url('GraublauWeb.eot');
  src: local('Graublau Web Regular'), local('Graublau Web'), 
         url('GraublauWeb.otf') format('opentype');
}

Check out his article for more information on why this works and the road he took to get here.