Pixel Deep

Glimpse Into The Future – Firefox 5 + IE 10 News / Previews Roundup

admin — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 18:48:33 +0000

Although Microsoft and Mozilla released new versions of their browsers (Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4, respectively), its safe to say that neither company is resting on its laurels.

Although Firefox 5 beta is coming only in May (with the final version scheduled for June release), you can try pre-beta release right now – just head over to this page.

And you can also try out IE10 Platform Preview 1.

Here’s a selection of recent news/updates on both browsers:

Internet Explorer 10 Drops Vista Support (PCMag)

Microsoft Previews Internet Explorer 10 (InfoMag)

Internet Explorer 10 Is Coming (Practical eCommerce)

Microsoft MIXed Messages On Silverlight, Internet Explorer 10 (ReadWriteHack)

IE 10 Sneak Preview (Redmondmag)

First Take: IE 10 Platform Preview 1 (ZDNet)

Mozilla Kicks Off Firefox 5, Faster Release Schedule (Computerworld)

Aurora Lets You Try Firefox 5 Now (Pocket-lint)

Firefox 5 May Get Social Sharing, Account Manager (PCMag)

Firefox 5 Nearly 2 Months Away (TIME Techland)

Firefox 5 Beta Scheduled For May 17 (Conceivably Tech)

Firefox 5 Ready To Hit The Market This June 21st (Ubergizmo)

Visual Inspiration / Local Events – Elegant Enigmas (Boston Atheanaeum) + The Record (ICA)

admin — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 18:04:05 +0000

Get Shareaholic

Two local events that no one with even the passing interest in art/design can afford to miss…

Elegant Enigmas: The Art Of Edward Gorey is an exhibition of work by Edward St. John Gorey – world-famous eccentric, illustrator and author, known for such hilarious/macabre works as “Gashlycrumb Tinies“.

Carnivorous plants, falling masonry, and uninvited guests fill the imaginary world of artist and author Edward Gorey. His stories and accompanying illustrations maintain a delicate balance between the hilarious and the horrific.

Gorey’s voracious consumption of literature, his love of the ballet, and his off beat and wry view of the world resulted in a sardonic and witty oeuvre. This exhibition explores the diversity of Gorey’s art through original pen and ink illustrations, preparatory sketches, unpublished drawings, and ephemera. Drawn from the holdings of the Gorey Charitable Trust, the exhibition comprises approximately 180 objects, including selections from The Gashlycrumb Tinies, The Unstrung Harp, The Gilded Bat, and other well-known Gorey publications.

Visit Boston Athenaeum for more info. The admission is $5 and the exhibit will be open until June 4.

The Record: Contemporary Art And Vinyl exhibit (ICA) explores the “influence of vinyl record on visual art”.

This spring, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston opens The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, the first museum exhibition to explore the culture of vinyl records within the history of contemporary art. Bringing together artists from around the world who have worked with records as their subject or medium, this groundbreaking exhibition examines the record’s transformative power from the 1960s to the present. Through sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, photography, sound work, video and performance, The Record combines contemporary art with outsider art, audio with visual, and fine art with popular culture. On view at the ICA from April 15 through Sept. 5, the exhibition features 99 works by 33 artists, including Jasper Johns, Ed Ruscha, Laurie Anderson, Christian Marclay and Carrie Mae Weems. The Record was organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and is accompanied by a 240-page color catalogue.

Visit ICA for more info. The show runs through September 5.

Weekly HTML5 News (Apr. 4 – Apr. 11)

admin — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 12:40:22 +0000

Get Shareaholic

In this weeks edition – news from Microsoft, Tweetdeck being launched as HTML5 web app and much more!

Microsoft’s IE9 Unlocks HTML5 (InformationWeek)

A Few Key Questions About HTML5 Video (ZDNet)

Microsoft: Silverlight 5 Beta Next Week, Focus Is Still On HTML5 (TechSpot)

Tweetdeck To Launch As HTML5 Web App, Now Accepting Beta Testers (AOL Tech)

Bing Begins Roll Out Of HTML-5 Enhanced Search Interface (AOL Tech)

How HTML5 Will Kill The Native App (MobileBeat)

Web Design News & Tutorials Roundup (Apr. 2 – Apr. 9)

admin — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 16:16:02 +0000

Get Shareaholic

In this week’s edition – CSS button recipes, the cicada principle (and its relation to web design) and so much more!

6 Useful CSS Button Recipes That You Can Paste (Design Shack)

The Cicada Principle And Why It Matters To Web Designers (Design Festival)

The Best Web Design Goodies Of The Week #5 (InspiredMag)

Image Manipulation With jQuery and PHP GD (Smashing Magazine)

The Most Important CSS3 Properties Explained (Onextrapixel)

Beginner’s Guide To WordPress Plugin Development (Hongkiat)

Visual Inspiration – April 2011 Calendars From Smashing Mag / Misc. Artists

admin — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 14:54:35 +0000

Get Shareaholic

A collection of calendars for a month of April – from Smashing Magazine and the artists who sent their submissions.

We always try our best to challenge your artistic abilities and produce some interesting, beautiful and creative artwork. And as designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one — desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. This creativity mission has been going on for almost two years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month.

We continue to nourish you with a monthly spoon of inspiration. This post features 35 free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for April 2011. Both versions with a calendar and without a calendar can be downloaded for free. It’s time to freshen up your wallpaper!

Note – you can send your own wallpaper to Smashing Mag. Read more here.

Pablo Cesar by Inet-Design (Denmark)

Usher In The Year Of Rabbit by Siewhui (Singapore)

Fool’s Day by Olivia Osik (Estonia)

To see all the wallpapers, go here and/or visit Smashing Magazine.

Weekly HTML5 News Roundup (Mar. 29 – Apr. 5)

admin — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 13:00:13 +0000

Get Shareaholic

In this week’s edition – a research on how HTML5 will affect the mobile market, an explanation on input elements from HTML5trends and more!

Mobile Firefox Skips Flash In Favor Of HTML5 (TechCrunch)

Research: HTML5 Will Disrupt The Mobile App Market (Mobile Enterprise)

HTML5 Input Elements – All You Want To Know (HTML5trends)

What Makes HTML5 Special (Practical Ecommerce)

The Onion Uses HTML5 In New iPad App (The New York Times)

HTML5 Video Subtitles With WebVTT (HTML5trends)

2011 Web Design Trends – Vol.2 – Japan

admin — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 13:49:23 +0000

Get Shareaholic

Dedicated to everyone affected by tragic recent events

From toys to robots to animation, Japan always seem to have something unique to offer. It should come as no surprise, then, that Japanese web design got its own character, so to speak.

More recently, Speckyboy published an article on Japanese Website Design Trends (which you can read here):

Japan plays host to some very impressive website designers. Their skills in the arts cannot be compared and demonstrate a powerful digital force among Internet readers. Luckily understanding how to read Japanese isn’t required to admire their website graphics and animation effects.

We’ll be looking into a few Japanese website designs which have pushed the limits on conventional development. As a designer it’s a refreshing feeling to work with alternate design concepts and build your own unique ideas off these.

And there were plenty of discussions on Japanese Web Design in previous years, as well:

The Puzzle Of Japanese Web Design (Jeffrey Zeldman)

The Beautiful Art Of Japanese Web Design (Woork Up)

Japanese Web Design As Compared To American Web Design (Shay Howe / Lets Count The Days)

An Exploration Into 25 Artistic And Traditional Japanese Websites (Terrance / Onextrapixel)

Best HTML5 Books

admin — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 12:20:31 +0000

Get Shareaholic

A guide to best books on HTML5, based on articles by Learn Computer / Michael Dorf, WebDesigner Aid and reviews on Amazon.

HTML5, as a new technology, suffers the bandwagon approach; many books are put out about it, and unfortunately the quality suffers occasionally from the publisher’s desire to have a cutting-edge technical book on the market. This loss of quality is not always the case, however, and hopefully these books will help you get up to speed on HTML5 and its use in your own web ventures! – Michael Dorf

Bruce Lawson / Remy Sharp – Introducing HTML5

Rarely is it a joy to read a tech book. Yes, the information you glean may be a wonderful, if it helps you increase your skills, but the book itself can be fairly mundane. This book blows that mold apart. I found myself chuckling my way through it, looking forward to the next little wise-crack. And lest you think it’s a couple good writers without a lot of knowledge–think again. The information is top shelf as Bruce and Remy have been involved with the development of HTML5 and absolutely know their stuff. – (Amazon Reviewer S. Sullivan)

Jeanine Meyer – The Essential Guide to HTML5: Using Games to Learn HTML5 And JavaScript

This book is well written, clearly explaining everything. It’s absolutely written for people with no prior or little programming experience. I liked the use of a table to explain the code line by line. It’s the first book I’ve read using this approach.

A lot of concepts are repeated in several chapters. I think this is a good thing for people with some or no programming experience. Besides this makes it easy to skip around. The book clearly showcases the new features of HTML5. – (Amazon reviewer Kees Overboom)

Joseph W. Lowery / Mark Fletcher – HTML5 24-Hour Trainer

Whether you are relatively inexperienced with HTML or you have work on website design for years, this book has something to offer. For starters, the authors have done an outstanding job to get you familiar with basic HTML and have plenty of working examples to practice with. For more experienced readers, you can quickly find the new features of HTML5 and try out them. The chapters are laid out in a gradual incline fashion that makes reading this book almost effortless. In about 300 pages, this book is a good starting point for learning HTML5.

As with any book dealing with constant changing standards, the materials covered in the book is subject to the changes of browser versions and new W3C standards. I found a few items, such as Input control type “date” has already shown difference in various browsers. This is to be expected for a cutting-edge, rapidly changing technology. Overall, I have enjoyed reading and learning from this book. – (Amazon reviewer Andy Zhang)

HTML5 and CSS3: Develop With Tomorrow’s Standards Today

You can learn the basic new features of HTML5 and CSS3 from a lot of freely available resources. However, this book is invaluable because it goes beyond simply laying out how to use the new features and syntax, focusing more on how to practically use them to better a user’s experience on your website. It doesn’t simply subscribe mindlessly to the hype surrounding HTML5.

Even more importantly, each feature has a “Falling Back” section that describes how to implement the feature outside of HTML5/CSS3 on browsers that do not yet support it (usually using JavaScript) or how to otherwise best gracefully degrade. (Amazon reviewer Andrew D. Lindeman).

See more Guides to HTML5 Books: Michael Dorf – Best HTML5 Books: My Top 5 Choices | WebDesigner Aid - Essential HTML5 Books & Cheat Sheets

New Web Design Books – March 2011

admin — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 14:43:43 +0000

Get Shareaholic

Karl Stolley – How To Design And Write Web Pages Today (Hardcover | Published by: Greenwood)

WordPress Website Secrets (Kindle eBook)

Zach Swineheart – The Two Hour Website (Kindle eBook)

David Karlins – Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques (Kindle eBook)

Larry Ulman – Building A Web Site With Ajax: Visual Quickproject Guide (Kindle eBook) - eBook version of the printed book.

Emanuel Feronato – Flash Game Development By Example (Paperback | Published by: Packt Publishing)

Creating a Web Site With Flash CS3 Professional: Visual Quickproject Guide (Kindle eBook) - eBook version of the printed book.

HTML Dog: The Best-Practice Guide To XHTML and CSS (Kindle eBook) - eBook version of the printed book.

Professional Web Design: The Best Of Smashing Magazine (Paperback | Published by: Wiley)

Dreamweaver CS3 For Windows and Macintosh: Visual Quickstart Guide (Kindle eBook) - eBook version of the printed book.

Flash CS3 Professional For Windows and Macintosh: Visual Quickstart Guide (Kindle eBook) - eBook version of the printed book.

Alexis Josephine – Web Design In Just A Few Steps! (Kindle eBook)

Brad Williams, Ozh Richard, Justin Tadlock – Professional WordPress Plugin Development (Paperback + Kindle eBook | Published by: Wrox)

Brian Miller Ed.D- Above The Fold: Understanding The Principles Of Successful Web Site Design (Paperback | Published by: How)

Sandor Burkus – Photoshop CS5 + Web Design (Windows/Macintosh): Buy This Book, Get A Job! (Paperback | Published by: CreateSpace)

Kevin Lawver, Rob Cherny, Christopher Schmitt, Mark Trammell - Adapting to Web Standards: CSS and Ajax For Big Sites (Kindle eBook) - eBook version of the printed book.

Browser Wars Continued – IE9 vs. Firefox 4 vs. Chrome 10/11

admin — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 13:13:03 +0000

Get Shareaholic

It seems that its been one non-stop party for Mozilla/Firefox, ever since the new version of the browser came out this Tuesday. Since its release, Firefox 4 was downloaded by 10 million users.

Listed below is a collection of reviews and analysis of all the new browsers – from IE9 to beta version of Chrome 11.

Firefox 4

Firefox 4 Outruns Foes (Asia Times Online)

Mobile Web Browsers: Hands On With Firefox 4 For Mobile (PCWorld)

How Mozilla Turned The Corner With Firefox 4 (TechRadar)

Santander Blames Firefox 4 For Website Fail (The A Register)

Firefox 4 Downloaded Twice As Much As IE9 In 24 Hours (TechTree)

Mozilla Confirms Over 10 Million Firefox 4 Downloads In 24 Hours (The Inquirer)

Other Browsers Vs. Firefox

Google Chrome 10 Vs. Firefox 4 (PC Advisor)

Frefox 4 vs. Chrome 11 Beta (Technorati)

IE9 Vs. Firefox 4 Vs. Chrome 10 (TechRadar)

Chrome 10, Firefox 4.0, or IE9? The Browser’s Choice (PCMag)

Firefox 4 Doubles IE9 Downloads While Chrome 11 Adds Voice Input (Black Web 2.0)

Download: Google Chrome | Firefox 4 | Internet Explorer 9