more to come soon.

-= Misc and Tools=-

Chrome with webkit development tools – Chrome’s devtools, like firebug, but different. Note that you will need the to use this.
Useful web design tools – Another list of tools for web designers.
25 graph and chart solutions for web developers – nice list of charts and graph libs.
50 Ultimate useful free mac apps for graphic and web designers – yay for mac tools (especially free ones, which I’m finding are wicked rare on that platform).
30 must see web generator for lazy web masters – see web 2.0 isn’t dead… it just kinda missed the upgrade.
ajax push engine – New comet server… yay! I really need to find an excuse to play with this.
Browser Size from Google Labs – intersting overlay based on visitors to google.
Deep linking with ajax – Deep linking is becoming a necessity these days…
Project Ares – Whoa, you can develop a WebOS app from the ground up in your browser, that’s pretty cool.
15 best articles for designers in 2009 – a round up of this years best posts for designers.
The Best 40 Photoshop text effect tutorials from 2009 – More end-of-year best-of roundup, this time photoshop’d style
SEOToolkit (for iis) – For those poor souls who are forced to use IIS, here is an extension to make life easier, see I care about everyone.
fontfriend – Bookmarklet that lets you change the fonts being used on the page (read: javascript css changer), very useful for on-the-fly changes without firebug.
Screenpresso – Cool Screen shot util… I suppose when I drop fscapture (if I ever do), I’ll switch to this.
Visual Event – Nice little Bookmarklet that shows you what dom-events js is tied to.
Reducisaurus – a webservice for minifying CSS and JS (runs yui )

-= jQuery =-

Parallax header (the way css squirrel does it) – a quick post on how css squirrel gets their parallax effect on.
Processing (animations with canvas) – Ok fine, this isn’t jQuery, but it is from John Resig, it’s called Processing.js. It does image, animation, and interaction without flash or java. Uses Canvas, and looks awesome
More jQuery and general javascript tips to improve your code – a tripwire post with some helpful tips.
20 must read jQuery tutorials for web – a good round up of miscellaneous tutorials to help you get your jQuery on.
Full jQuery Animations – I’ve played with animation before, and I handled the queue a little differently, but I like the approach of this method.
jQuery 1.4 presentation at Yahoo! – What happens when Resig drops by Yahoo? He delievers awesome presentations on testing, performance, and jQuery 1.4
10 useful jQuery form validation techniques and tutorials – Who doesn’t love a little validation?
Meerkat – for those times when you need a sticky header/footer/div
Roundabout – This is a fun little plugin, not sure I’d use this on a production site, but it’s fun to play with.

-= Fonts =-

designing with fonts, 30 useful free dingbats – Who doesn’t need a good dingbat now and then!? Yeah you’re right, people who use illustrator but hey for those of us without that, here you go.
font squirrel presents… font face generator – for those who are using @font-face, font-squirrel has got some good news…
17 Awesome free fonts for your work – Personally I love the walkway font, used it in a few sites already

-= Images =-

30 free psd templates for product design – Excellent list of free (psd) templates for everything from dvds to books to soda cans.
free abstract brushes to use for light effect – a plethora of brushes for light designs
49 most creative photoshop tutorials of 2009 – Sometimes it’s fun to try to learn some new things (when the design and cut out gets too monotonous)
The ultimate Christmas round up of patterns, brushes, vectors, and icons – Get your wintery-Christmas designs on, this has everything… of course by the time I post this, you won’t need it… but eh, whattaya do.
Top 50 web development icon sets from 2009 – The top icon sets for the last year, get it while it’s still semi-warm
Ultimate resource list of vector graphics – Sometimes we all needs some vectors right?
30 professional tutorials for designers using gimp – Gimp tutorials… some are pretty good, others are well, uh… yeah there’s no real good way to say bad.

-= Fonts =-

20 new high quality free fonts – Yeppers, wouldn’t be a linkpost without more free fonts.

-= Images =-

big collection of free design textures – Large list of texture packs
25 more free photoshop texture packs – 25 more texture packs
free photoshop brushes set II – Some ps (and gimp brushes
40 fresh and free icon sets for web designers and bloggers – Yay for icon sets!
fireworks vs photoshop compression – interesting read (with some tests) on why Fireworks may be better than photoshop for web work.

-= JS =-

a 50 lines of code javascript animation framework, say hello to emile – Emile, a 50-lines-of-code animation lib from the guy who made scriptaculous (i think).
Google Closure – js compiler (Note that the jQuery team now uses this instead of YUI for their minifying needs) and tools from Google.

-= jQuery =-

jQuery for beginners using simple jquery effects for a rockstar user interface – Pretty much was it says; learn to use jQ effects like a rockstar.
11 ways to increase your jQuery performance – We’ve covered speed tips before, but always good to have more explanations and good tuts like this one.
360 picture views with jQuery – Pretty cool jQuery plug-in for 360-degree images.
TopUp – Pretty cool lightbox… feels heavy, but impressive
35 more useful jQuery plugins and techniques – Just like it says, noupe round up of some jQuery tutorials and plug-ins.
Amazing jQuery hover effects – I totally plan on reading this later. But hey, it sounds great right?

-= Mac =-

20 free mac apps for web designer’s toolkit – Yay! more free mac software.
a collection of useful mac apps – useful mac apps.

-= Misc. =-

ajax dynatrace – this tool supposedly will help you find errors, leaks, and spead up your ajaxery etc. and it is supposed to work with IE. You have to register to download it.
Fresh Web Development Goodies Bag #2 – Noupe’s current design may be fugly, but as always they deliever with great articles and downloads.
40 new useful web development tools and resources – I didn’t read it, but it sounds good
15 out of the oven adobe AIR applications for designers and developers – I enjoyed the list (although I already have some favorite air apps that I just can’t let go of).

Ajax Library Smackdown: Prototype vs jQuery by Nathaniel Schutta

instead of a:focus { -moz-outline: none; } you use a:focus { outline: none; }. Seems that they no longer require a Firefox only declaration (although you may want to use both -moz-outline and outline so that less-than 3.6 users still don’t see those fun dotted boxes).

In the spirit of keeping new useful things coming, and in the hope of a great year, I have completed an Adobe Air app called “VidCalc”.  Basically it’s a tool to help you figure out video ratios (so you don’t skew them when you try to resize), the file size of a constant bitrate encoded movie, and how long it will take to send a file down the pipe. I could explain it in greater detail, but you should probably go check out the project page to find out for yourself.

Have a great new year!

Flash Switcher in Firefox Tray - (with my other tools )

The plugin  is fairly huge (14mb) but it makes sense as he’s cramming 3 version of flash for 3 different operating systems in it.  What it does is puts a little flash logo in the bottom right of your window. When left-clicked it shows you other versions of flash that you can test with (9.0 r124, 8.0 r24, or 7.0 r63).  If you click on one, it will remove the currently installed version of flash and install the one you clicked on.  IMPORTANT! before you click on one of the flash versions in the menu, use the sub-menu to “Save as…” your current version or it will be removed and you’ll have to go download it and install it again.  Once you’ve “Saved as…” it will keep your current version and list it with the others.

Flash Switcher with sub-menu active

Hopefully this will be useful to those of you playing with various versions of flash, or if you want to do a test for users without flash (just click remove to uninstall flash from your browser).

Open your config .xml file and find this line:

<application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.0">

See the “1.0″ on the end? That’s your problem, see you are probably developing with AIR 1.5 (and why wouldn’t you?), not AIR 1.0. So change the line to read

<application xmlns="http://ns.adobe.com/air/application/1.5">

Save the file and relaunch/debug your app. It should run like a champ now. On the upside, maybe lynda will find this post and fix their example files. Until then, this trick should keep you going.

-= Images, Brushes, and the like =-

http://speckyboy.com/2009/10/23/40-amazing-photoshop-brush-directories-and-collections/ – Big post with all the best free brush sites (some we’ve covered in previous linkposts, but some are new )
http://www.creativecloseup.com/30-great-free-paper-backgrounds-and-textures – I’ve used some of these recently, but here are some good (and some whacky) paper textures.
http://designreviver.com/freebies/25-great-free-photoshop-texture-packs/ – Awesome texture packs
http://www.noupe.com/design/80-stunning-background-patterns-for-your-websites.html – Some really nice patterns and backgrounds
http://www.tutoriallounge.com/2009/09/35-startling-free-adobe-photoshop-brushes/ – get some free brushes
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/08/50-clever-tutorials-and-techniques-on-traditional-drawing/ – I love to draw (although I’m not very good), so here are some tips for you traditional artists
http://www.visualpharm.com/free_icons.html – Free icons, not sure you’d use’m, but they are handy to have around… thanks WRD for the link
http://www.area1.info/resources/over-5000-free-adobe-photoshop-brushes/ – 5000 brushes! (remember gimp’ers you can use most of these too!)
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/16/50-fresh-free-hiqh-quality-icon-sets/ – Yay! more free icons!
http://speckyboy.com/2009/09/18/49-amazing-resources-for-free-vector-graphics/ – When you have a vector program, these links are awesome (Inkscape can use some of them )
http://www.readyphotosite.com/blog/photo-website-news/12-ultimate-free-stock-photo-resources/ – I’ve covered a few of these stock photo resources before, but this list has some new ones too.

-= Fonts =-

http://www.instantshift.com/2009/09/04/36-high-quality-latest-free-fonts-to-enhance-your-designs/ – More free fonts
http://designreviver.com/freebies/10-great-font-resources/ – yep, just what it sounds like, a list of where to get fonts.

-= jQuery =-

http://ajaxian.com/archives/queryloader-a-full-page-preloader – nice, pre-load your whole site, or just a piece of it.
http://www.artzstudio.com/2009/04/jquery-performance-rules/#eliminate-query-waste – another helpful article on how to speed up and clean up your jQ code. I haven’t tried some of the tips, but if they work, booyah.
http://srobbin.com/jquery-plugins/jquery-approach/ – a fun new look at animation based on distance rather than time.
http://pelfusion.com/tutorials/25-excellent-collection-of-jquery-tutorials/ – I’ve been to some of these sites, and some are in the old links, but some are new and very helpful
http://designreviver.com/tips/a-round-up-of-the-best-and-latest-javascript-and-jquery-plugins/ – A list of tables, navs, and misc jQuery plugins
http://www.sohtanaka.com/web-design/greyscale-hover-effect-w-css-jquery/ – Nice tutorial on a cool grayscale-hover effect (uses a sprite)
http://ara-abcarians.com/jquery/atooltip/ – I like tool-tips… well usually I like tool-tips, this one is pretty light and easy to use.
http://speckyboy.com/2009/09/16/25-useful-jquery-tooltip-plugins-and-tutorials/ – I know I’ve linked to tooltips before, but here’s another 25 of them
http://www.bennadel.com/index.cfm?dax=blog:1710.view – This is a plugin to trace your selector paths, no I didn’t try it, but thought the peoples might want to take a look at it.
http://www.learningjquery.com/2009/09/working-with-events-part-3-more-event-delegation-with-jquery – Working with event delegation, this is pretty cool, I usually end up setting a $this var and then .children’ning it to find what I want, so this was a good read for me.
http://www.devirtuoso.com/2009/09/making-a-3d-engine-in-jquery/ – blew my mind-hole.  This is sweet, some day when I wrap my head around this, I’m going to build something spectacularly useless (not that this is, cos it’s awesome, but whatever I build won’t have a use).
http://labs.pimsworld.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/demo-content-aware-image-resizing-2/ – I love liquid scaling, mix that with jQuery and boom! instant awesome!
http://woork.blogspot.com/2009/09/jquery-visual-cheat-sheet.html – another jQ cheat sheet (the pdf is hosted at box.net, so your work proxy may block it).
http://www.marcofolio.net/webdesign/create_a_better_jquery_stylesheet_switcher.html – Sometimes switching the stylesheet is fun, I didn’t read this, but it sounded like it would explain how to do that.

-= HTML & Javascript =-

http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/html-5-and-css3-cheat-sheets-collection/ – cheatsheets are your friend, and I like to spread the buzz on html5 and css3
http://monc.se/kitchen/59/scalable-css-buttons-using-png-and-background-colors – Pretty cool way to make scalable css buttons… does contain ie hacks
http://ajaxian.com/archives/doloto-the-javascript-optimizer-released-by-microsoft-research – Doloto, uses eval, which everyone claims is evil, and its by m$, so yeah, probably evil
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/09/22/google-turns-internet-explorer-into-chrome-yes-seriously/ – awesome! integrate chrome into IE! this solves sooo many problems
http://iwebskel.com/ – A pre-packed ready-to-go collection of web resources to you can uncompress and get coding (comes with a few thousand icons, and your choice of mootools or prototype) I’ve been using my own version of this for months (only bundled with jQ )
http://piwik.org/ – free analytics suite, has an air app that hooks into it so you can keep an eye on your stats without logging into the site (I haven’t tried it yet, but since woopra just left beta, maybe it’s time for me to switch).
http://ajaxian.com/archives/yui-3-is-out – YUI 3 has dropped (and if you’re not using prototype, google whatever, or of course jQuery, you can now rejoice
http://code.google.com/p/pinwheel/ – Awesome Prototype/Scriptaculous effect… ok jQ guru’s rip this apart and make me a plugin (cos I’m lazy and don’t want to)!
http://g.raphaeljs.com/ – Charting lib, not bad, fairly simple, and generates the content in vml, so it works across most browsers (including the demon ie6)

-= Miscellaneous Links =-

http://www.tripwiremagazine.com/tools/flash/13-essential-flash-video-and-audio-players-for-your-website-or-blog.html – Nice assortment of commercial and cheap-as-free media players for your site.
http://www.tripwiremagazine.com/tools/tools/55-seriously-useful-front-end-web-developer-cheat-sheets.html – Who doesn’t need more cheat-sheets?
http://www.tutoriallounge.com/2009/09/25-overwhelming-adobe-after-effects-tutorials/ – After Effects is very cool, and well if you have it, these may come in handy.
http://speckyboy.com/2009/09/15/45-cool-google-android-apps-the-perfect-iphone-replacement/ – I’m eye-balling the HTC Hero when it drops in a month or two at sprint, so I found this article rather informative
http://ajaxian.com/archives/talk-like-a-pirate-day-is-coming-heres-a-script-to-join-the-fun – by the time this post hits the net, this will be old news, but you can use the bookmarklet now for fun.
http://setmy.browsersize.com/ – This has some bookmarklets for screen resizing (useful if developing on a platform with out developer tools) (thanks Kat)
http://www.fuelyourinterface.com/how-to-use-textures-better-than-you-used-to/ – not a bad little photoshop tutorial on using textures… I’ll admit, I get lazy with them sometimes and just layer them in, nice to see a more in-depth approach.
http://www.w3avenue.com/2009/09/28/definitive-list-of-free-wordpress-theme-frameworks/ – It’s been a while since I posted anything about wordpress, so here are some ‘frameworks’ for wordpress that help you build your own theme/template
http://inspiks.com/2009/08/26/best-of-the-web-for-free-applications/ – Web Apps, who doesn’t need a good list of them?
http://cookbooks.adobe.com/home – Need adobe snippets? this is adobe newly branded hotness of snippetry
http://www.neilturner.me.uk/2005/02/05/quickly_compress_png_images.html – So this is 4 years old, but when I learn new things I like to pass them on, and this is pretty cool, remember though, there are many options for png crushing (punypng, smush.it, etc)
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Noupe/~3/ZEQQi8lbCTM/fresh-web-development-goodies-bag.html – Good list of tools for the web developer
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1743 – Firefox addon to view information about page requests (page size, #of requests, length of requests, etc)
http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_WebScarab_Project – WebScarab is a http/https testing tool that can help you find holes in your security and fix them. It runs as a proxy and will show you GET, POSTS, etc.  Built from Java, so you can run it just about anywhere…
http://code.google.com/p/pinwheel/ – Awesome Prototype/Scriptaculous effect… ok jQ guru’s rip this apart and make me a plugin (cos I’m lazy and don’t want to.. well now I’m too busy)!
http://g.raphaeljs.com/ – Charting lib, not bad, fairly simple, and generates the content in vml, so it works across most browsers (including the demon ie6)

In the end the simple answer I found, on the same page linked to above, was to encode the file as a Base64 string and put it in the request like a normal string. Then on the service side it is simply decoded.

For example:
On the client side:

String base64Encoding = Base64.encode(byteArrayFromFile); 
.
.
.
//In the XML request
.append("<ns1:encodedFile>")
    .append(base64Encoding)
.append("</ns1:encodedFile>")

And then in the service:

String base64String = request.getEncodedFile();
byte[] byteArray = Base64.decode(base64String);

And then with the byteArray you can save it or do whatever you need.