For the spillover

Harmony is a new drawing tool, a HTML5/Canvas experiment with great potential. It provides some unique brush styles, and can produce some great-looking charcoal pencil style sketches, among other things. Better to try it out than explain it in words.

Creator Mr. Doob (Richard Cabello) explains how he used Canvas to make it darker the more you draw over it:

The whole thing is quite modular so I can keep adding more brush styles whenever I get inspired. During the process I found out that, for some reason (apparently lack of hardware acceleration), Firefox and Opera do not support context.globalCompositeOperation = ‘darker’. This was on the HTML5 spec before but got removed. Just so you know what I’m talking about, this is like the “multiply” blending in Photoshop. Webkit does support it tho. I hope they put it back on the specs and all browsers support it.

You can also save images using data URI encoding.

As it works on webkit, he made sure it worked on the mobile Android and iPhone browsers. No multi-touch as yet, but the touch UI still makes a nice input mechanism.

(Thanks FND)

GorillaPod, the bendy tripods you know and love, just announced its newest version: GorillaPod Magnetic. This guy has magnets on each of its feet, allowing you to stick it to pretty much any magnetic surface.

Of course, it’ll still work without sticking to a surface, as it’s still a normal GorillaPod above the feet. But if you feel the need to have your camera attached to the side of your car door, well, now you’ve got the ability to. It’ll be available in April.

I don't know how to best sum up Infinitec's new "flash drive" in a headline—which is obvious at this point. But what it can do is pretty unique, once you wrap your head around it.

Infinitec has created a USB stick that contains an 802.11n module capable of creating an ad hoc network through any device’s USB port. But on the receiving end, it appears as nothing more complicated than a flash drive.

In other words, you can stream media to devices that aren’t necessarily so thrilled with you streaming media. Placed in a DVD player, for instance, you need not worry about the player’s supported network standards or your PC’s sharing settings. Just set the Infinitec stick to anywhere from 1GB to 1TB+ (depending on how much storage you expect your player to support), then load MPEG4s right from the stick…streamed from your PC loaded with accompanying software.

I could see several uses for Infinitec's little device—namely, adding a media extender to any room that has a TV with a USB port. That is, if the price is right whenever it eventually comes out. [Engadget]

Alan sez, “A great, but slightly disturbing, look at how pervasive green-screening has become in simply every scene in television these days. Pretty much everything you think is outdoors is faked, at least to some degree. I particularly like the faked ferry fire…”

Stargate Studios Virtual Backlot Reel 2009

(Thanks, Alan!)

Although CSS is generally considered a simple and straightforward language, sometimes it requires creativity, skill and a bit of experimentation. The good news is that designers and developers worldwide often face similar problems and choose to share their insights and workarounds with the wider community.

This is where we come in. We are always looking to collect such articles for our posts so that we can deliver the most useful and relevant content to our readers. In this post, we present an overview of useful CSS/jQuery coding tips, tricks and techniques for visual effects, layouts and web form design to help you find solutions to the problems you are dealing with or will have to deal with in future.

You may want to look at similar CSS-related posts that we published last months:

• 45 Powerful CSS and JavaScript Techniques
• 50 Brilliant CSS3/JavaScript Coding Techniques
• 5 Useful Coding Solutions For Designers And Developers

[Offtopic: By the way, did you know that Smashing Magazine has a mobile version? Try it out if you have an iPhone, Blackberry or another capable device.]

CSS Layouts: Techniques And Workarounds

Facebook Style Footer Admin Panel
Learn how to re-create the Facebook footer admin panel with CSS and jQuery. Also check out part 2.

Adaptable View: How Do They Do It?
This tutorial explains how to manually change a layout, and it shows two great examples and “how they did it.”

Easy Display Switch with CSS and jQuery
A quick and simple way to enable users to switch page layouts using CSS and jQuery.

Quick Tip – Resizing Images Based On Browser…

GMAIL USERS: We hope you’ll join the discussion over on Mashable’s Google Buzz account.

We’ve discussed how you can integrate Buzz with your other social networks, but what about integrating Buzz with your blog? If you use a self-hosted WordPress blog (sorry, WordPress.com users), there are already a variety of Google Buzz plugins and add-ons available.

While it’s clear that people are really taking to using Buzz to share content and communicate, the service will undoubtedly reach more users as its sharing tools are integrated into other social sites. From buttons to social stream in your side bar, here’s how you can integrate Buzz with your WordPress blog.

Google Buzz Buttons

Mashable started sporting some nifty Buzz buttons a few days ago and lots of our readers have wanted to know how to add a similar feature to their own blogs. As it stands right now, how our Google Buzz buttons work (and how the buttons other sites are using also work) is that they create a share link from that post to Google Reader. As long as Google Reader is connected with your Google Buzz account, your publicly shared items will also be shared on Buzz.

Already, a number of enterprising WordPress plugin developers have answered the call to add Google Buzz buttons to WordPress posts.

Let’s take a look:

Google Buzz Button

Internet Techies created the Google Buzz Button plugin that allows you to add a “Buzz This” button to each of your WordPress posts. That icon probably looks pretty familiar — that’s because the button was designed here at…

The short answer is “as much as you need”. The more tactical answer is “as much as you can raise cheaply”. The latter is a pragmatic view. Raise more than you need when times are good. Just because you raise it does not mean you need to spend it – capital efficiency is always good!

In this post I look at what VC are saying SaaS ventures need to raise to get to scale and profitability. But I’ll also look at what VC are doing – what SaaS deals they are funding currently. I look at the capital efficiency drivers, what you can do to reduce your need for capital. And finally, I show you which VC are active in SaaS today.

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What Are VC Saying?

The answer according to Bruce Cleveland of Interwest is about $40m.

Take that seriously. Cleveland is a SaaS specialist with serious operational experience who has done his research on this subject. But as he points out, the details matter. There are two points of caution:

1. This is looking in the rear view mirror at ventures funded some time ago that did an IPO in 2007 or earlier. It is a different world today – less capital available and less need for capital.
2. VC are happy with models that require a lot of capital. Capital is what they have to offer and if you need a lot they are in the driving seat.

Lets look at the operational details, the capital efficiency drivers, in a minute. First, lets see what VC are…

Earlier today Venture Hacks announced the launch of the AngelList – a curated list of angel investors with an interest in early-stage funding pitches. According to a blog post by Venture Hacks cofounder Babak Nivi, legendary investors like FF Fund angel Dave McClure, Techstars’ Brad Feld and SoftTech VC’s Jeff Clavier are among the site’s first participants. ReadWriteStart caught up with Nivi to find out why he was moved to create the resource.

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“Entrepreneurs are always asking us if we know any angel investors.” He says, “It’s one of the most common questions in the startup world. So we decided to make a list of the ones we know and also open it to ones we didn’t know. We also needed a place to keep track of the angels we know for our own reference. Hence AngelList!”

Anyone who has made $25,000 dollars in investments in 2009 and plans to do the same in 2010 is eligible to apply for the list. Participating investors receive information on three vetted startups per week and a place on the Venture Hacks blog and AngelList Twitter account. While some Angels may shy from displaying their contact info to the public, the list is actually a much better way to manage the pitch process as entrepreneurs are made well aware of investor objectives and interests. Startups can browse the site for contact information, investment criteria, trusted referrers and an investor’s current portfolio.

Explains Nivi, “Entrepreneurs spend a lot of time trying to get intros to investors – even the…

The iPhone Dev Team has put the latest redsn0w jailbreaking tool up for your downloading pleasure, for use with iPhones and iPod Touches running OS versions 3.0 and 3.1.2. [Redsn0w via SlashGear]