Latest Content

  • Opera 10 Beta Released

    Author
    Ethan Poole
    Date
    Thu 4 Jun 2009 at 9:49
    Type
    Blog Entry
    Comments
    1 comment

    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 infamous designer Jon Hicks), built-in Opera Turbo support, the ability to compose rich-HTML emails (in Opera Mail), inline spell checking, and auto updates. They have also introduced a visual tab display that can be accessed by pulling down the adjustable bar beneath the tabs. You can find complete changelogs on Opera's documentation website: Windows…

  • MinneWebCon 2009

    Author
    Ethan Poole
    Date
    Tue 7 Apr 2009 at 22:26
    Type
    Blog Entry
    Comments
    1 comment

    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 and I quite liked it! Most of the speakers seemed to be from the Twin-Cities area and most of the attendees worked for the University. Nonetheless, the sessions were informative and interesting, particularly the two keynotes. You can read about the conference's presentations on the MinneWebCon website. Presumably, some of the slide shows will …

  • Internet Explorer 8 Released by Microsoft

    Author
    Ethan Poole
    Date
    Mon 23 Mar 2009 at 17:00
    Type
    Blog Entry
    Comments
    4 comments

    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 major release of the browser since October 2006. IE8 features: Private browsing mode "Accelerators" Web slices Better page zooming Better RSS reader Developer tools Improvements to the rendering engine, security, and performance Microsoft have made a number of fixes and improvements to IE's rendering engine in IE8. Finally, IE8 pass…

  • Photoshop: Apple-style Glassy Reflections

    Author
    Ethan Poole
    Date
    Fri 20 Mar 2009 at 19:18
    Type
    Article

    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

    Author
    Ethan Poole
    Date
    Tue 17 Mar 2009 at 22:52
    Type
    Blog Entry
    Comments
    7 comments

    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 functionality that people have been asking for, including copy and paste, MMS, and landscape mode. The only major functionality missing is built-in Flash support, but otherwise the iPhone OS 3.0 is a huge improvement to the iPhone platform. Some of the new features include: Cut, copy, and paste Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) A2DP stereo Bluetooth Landscape vi…

  • Opera Goes Turbo

    Author
    Matt Oakes
    Date
    Fri 13 Mar 2009 at 5:01
    Type
    Blog Entry
    Comments
    7 comments

    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 sends you the results to be displayed in Opera. The technology is already used in Opera Mini, where it can compress a standard web page (with images) down to around 7KB, which loads quite quick, even on a standard mobile connection. Originally it was thought that Opera were only going to licence the technology to third parties, who would then i…

  • In-depth Comparison of Web Browsers at MaximumPC

    Author
    Ethan Poole
    Date
    Wed 11 Mar 2009 at 23:19
    Type
    Blog Entry
    Comments
    1 comment

    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 of the graphs and speed tests are the worst, with each data set showing almost entirely different results, always skewed towards a particular browser. However, I found a great article on Maximum PC that gives a pretty detailed and fair review of the major browsers on the market. It compares the browsers on the rendering engine, the user interfa…