The first thing I have to do is welcome Kip Hughs to our small team.  Kip joins as a developer with a nice set of skills and talents that he has developed over years of working in the industry as both part of major development projects and freelance work for American clients once he moved to NZ.  I am sure that the new thinking he brings will compliment the wonderful approach that Hesky has developed to our work in the past two years.

Many of you will know that we don’t employ designers on our team, preferring to work with designers who bring their own unique design skills to each job that we collaboratively work on.  Over the years we have worked with Ruth at Wandering Stars and Shane at Creative Organisim.  Recently we started working with the design team at Media 41 and look forward to helping them bring some of their client projects to life on the web.

As well as expanding the team, we have moved our team to the Ironbank building in K’Road.  The small group that we operated with has joined The Business Dojo, a collective of small businesses who compliment each other.  The shift is an exciting change and we are looking forward to some great creative stimulus with the extra people in our environment.

And then there are our client projects.  The team have been working on a number of current client projects, updating and making improvements.  We have been helping clients with their social media strategy and starting a number of new assignments with new clients.  A nice simple job was created for Greggs and went live last week.  Of course you can keep up with the projects on our Blink website and our facebook fan page.

We have several other plans on the drawing board for Blink during the coming year, including more in the Social Media Strategy arena with links to a new partner - Buzz Numbers.  More on these items as the come to fruition.

As you look forward with some excitement to the year ahead, make sure you contact us when you need to upgrade any aspect of your web site and interactive strategy.  And of course, if you hear of someone that wants some web work done, please feel free to refer them to us.

Please contact us, or leave comments.

Released in 2001, Internet Explorer 6, a.k.a IE6, turns 9 this year, and sadly yet there is still a column for it on our support list. However, Google said they are going to phasing out their support of IE6 from March 2010, starting with Google Docs and Sites. Later on this year, Google will phase out support for IE6 for GMail and Google Calender, according to Google’s notice email to all Google Apps administrators.

Dear Google Apps admin,​

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.  We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.  We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your Google Appsproduct or account.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

This is an aggressive move on the part of Google that advances the field and will ultimately benefit everybody.

Facebook also started to phase out IE6 by displaying a “You may want to upgrade your browser” message when someone using IE6 wanted to access the new Facebook design.

IE6 visitors to YouTube are now confronted with a red warning bar with download links for alternative browsers.

We believe there will be more websites following these internet giant to abandon the sinking IE6 ship.

So if you’re using IE6, we think it’s a good time to upgrade it or choose an alternative browser. There are numbers of choices: Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera. All these browsers support bookmarks/favorites migration, that you can use to easily import your bookmarks/favorites from IE6. They have more decent features and are better compliant with modern web standards, which means you will have a better web browser experience.

Free free to leave your comment, no matter if you agree or disagree with us. Share with us what do you think of the sites prompting with upgrade messages,  or maybe tell us about what you love about IE6 if it’s a choice or you’re restricted by your IT department. We’d love to hear from you!

Cufón’s font generator converts fonts to SVG font then to VML paths then finally into JSON with JavaScript functions. Cufón renders VML shapes for IE which natively supports VML, and another render engine use HTML5 <canvas> element. While it might sound very complicated, the font generator is fully automated  and it has been prove that the performance of the renderer is very fast.

Now let’s see how you could get it running in just a few minutes.

Step 1 - Download Cufón

Step 2 - Generate a font

If you want your replaced font displays as bold or italic, you need to upload separate files for them.

Choosing all available glyphs is highly unrecommended, we found the combination of Uppercase + Lowercase + Numerals + Punctuation + Wordpress punctuation does most of the jobs. If you are unsure you can always start from the minimal combination and add more glyphs if problem occurs.

The rest options are fine on default. Make sure you agree with the laws and the terms then you’re good to submit the form and download. Simply repeat step 2 for other fonts that you want to use.

Step 3 - Prepare your HTML and replace text

Make sure your cufón-enabled pages are UTF-8 or US-ASCII encoded.

Add the main Cufón and the font JavaScript files into the HTML HEAD section.

Call the magic “replace” method. For example, we want to replace all the <h1> headings.

If you’re using some JavaScript frameworks such as jQuery or mootools, make sure you include the framework before Cufón and the elements selectors such as #header h1:first-child will work in the replace function.

You can use multiple fonts by specifying the fontFamily attribute with the font name you entered in Step 2.

Now it should work for Chrome, FireFox, Safari and Opera, however there is still one little tweak for Internet Explorer. Call Cufon.now() right before the closing </body> tag and Google Analytics or any other external scripts.

Complete

Yes, that’s it. Your HTML should look something like below.

Maxwellrodgers Fabrics has achieved global success in providing high performance fabric products for commercial applications and the hospitality industry since early 1980’s. The company needed an appealing new site to display the extensive range of products to current, and prospective customers.

Blink custom-built a content management system to allow the client to keep the fabric ranges up to date without having to come back to the Blink team to make updates.  Whether it’s updating the fabric details, announcing the latest news and events, or managing registered users, the team at Maxwellrogers can do it themselves without the need for any ‘geek’ skills.

Designed Ruth Osborne of Wandering Stars, the site is a refreshing palette of colours that serves to highlight the Fabrics, and is clearly laid out with a simple navigation system.

Technical aspects of the site - the site is built on the Symfony development framework with supports of jQuery, TwinHelix IE PNG Fix.  Blink also ensured the site is search engine optimized and web standards compliant.

Visit www.maxwellrodgers.com

Yes, we have redesigned our site, and added a blog. We hope you like it.

Optimistically, by creating this blog, we can have some motivation to share some interesting things with you and gain a better presence on the web.

Not only interesting things we will been blogging, but also everything about the web - business strategy, design experiences, development tricks, code snippets, technology gossip and much much more. If you like these topics, watch this space.  Also feel free to leave your comments, even disagreement. Your feedback is encouraged and appreciated.

While building the blog, we also facelift the website a little bit, while still keep the simplicity. We hope you like it.  Thank Wordpress for the easy-to-use blogging platform. We also recommend a cool font replacement Cufón. Hopefully we will write a step-by-step guide of using cufon later soon.

I invite you to follow us on twitter, subscribe to the feed or join us on facebook.

Thanks for visiting!