I’m pleased to announce a preview release of Blueprint Layout Tool 0.4. This version marks the migration of BLT to its own site at http://www.blueprintlayouttool.com and a focus on dramatic improvements to the source view. Unfortunately, the current development version only supports Firefox, IE, Opera & Safari support will be coming soon.

Key Features:

• Improvements to style and polish of the interface
• Dramatic improvements to source view (Powered by CodePress & PHPTidy)
  • Generated Source is well formatted and polished
  • Generated Source is Syntax Highlighted
  • Generated Source is cleaned of most extraneous markup

Known Issues:

• Source View does not work in Safari and Opera
• Formatting is off in IE
• Generated source contains several Mozilla specific tags that still need to be cleaned.

I would also like to take a few moments and draw your attention to Christian Montoya’s Blueprint Constructor application. He takes a different approach to the interface and design of the Layout Tool and has created something quite useful and fun to use. We will be working together to try and achieve similar conventions between our apps.

Check out Constructor at http://lab.christianmontoya.com/construct/

You can read about his design process on his blog at http://www.christianmontoya.com/2007/12/08/construct-01-alpha/

Hi All, I will be scuba diving in Central America for the next week.  I’ve queued up some posts but won’t be around to respond to any comments.  Hope you all had a Happy New Year. 

Today, I’m proud to announce the release of SilkSprite a CSS Sprite plugin for Blueprint based on the widely used Silk Icons.

Benefits

• 1000 icons compressed into 1 file
• Entire Plugin is only 3 files
• Easy to use

Usage

• Place this directory inside blueprint/plugins
• Add this line to “blueprint/screen.css”,
  • @import ‘plugins/silksprite/sprite.css’;
• Use the sprites by attaching classes ss_sprite & ss_(name of sprite) to an a, span or div element. You can use test.htm as a key to the names of sprites.
• example:

  <span class="ss_sprite
  ss_add"> </span><br />

Credit

• Silk Sprite is Based on the Silk Icon Set by Mark James [famfamfam.com]
• Compiled & Adapted for Blueprint by Don Albrecht [ajaxbestiary.com]

Check it out online here:

http://www.ajaxbestiary.com/Labs/SilkSprite/

Hi everyone,  Today marks the 3 Month Anniversary of Ajax Bestiary.

With over 100 posts I think its time to solicit some feedback from you.

What would you like to see change about Ajax Bestiary?

My apologies everyone.  We’ve been having some strange intermittent server issues for the past 24 hours.  I’m working with my hosting provider to get them resolved.  If you have any problems reaching AjaxBestiary, please try again in a few minutes.

Hi Everyone, I just upgraded the site to WordPress 2.3 and added a tag cloud on the sidebar. Please let me know what you think.