If you are in the Boston area and you missed last night's Boston CFUG meeting, I hate to tell you that you really missed out. We were lucky not only to have newly minted ColdFusion Product Manager, Adam Lehman, but also Flex Builder Product Manager, Tim Buntel, Director of Engineering for ColdFusion, Hemant Khandelwal, lead engineer on Bolt, Ram Kulkarni, and ColdFusion Product Marketing Manager, Allison Huselid.

An Event Apart - Boston is being held from March 26–27, 2007 and features a number of web design and usability luminaries including Steve Krug (who wrote the preeminent usability book - "Don't Make Me Think!"), Eric Meyer (CSS design guru), Jeffrey Zeldman (web standards and usability expert and author of "Designing With Web Standards") among many others. Many of these are the very people behind the online design, usability and standards journal A List Apart. If you are interested in attending, please check a post by John Dowdell which lists an Adobe discount code that will get you a $50 discount.

This is local for me, so attending would be very easy - though I may not be able to attend for financial reasons (read: I need the money for CFUnited and cf.Objective()). Nonetheless, if you are in the Boston area and are interested in design and usability...

You may have heard about this on the latest ColdFusion Weekly Podcast (I actually found this on dzone), but Aptana is a new IDE based on Eclipse that offers code assist on JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. The CSS code assist alone is huge to me since I have not found a decent CSS editor for Eclipse up to now. The code assist will even let you know the compatibility (Firefox/IE) of the attribute. I am just beginning to test this out, but for the moment it seems like an excellent compliment to CFEclipse.

I have commented on this topic many times before, and it always seems like there is a new IE PNG fix out, but IE PNG Alpha Fix v1.0 RC4 is exciting for two reasons:

1. It automatically supports png background transparencies. My current solution is Sleight and while it benefits from a lack of lag time, it does not support background transparencies.
2. It requires 1 line of CSS to implement. Yes, you heard that right.

Here is example code taken from the source of their demo page:

<style type="text/css"> <P>
/* USAGE: All you have to do is include this one line in your CSS file, with the tag names to which you want the script applied: */ <P>
img, div { behavior: url(iepngfix.htc) } <P>
/* Alternatively, you can specify that this will apply to all tags like so: * { behavior: url(iepngfix.htc) } */ <P>
</style>

Once you strip out the comments you will notice we are down to a single line of CSS that is IE specific. That's it. This did appear to have a slight lag time (unlike sleight), but definitely nothing prohibitive. Definitely something I will be testing out. Thanks to the Wired Monkey Bites blog (who also mention a solution for PNG image maps as well)

I consider myself pretty competent with CSS, but I am also a incredible "link hoarder"; so even though I don't use CSS in my every day work, I have gathered a decent collection of resources which I figured I would share. Many you may already know, but hopefully some are new to you. These are in no particular order, and the descriptions are taken from the sites they link to wherever possible. Enjoy!