Monday Link-O-Rama

by Jason Caldeira

Every Monday (or whenever we can remember) we here at FlyCasual will be posting an assortment of links to sites that influence us in some way or another. So without further ado… let the linkage begin:

AisleOne: Helvetiriffic!
Baggu: I love simple “why didn’t I think of that” concepts.
ReForm School: Makes me feel like a kid again.
Swear Words: Brilliantly executed horizontal navigation.

That’s all I’m going to post in hopes that you all take a few moments out of your day to visit and absorb these sites. It’s getting progressively more difficult to sift through the bazillions of horrible sites out there, so whenever we find sites that are doing things right it’s important to pay proper attention.

The Beauty of Balsamiq

by Gregory McClendon

Pronounced like (balsamic), this handy little application has quickly proven to be a mainstay for all of my design projects. Balsamiq is essentially a “sketch” tool for creating wireframes and screen mockups. It is on the Adobe AIR platform, and is relatively lightweight to install (compared to Fireworks, which I still use for hi-res mockups).

Available for Windows and Mac, Balsamiq is by far the easiest tool I’ve found for making quick screenshots. It can be useful from brainstorming stages to …

Parsing Dropular RSS Feeds in Wordpress

by Gregory McClendon

When looking at parsing the Dropular feed, all I really needed to do was sort out some php to parse the feed’s XML, then resize the images to fit the design (in our case this was a vertical column, 150px in width). Wordpress conveniently comes with a handy enough parser for the job.