Grey strip for Monitor test- if your monitor is calibrated, you should to be able to distinguish all 20 grays. I can't.
I bought Dell ST2310 23 Inch Full HD Widescreen Monitor for $169.00. It is a pretty good monitor and I have to say I got a great deal on it (Market value is supposedly $229.99). But, I am not happy with it. No matter how I set my color/balance and calibration (from System Preferences -> Displays -> Color), I’d lose some color details. When I do PhotoShop work on this monitor (and I did spend fortune buying my MacPro, and Adobe CS…) and looking at the image with my other computers or computer at work, the is always slightly off, such as losing detail or washed out or dark is too dark too quickly (therefore can’t see the subtle color changes), or worse, I thought I was fading it to white but it was actually not white so the extended background have white box and looks really bad… This has been bothering me for a while now, and more I spend time with this new monitor, I notice little things, like white color text on black background is very hard to read on this monitor etc. This and especially the latest trends in web design is very subtle drop shadow and patterns or gradients that you may or may not notice at a glance.
Sure I would love to have bought Apple LED Cinema Display (24″ flat panel). While I can’t spend $900 on a monitor, me totally going opposite by going waaay cheap, and buying cheapest possible monitor was a stupid move. In Japanese, Yasumono Gai No Zeni Unshinai (Buyer of cheap things, loser of money) or in English, penny wise and pound foolish. Yep, that is me.
So, to compensate for this my self invited bad situation, I am struggling to try to improve accuracy of the monitor. Here are some of the links that I found (sort of) useful.
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Great tutorial on hide/show divs using jQuery
jQuery for designers have very good and simple step-by-step tutorial on how to show/hide divs using ids. It is a tutorial for tabs, but don’t have to use it as tabs. It’s nice. I used this technique to create a simple JavaScript driven “NFL Camp report” at my company (link to come when the project goes live.) I’ve also used Q-Tip jquery plugin for this project.
Speaking of jQuery, I haven’t had time to check out yet, but I’ve meaning to read Rebecca Murphy’s Open-Source jQuery Training Curriculum “jQuery Fundamentals”. Sounds really interesting. Probably good for someone like me who is so hack that don’t have fundamentals…
Also, not related to jQuery so much, but here is my latest Flash/ActionScript project, a sortable 2010 Boston Red Sox schedule. I got a shout out from Boston Globe Red Sox Writer Peter Abraham, I am stoked!