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Progressive Enhancement for Browser-based Games

This article recently appeared on BuildNewGames.com, a collaboration by the teams at Bocoup and Internet Explorer.

200 Free Vector Map Icons for Google Maps API

Map Icons Designer is a set of 200 Map icons in PSD Vector Shape & PNG format. They can be used as Google Map Icons, Location Markers, Point of Interests (POI) on any Maps. It includes icons for tourism, sports, restaurants, hotels, transportation and etc. It’s sutiable to use them in Google Maps API.

There are 10 different type of location pins. They can be resized and can easily change colors. You can use the royalty-free map icons for any personal, commercial project including web design, software, application, advertising, film, video, computer game, gui design, illustration, for you or for your clients, without having to pay additional licensing fees.

Requirements: –
Demo: http://www.webiconset.com/map-icons/
License: License Free

Create Free Responsive Portfolio Websites with Dunked

Dunked is one of the simplest, easiest, and most versatile portfolio simple-to-use solution to allow creative folk to showcase their work. It’s Responsive, Retina & Ready to go. you can choose from a growing collection of professionally designed templates to reinvent your portfolio. Their pixel-perfect templates are customizable, easy to use, and focus on one thing only – your content.

Each template is fully responsive and will adapt itself to any mobile device. iPad, iPhone, Android, it doesn’t matter. Your work will always looks its absolute best. Upload images from your computer, embed your latest videos from YouTube or Vimeo, and add your mixes from SoundCloud. When you’re done, manage your content through a simple to use drag and drop admin interface.

Requirements: –
Demo: http://dunked.com/
License: License Free

A True Responsive jQuery Lightbox Plugin for Free

Magnific Popup is a free responsive jQuery lightbox plugin that is focused on performance and providing best experience for user with any device. The majority of lightbox plugins require you to define size of it via JS option. Magnific Popup does not – you can use relative units like EM’s or resize lightbox with help of CSS media queries. Update content inside lightbox without worrying about how it’ll resize and center.

Plugin has an option to automatically switch to alternative mobile-friendly source on small screen size. Default controls are made with pure CSS, without external graphics. For the main image there is a built in way to provide appropriate source for different pixel density displays. Magnific Popup displays images before they’re completely loaded to take full advantage of progressive loading. For in and out transitions CSS3 is used instead of slow JavaScript animation.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://dimsemenov.com/plugins/magnific-popup/
License: MIT License

Deal of the Week: Spy on Your Competitors

Keeping up with the latest and greatest Web features is an exhausting experience, though. You can check out tons of forums, blogs, newsletters and more just to read up on the latest releases. The best way, though? Just browse. Check out what your competition’s doing. If only it were that easy to look beneath the hood. Well, it is. Thanks to SpyBar, you can pull in tons of useful data about any site, and you can do it all right from your Firefox or Chrome browser.

With just a single click, SpyBar will instantly spit out a list of WordPress themes and Plugins used on whatever website you’re currently on. So surf over to your competition’s site or some of the industry leaders’ pages, and take a peek at what’s working for them. SpyBar normally sells for just $12.95, but for a limited time only, you can purchase this incredible browser extension for only $7! That’s nearly 50% off the original price.

How to Create Realtime Multi-player Games in HTML5

This article recently appeared on BuildNewGames.com, a collaboration by the teams at Bocoup and Internet Explorer.

Create an Amazon-like Navigation Menu with jQuery

menu-aim is a jQuery plugin for dropdown menus that can differentiate between a user trying hover over a dropdown item vs trying to navigate into a submenu’s contents. This problem is normally solved using timeouts and delays. menu-aim tries to solve this by detecting the direction of the user’s mouse movement. This can make for quicker transitions when navigating up and down the menu. The experience is hopefully similar to amazon.com/’s “Shop by Department” dropdown.

menu-aim assumes that you are using a menu with submenus that expand to the menu’s right. It will fire events when the user’s mouse enters a new dropdown item and when that item is being intentionally hovered over. You can take a look at the detailed explanation here.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: https://github.com/kamens/jQuery-menu-aim
License: MIT License

Open Source Interactive App Framework for HTML5

The iio Engine (pronounced ‘ee-oh’) is an extensive application framework that helps with the creation and deployment of HTML5 applications. The framework provides a feature rich SDK, an advanced debugging system, and a cross-platform deployment engine. The iio Engine has no dependencies and can be interfaced with Box2D. The core platform is open source and totally free.

iio was designed from the ground up to be as lightweight as possible. Most data is ‘undefined’ by default, so your app will never be carrying any extra weight. No application is too simple to benefit from utilizing iio. The iio Engine is not a bulky framework – its about 1/70th the size of an average mp3 file.

Requirements: –
Demo: http://iioengine.com/
License: License Free

Protect Yourself from Copyright Infringement Claims

Copyright regulations exist to ensure that the owners of intellectual property, such as images, text and other creative works, are protected should their work be used without their permission.

The Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988 gives the creators of literary, dramatic, musical, artistic works, sound recordings, broadcasts, films and typographical arrangement of published editions, the right to control the ways in which their content may be used.

Although it’s designed to protect content producers against malicious use, creative professionals such as web designers need to be careful not to breach copyright.

What does the act include?

Written content and articles

Copying articles or content from third parties can constitute a copyright breach, even if the content is modified or adapted. The use of scrapers could also be constituted as a breach, as can placement of ‘dummy text’ that is used on another website, even if it is only used on a development server.

Photography and graphics

Photography and images are one of the most common areas of copyright infringement for web designers. The copyright for any image usually lies with the photographer or website that you purchased the image from. If you use stock images from sites such as iStockphoto, ensure that the licence you purchase on behalf of your client is the correct one. It can be all to easy to purchase a ‘Standard’ licence, when in fact extended rights are needed – so be sure to read up on the licence agreement before you make the purchase. Read the rest of this entry »

How to Create 3D Social Media Buttons with CSS3

Social media buttons are presented today on every website design. They are used to promote your business on social networks and get in return potential customers. There are plenty of free social media icons sets out there but in this tutorial show us how to Create 3D Social Media Buttons with CSS3. It’s free to use these buttons into your projects and create new ones.

Requirements: CSS3
Demo: http://flashuser.net/tutorial/css3-social-media-buttons/
License: License Free