GreyBox from Orangoo Labs is the best general purpose Lightbox implementation I have found to date.  GreyBox allows you to display websites, images and other content in a modal window.  It’s not a program like Visual LightBox JS  where you  drag and drop photos into the Visual LightBox window, press “Publish” and a Web gallery is generated.  However, Greybox is easy to set up, it’s small (only 22KB), and it’s styled in CSS so it’s easy to customize.  GreyBox is free, and you can get more information and download GreyBox here.

I love it when I discover a useful program on the Web that’s priced reasonably, or even free,  and I think I’ve found just such a program.  I was browsing lightbox/modal window scripts and ran across a program called Visual LightBox JS.  It’s a little program that makes it easy to generate generate Web photo galleries that are based on the LightBox2 script.  You just drag and drop your photos into the Visual LightBox window, press “Publish” and your Web gallery with beautiful LightBox 2 effects is ready.  You can use the HTML page generated by Visual LightBox, or you can add the generated code to your own page.  Visual LightBox JS is free for non-commercial use and $25.00US for commercial use.  You can read more about the program, view demos, and download the program here.

Firefox 3 places a dotted border around an SWF object to indicate focus. The following code in the CSS for the page should eliminate the border:

:focus { outline: 0;}

I recently upgraded from Web Premium CS3 to CS4.  The normal upgrade cost is $599, but those upgrading from Adobe Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium, Design Standard, Web Premium, or Master Collection can upgrade for $440.   I’m not sure how long this special upgrade price will last, and I couldn’t find a way to order the upgrade online.  If you’re interested in upgrading, call Adobe Sales at 800-585-0774.

Xara Web Designer is the most amazing web development program I’ve seen for $49.00 US.  Whether you’re an experienced developer who uses the Adobe CS4 Web Design suite or a rank amateur, you’ll find uses for this program.  Web Designer is unlike any website creation tool you’ve seen before because:

• You can easily create complete websites by selecting a page design from the bundled templates, all created by professional designers.  I generated a couple of pages and they did not use table layouts, as I expected.  The CSS validated as CSS level 2.1 and the markup validated as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.
• You can create individual graphics, from headings and buttons to text boxes and speech bubbles, using templates created by professional designers, and the graphics can be customized to fit your site in seconds.
• Web Designer is one of the easiest tools for creating truly efficient Flash animations, and the animations can be exported as .swf or added to any page being created in Web Designer.
• For designers, Web Designer offers unparalleled design freedom. It’s perhaps the fastest website prototyping tool around, even for websites created from scratch. As a designer you don’t need to know anything about HTML, but you’ll have complete freedom to design websites as simple or as complex as you need, with an actual working HTML result, rather than just a ‘fake’ static mock-up.”

Use the following link to learn more about Web Designer and download a free 30-day trial:  XARA Web Designer

CreativeTechs is offering a free 10-week Photoshop course.  The class is taught with Photoshop CS4 on the Macintosh, but CreativeTechs says that most of the learning applies to earlier versions of Photoshop, as well as PC users.  For more information, go to:

http://creativetechs.com/tipsblog/free-10-week-photoshop-course/

A developer by the name of Drew Diller has developed another method for creating rounded corners without using images. Go to the CSS Tips & Tricks page of the CSS Lab and click on the link that says, “Rounded Borders Without Images (another method).”

I have bought Dell computers over the years and have been very satisfied with the systems’ performance and Dell’s customer service.  However, earlier this year a sale at Costco enticed me to purchase an HP computer system.  In less than a week, the motherboard failed.  I called HP support and was told that I would have to ship the computer to them and that it would take about 10 days to replace the motherboard and return the system to me.  Instead of shipping the system to HP, I returned it to Costco and ordered a Dell system through Costco.com, something I should have done in the first place.

After a couple of months, the fan in the Dell system became a little noisy.  The noise was not loud enough to bother me, but I thought it might be an indication that the fan was failing, and I called Dell Support.  Dell shipped me a new power supply overnight and had a technician come to my home and install the replacement power supply.

Dell’s superior customer service is just one of the many reasons why I will continue to purchase computer systems from Dell.

Many of us use multiple browsers, and it’s nice to have a bookmark program that will work with all the browsers we use.  My personal preference is a program called Bookmark Buddy.  You can try it free for 30 days.  After that, a license is $29.95.

A similar program is Linkman.  Linkman Pro can be tested for 30 days with all features enabled. After that, you must purchase a license and obtain a serial number (registration fee starts at $39 for a single computer). You can also try Linkman Free , a special edition of Linkman with slightly less features, but completely free for private non-commercial use as well as for use in charity organizations and educational use.

Meta tags to prevent caching are usually placed in the header section of an HTML page.  However, because of the way that IE caches a page, meta tags at the beginning of a page won’t prevent a page from being cached.  Microsoft’s solution is to place a second header section at the end of the page.  However, if you place a second header section at the end of a page, the page will no longer validate.  Any suggestions?