WebDev3000 » Forms

Surface iPhone UI Kit

Codrut Nistor — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 06:06:12 +0000

Still having some problems with your iPhone development work? Well, I guess there’s nothing out of this world, since nothing’s that simple when it comes to programming stuff for the iPhone/iPad or the iPod. Fortunately, there are plenty of great tools available for free, so if you want to ease your life, you don’t really have to start paying for tools that can help you. Today, the time has come to tell you a few words about Surface iPhone UI Kit, so let’s get to it, shall we?

This excellent freebie know as Surface iPhone UI Kit was designed to cover all the common UI elements of the iPhone, being one hell of a choice for those in need to quickly design user interfaces of iPhone apps. Also great for wireframing, Surface iPhone UI Kit includes two PSD files – one for the Retina resolution and one for standard (pre iPhone 4) resolution. More than just that, you can also mess with the set and obtain interface elements that can be easily used to “dress” iPad apps, even programs built to run on Android and Windows phones!

Other than the above, I think there’s nothing much left to be said – after all, designing a user interface is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, so… start sweating with Surface iPhone UI Kit, will you? Good luck!

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iPhorm

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 18:45:39 +0000

Wow, I found something that has a name Apple would sue for, yet it’s still on the market! I hope that doesn’t happen anytime soon, because I really love the way “iPhorm” sounds. For example, think about what happened when Microsoft forced Windows Commander to change its name to Total Commander. Bastards! I only hope Apple won’t come to turn iPhorm into TotalPhorm or something like that…

… because I really like iPhorm the way it is: “a simple yet powerful ajax contact form that you can easily embed into any web page in a matter of minutes” and nothing more. Well, there may be something more than the average basic contact form, since iPhorm does everything without reloading the page, offering support for virtually all the browsers that matter these days – IE7/8, Firefox 3.x, Safari 4/5, Opera and, finally, Google Chrome.

Requiring PHP 5.x, iPhorm is really easy to install on any webpage and fully customizable, offering 4 layouts, captcha verification, jQuery effects, form validation & filtering and, of course, extensive documentation. After all, you gotta get a lot for your money, right? Yeah, I know, this one may not be free, but it’s not that expensive, either – a regular license is $6, while an extended one sells for $30.

That’s all for this week, folks! Have a nice weekend!

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HTMLform.com

Codrut Nistor — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 18:47:25 +0000

This is no secret, but I never told you about it so far – I am moderating the IT section of a general-purpose forum. Nothing out of this world, just a medium-sized forum reached by a few thousand users daily. Strange enough, even there people started to come up with various questions I wouldn’t expect on such a forum, and a few users there asked about creating forms for their sites. These being said, it should be no surprise that I finally decided to tell you about HTMLform, right?

HTMLform.com makes things really easy – no configuration/programming needed for your HTML form to work, the code generated thanks to this online service is all yours, using it is completely free, and you even get email notifications and a basic data tool that allows export to CSV or Excel files. Awesome!

More than the above, think about these: HTMLform can generate forms in any language, offering support for any character set (100% Unicode, baby!!!), the code generated is XHTML 1.0 strict compliant, completely commented and, even better, the CSS files are totally editable, not to mention the rather obvious fact that you get cross browser compatible code and that can be easily embedded in any HTML page you can think of, including those in websites created using WordPress, Joomla, Drupal or any other CMS you may have ever heard of.

The official page of this product has more than you’ll ever get from most of its competitors, including a well done tutorial, examples, FAQ, a support forum and, to make it all easier, you don’t even need to sign up to get started, so since everything’s free, in case you need a form… you know what to use, right? That’s all, folks!

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LightForm

Codrut Nistor — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:45:34 +0000

Keeping the bond between you and your readers/clients alive is the key to success when talking about Web-based businesses, but that’s only the second part of it. Even harder is to create that close relationship I mentioned above, and while I can’t really help you with that one, I am sure that a contact form can help you keeping it all alive…

… despite the fact we’re talking about a piece of code that seems to have reached the end of its days, unfortunately. Well, the good part is that LightForm is still a very useful piece of code, and so I hope it won’t fall into oblivion anytime soon.

LightForm is a free Ajax/PHP contact form that brings together FormCheck 1.2(MIT license) for the validation parts, and NiceForms(no specific licensing terms) to style text areas and fields. Since it even includes a basic spam protection method, I think it should come in handy for a lot of people, but the problem is that, as I said, LightForm reached its final version, and no future releases will arrive. Even more, any kind of support from its programmer is also out of question…

… so if you can live with all the bad things above, you should give LightForm a try. To me, it really looks like a contact form script worth trying, especially since it’s free and has spam protection, the two thing I can’t live without when it comes to contact forms. Oh, yeah, the additional code coming with the components mentioned above is covered by the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution v2.5 license!

Compatibility: as long as your visitors are using a JavaScript-capable browser, everything should be fine, so adding a warning about script blockers in your contact page could be a good idea (demo available here)

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AJAX Hotel Reservation Form

Codrut Nistor — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 10:02:58 +0000

When I think about hotel reservation forms, I suppose such things can’t be available as free source code, since we’re not talking about the next door bakery here – hotels should have enough money to put into some expensive website, right? Well… I guess the Internet almost managed to prove me wrong once again, since AJAX Hotel Reservation Form is exactly what I wasn’t exactly hoping to see – an excellent piece of (almost) free source code for those working on any kind of Web project involving hotel reservations!

Last week, the second major revision of this script arrived, providing a wide array of features, including the ability to use skins (12 available for now, probably more to come in the future). Unfortunately, this isn’t as good as expected, because there’s a price that comes with all those 12 skins…

… so let me tell you the truth about the price – to get the whole set of skins, you’ll have to purchase the full version of Hotel Reservation Form, and that will make your pockets $50 lighter.

On the other hand, the Lite version comes with 3 skins, and also displays a trial message, but for small sites on a very tight budget… I don’t think this can be that bad, don’t you think?

At last, a few words about requirements – basically, this needs any kind of PHP capable Web server (Apache, for example), and while it has quite a few dependencies (ButtonReplacement.JS, Web 2.0 AJAX Loading Panel, jquery-1.3.2.js or jquery-1.3.2.min.js, as well as a few others), they are all included in the distribution file.

Compatibility: according to the official product page (see link in the first paragraph), Hotel Reservation Form works with Internet Explorer 6/7/8, Mozilla FireFox 2/3, Opera 9/10 Beta, Google Chrome 1, Safari 3/4 Beta (I checked and it also works with Google Chrome 2, so probably even less popular browsers will work great with it)

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