Lowter - New Content

Review: Opera 10

Ethan Poole — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 19:02:19 -0400

Opera Software officially released Opera 10 last Tuesday, which features a refined visual interface, the Turbo compression technology, a customisable Speed Dial, and more. Now that I have been active…

First Look at Adobe BrowserLab

Ethan Poole — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:16:32 -0400

Last month, Adobe released BrowserLab, an online tool to help web developers easily preview their websites in multiple web browsers without needing to have each browser installed. You simply input yo…

Time to Ditch Internet Explorer 6?

Ethan Poole — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 08:25:17 -0400

Youtube have announced this week that they will not be supporting Internet Explorer 6 in future development. Instead, they encourage IE6 users to upgrade to Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 8, or Moz…

We'll Miss You XHTML 2

Ethan Poole — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 10:44:39 -0400

XHTML 2002 - 2009 The W3C officially announced last week (2 July 2009) that they will not be renewing the charter for the XHTML 2 Working Group at the end of 2009. Their objective is to increase t…

Opera Unite Solves the Problems of "the Cloud"

Ethan Poole — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:39:35 -0400

Opera Unite Opera Software have today launched Opera Unite, an innovative technology that allows users to share files, photos, music, and more without the use of a third-party service. Using web-s…

Opera 10 Beta Released

Ethan Poole — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 09:49:52 -0400

Opera Software have yesterday released Opera 10 Beta, a preview of the next version of the Opera web browser. For the average consumer, this beta release includes a redesigned interface (by the infam…

MinneWebCon 2009

Ethan Poole — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 22:26:29 -0400

I had the privilege yesterday to attend MinneWebCon 2009, a conference for web developers held at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities. MinneWebCon was my first web-development conference a…

Internet Explorer 8 Released by Microsoft

Ethan Poole — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 17:00:50 -0400

Microsoft officially released Internet Explorer 8 to the world last Thursday. Even though IE7 still feels rather new in the web development world, due to its rather slow adoption, IE8 is the first ma…

Photoshop: Apple-style Glassy Reflections

Ethan Poole — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:18:33 -0400

Apple's design and style has permeated throughout the web development world. It is apparent in the current web design trend, especially in the Web 2.0 movement. The current Apple-influenced web trend includes excessive gradients, glassy reflections, spinning pinwheels, and more. In this tutorial, I am going to guide you through creating Apple-style glassy reflections in Adobe Photoshop. This effect can add a nice, sexy touch to your website if done in the appropriate locations, such as a large banner or a logo.

Apple Previews iPhone OS 3.0

Ethan Poole — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:52:15 -0400

Apple iPhone OS 3.0 Apple held a press event at their headquarters in Cupertino earlier today to unveil the iPhone OS's third iteration. The updated iPhone OS actually brings a lot of the function…

Opera Goes Turbo

Matt Oakes — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 05:01:27 -0400

About a month ago, Opera announced Opera Turbo. Opera Turbo is a piece of software that runs on the Opera server in between you and the Internet. It compresses website data by as much as 80% and then…

In-depth Comparison of Web Browsers at MaximumPC

Ethan Poole — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:19:15 -0400

There are a lot of web browsers on the market today, with a lot of marketing text and hidden agendas clouding any real evaluation of each browser. Even at Lowter, we heavily lean towards Opera. All …

Re-evaluating Safari 4

Ethan Poole — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 22:24:52 -0400

A few weeks ago, Matt posted about Apple's announcement of Safari 4 Beta. Now that Safari 4 has been around for a few weeks, it is time to re-evaluate it, without the glimmer that a new piece of soft…

Obama Appoints CIO and FCC Chairman

Ethan Poole — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 21:37:04 -0500

Yesterday, President Obama officially announced that Vivek Kundra would serve as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) at the White House. The CIO is "responsible for oversight of federal technology sp…

SourceForge.net Adds Support for Git

Ethan Poole — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:04:43 -0500

Late last week SourceForge.net announced support for Git - a distributed revision control system - to complement their existing offerings of SVN and CVS. Git is a free distributed revision control sy…

Quickstart Guide to SQLite in PHP5

Matt Oakes — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 16:14:27 -0500

PHP5 includes a built-in SQLite extension that allows you to store data in a database without a standalone database server! Say good-bye to the pesky accompanying MySQL database server that you had to run alongside PHP. SQLite can help you to make your applications more portable, to avoid pesky file-based storage, and more! In this article, Matt goes through the basics you need to get started using SQLite in your PHP applications today!

Sprockets: JavaScript Dependency Management and Concatenation

Ethan Poole — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 10:22:03 -0500

Sam Stephenson of 37signals has released Sprockets, a Ruby library that helps to organise multiple JavaScript files neatly into one single, deployable file. Sprockets takes multiple JavaScript files …

Apple Releases Safari 4 Beta

Matt Oakes — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 23:20:41 -0500

Apple have suddenly released a beta version of Safari 4, their web browser, which they seem to be marketing as the latest version that people should use, so it must be fairly stable at the minute. Th…

Opera Teams Up with Yahoo! and Vodafone

Ethan Poole — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 18:24:36 -0500

Some cool news came from Opera Software this week, who announced partnerships with both Yahoo! and Vodafone. First, Yahoo! Mobile is going to include an integrated version of Opera Mini, allowing the…

Do We Really Need Proprietary CSS Properties?

Ethan Poole — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:55:22 -0500

Recently, I was working on a project that utilised Webkit's CSS transforms to create a cool effect as a little extra to anyone viewing the page in Safari. Firefox 3.1 will also introduce CSS transfor…

Micro-optimisations in PHP

Douglas Brunner — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 21:26:31 -0500

I'm nearing the time when I need to start benchmarking the code of a project I'm working on and I have been browsing around the web for some various tips on optimising PHP code. So far I've come acro…

Sitepoint Bushfire Relief Sale

Matt Oakes — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 05:24:07 -0500

Sitepoint is one of the largest web development communities on the Internet. As well as publishing many articles and blogs on their website, they also offer full books about web development. They ar…

Google Analytics App for iPhone

Ethan Poole — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 12:47:25 -0500

Three sample screenshots of the Analytics App Google Analytics is one of the better services available to track the traffic on your website. Any passionate webmaster, like myself, is constantly ch…

TextMate Theme for Web Developers

Ethan Poole — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:28:29 -0500

For those of you using the popular code editor TextMate, I have come across a great theme that is geared towards web developers. Zachary Johnson has developed a TextMate theme just for web developmen…

50 Useful PHP Tools

Matt Oakes — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:14:45 -0500

Awhile ago, I found a nice web development website called Smashing Magazine. The vast majority of their content consists of top 10, top 50, and top 100 lists of information and tools that are of inte…