Shortcut icons on Unity desktop

Noteworthy as Unity's turn away from the desktop towards the launcher might be, I'm an old dog and like my screen crowded. The (manual) way to create a new desktop shortcut icon to an application is to create a shortcut file in the Desktop directory, i.e: /home/george/Desktop/Firefox8.desktop And the contents: [Desktop Entry] Encoding=UTF-8 Version=1.0 Name=Firefox … Continue reading Shortcut icons on Unity desktop →

CSS for frontend engineers

If you are working on a webapp, it is likely that sooner or later you will find yourself tasked with generating some web UI. While the esteemed colleague from the web design department excels at that (disclosure: I'm not a web designer), when asked for advice on how to get something "simple" done you'll find … Continue reading CSS for frontend engineers →

Scaling sprite image

If you've always wanted, just like me, a way to scale images used in CSS sprites: there's a way [1]. It essentially comes down to a clever overlaying of a mask on an image: 1. a div with overflow:hidden and of a fixed size 2. an img pointing to the sprite is placed inside the … Continue reading Scaling sprite image →