Lowter - New Content

Gmail Gains Themes

Ethan Poole — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:18:02 -0600

The Official Gmail Blog announced today the availability of themes for Gmail! They look pretty snazzy, I must say so myself, and certainly look leaps better than the default Gmail interface's colours…

Not Liking the MacBook's New Trackpad

Ethan Poole — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 15:48:30 -0600

Last weekend I was at the Mall of America with a friend and we went inside the Apple Store. I always make a habit of going to the Apple Store when I am at the Mall of America because it seems that th…

How Will the Web Fair with the Financial Crisis?

Ethan Poole — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 11:16:28 -0600

With the current state of the world economy, everyone is questioning the future of their market. I don't think that the world economy has entirely collapsed yet, as many people seem to assume. We ar…

Are Resizable Layouts Dead?

Ethan Poole — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 17:45:32 -0600

I've noticed in the past few months that fewer and fewer websites have resizable layouts that can properly shrink for an 800x600 resolution. The few resizable layouts I've encountered will only shrin…

Opera Mini Never Submitted to Apple

Ethan Poole — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 22:53:21 -0600

The New York Times' blogger Saul Hansell has reported a clarification about Opera and the iPhone. He went and further questioned Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, Opera's chief executive, about Opera Min…

Obama Expected to Appoint a CTO

Ethan Poole — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 11:30:50 -0600

Before being elected as President, Obama promised that his new administration would embrace technology in order to incorporate citizens more into the democratic process. One way he plans to do this i…

PunBB 1.3 Officially Released!

Ethan Poole — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 14:07:06 -0600

PunBB 1.3 has finally been officially released just today! This release brings tons of improvements from 1.2, particularly the new extension system. Here is a small list of improvements (from the of…

Increasing Productivity with Virtual Desktops

Ethan Poole — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 20:08:19 -0600

When you're designing a website you know how many windows you can have open: code editor, web browser(s), Photoshop, terminal window (for SVN or CVS), etc. You're desktop gets crowded! Sure, there a…

Opera on the iPhone Soon?

Ethan Poole — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 19:17:21 -0600

Last week there were a number of reports on the Internet about Opera's mobile browser being rejected from Apple's iPhone App Store. To clarify, Apple apparently rejected Opera Mini, not Opera Mobile.…

Windows 7 Pre-beta Leaks onto Bittorrent

Ethan Poole — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 11:29:59 -0600

CNET's News.com is reporting about Windows 7 having quickly leaked onto Bittorrent sites, such as The Pirate Bay and Mininova: The pre-beta version of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system relea…

WordPress' Plugin Platform Rocks!

Ethan Poole — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 12:06:55 -0500

Many of my client projects have utilised WordPress as the foundation for each website. This is usually the client's choice because they don't want to pay for an entire custom CMS, no matter how much …

Code Syntax Debates in the Programming World

Ethan Poole — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:08:14 -0500

There are a number of code-syntax debates in the world of programming. Everyone has the common goal of establishing some sort of code-syntax standard so developers can easily work on each others' cod…

30 Beautiful Photoshop Illustration Tutorials

Ethan Poole — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 18:55:44 -0500

Six Revisions, a blog I probably should mention more often, posted a collection of thirty Photoshop illustration tutorials earlier this month. Illustration is always something that I have wanted to b…

New SitePoint Book: Everything You Know about CSS Is Wrong!

Ethan Poole — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 11:49:03 -0500

Book cover of SitePoint's book SitePoint has released their latest book about CSS titled Everything You Know about CSS Is Wrong! I've been very pleased with SitePoint lately for releasing a lot of…

Coding an All-in-one RSS Feed

Ethan Poole — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 11:50:32 -0500

One of the cool new things that we have added at Lowter recently is an all-in-one RSS feed that contains both our articles and our blog entries. Granted, the feed doesn't contain "all" of Lowter's co…

Opera Report: the Current State of the Net

Matt Oakes — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 13:26:59 -0500

I sometimes feel like I write too much about Opera, but I couldn't really pass this article up! Opera have just released a large report that attempts to document the current state of the webpages tha…

PunBB Akismet Spam Plugin

Ethan Poole — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 10:22:29 -0500

Those of you who are members of the Lowter Forums (which I highly encourage you to become) may have noticed the huge increase in spam in the past few weeks. It got to the point where we were just pru…

Best Semantic Naming Convention?

Ethan Poole — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 19:59:26 -0500

Awhile back there was a great thread on SitePoint Forums about the best semantic naming convention for a typical layout shell (header, footer, content, navigation, etc.). A lot of people posted what …

Thoughts about Cloud Computing and Amazon S3

Ethan Poole — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:07:42 -0500

Cloud computing is one of the rages online nowadays, with tons of applications hopping onto the bandwagon with services like Amazon S3. Wikipedia defines cloud computing as "a style of computing in w…

Enhancing Opera 9.6's RSS Feed Display

Matt Oakes — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:19:12 -0500

This blog post was originally going to be about the new features of Opera 9.6 and how much I like them. However, I spotted a major flaw with one of the new features and luckily it's a flaw that anyon…

What Kind of Browser User are You?

Ethan Poole — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 15:05:23 -0500

Comedic chart expressing the different types of users of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Safari. The Choose Opera blog posted a funny little chart about typical web browser users of Internet…

Technology in the '08 US Presidential Election

Ethan Poole — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 08:28:06 -0500

In the mists of the potential collapse of the entire world economy, we are going to compare Obama's and McCain's policies on ... technology! We're geeks, what would you expect? We all supported Ron Paul, so we already knew about the impending economic doom... Anyhow, here we take a look at each ticket's policies on net neutrality, broadband availability and speed, promoting research, online privacy, intellectual property and patent reform, and incorporating technology into the government.

Lowering the iPhone Development Barrier

Ethan Poole — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 08:28:26 -0500

Apple's iPhone has become the "cool" platform in the development world, especially with the introduction of the App Store, where developers have been raking in the dough by selling their applications …

Apple Understands Design Better than Google

Ethan Poole — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:37:24 -0500

Google's new Android mobile platform is said to pose a real challenge to Apple's growing dominance of the US smartphone market. However, after simply looking at various screenshots of Android, it is …

Multi-Column Lists with CSS

Ethan Poole — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 22:36:35 -0500

When redesigning Lowter's homepage, one of the first decisions was to move the category list somewhere else because it took up a lot of valuable space. I decided to move the category list from the le…