Archive for May, 2008

Bloggers of the world, rejoice. The day most of you have long waited for is at hand. Well, almost. Feedburner just announced that a week from now, they’ll be offering Google’s Adsense to a few selected publishers for trial (probably the big ones), with the goal of making it available for everyone in the long run. They’re pretty vague as to how long the wait will be for the rest of us, but it’s interesting to study the results of this initial run. Here’s a quote from the Feedburner blog:
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Google Gears is aiming to change the online landscape, and there’s a good chance that it will. If you haven’t heard of it yet, it’s a browser extension that primarily allows web application to work offline. If you use Google Docs, for example, Google Gears will create a database on your hard drive where it store your files, and these will always be synched with the Google Docs database when you go online. For people on the go who sometimes find themselves without an Internet access station, this add-on is heaven-sent.

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It’s not easy being a web developer – in addition to a server-side language, we also have to learn a markup language, yet another (client-side) language and a presentation system. As a result, we tend to focus on what we’re closest to – the business logic – and neglect the front-end.

But you don’t have to be a web dev guru to build great applications: with just a few simple tricks, you can make your web based interfaces more usable and more visually appealing. Here are a few simple CSS tricks every PHP / web developer should know. (more…)

After I recently upgraded to Zend Studio for Eclipse, I noticed one troubling feature of my setup – I couldn’t debug applications with “pretty urls”. Zend Studio for Eclipse has a great debugging platform setup, even with a dedicated IDE layout for debugging, and the Zend Studio Debugger backend on the server is quite powerful in itself. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to make use of that power and debug your Cake applications with Zend Studio for Eclipse. (more…)

One question I hear people asking a lot is how to style the comment section in Wordpress. I didn’t have time to go in depth in my tutorial Designing and Coding a Wordpress Theme from Scratch but here are a few links from my del.icio.us to some blogs that break it down in far more detail.

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With the recent announcement that Photoshop Express will include FlickR support, Adobe has realized that it missed an opportunity that Picnik quickly took advantage of. Mistakes by one company in business breed success for another and this case is no different.
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All languages need constant revision, updating and expansion. As we move closer to a unified and cohesive semantic web, HTML is growing by the day to include new things. The latest complete overhaul is currently being developed and many representatives from Apple (Safari), Mozilla (Firefox), Opera and Microsoft (Internet Explorer) are being included in talks.
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I love Photoshop but a good designer will learn new programs just for the sake of remaining relevant in this ever changing field. That said, here are five up-coming programs that are challenging the Photoshop throne.

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Are you new to Photoshop and looking for ways to enhance photos without having to stress yourself out reading hundreds of tutorials. These four techniques are no brainers that will make your designs “pop”. All of them are also ways to fake more advanced techniques. Each of them are simple and only require about five steps each.

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Adobe has dominated the design software market for close to two decades now. Their kingpin is Photoshop which, in the past decade, has grown to include support for 3D modeling, video and web design. So what can we expect from the next generation of Photoshop?

Well, no one is sure yet but the new features in some of the products in Adobe’s may provide some insight as to what the future holds.

Adobe has just announced that the newest versions of several Creative Suite titles, namely, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Soundbooth, can now be downloaded for a test run.

There’s a catch. If you’re not currently using the CS3 versions of Dreamweaver and Fireworks, the trial period for these programs will end within 48 hours. Otherwise you can request serial numbers to use them during Adobe’s prerelease period.

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