ServicesWeb site Design Google Graphic Design E-Commerce Illustration Printing Domains and Web hosting Contact DetailsContact David Appleby for a quote or further information. Adobe Roadshow25 February 2009 I attended a Adobe Road show at Darling harbour this week and have to congratulate them on putting on a great show. The day kicked off with a You Tube video called Did You Know - a collection of facts about the internet which you can watch below. The show focused on highlighting the new creative and time saving features of CS4 which are too numerous to list. Having used Adobe CS4 since November 2008 I can confirm anyone not upgrading is wasting their time and possibly your money. The many small time saving features add up to big savings in productivity. |
Work SamplesUnderwear of Sweden (UWOS) One Percent Plus GST Max for Kids The Hideaway Jervis Bay Fruit for life Good Innovations Mostly Massage OceanWatch Australia More samples of print and web work are available on request. |
Opera BrowserDavid Appleby, 5 October 2009 I run a 64bit Vista system as my main work machine. Recently Firefox patched to version 3.5 and bang it is so unreliable on a 64 bit machine it is unusable. A colleague of mine found the same thing. It works fine on a 32bit operating system. I find it hard to believe they would stuff up this bad but they did. Reluctantly I went back to using Explorer but a friend suggested I try out Opera 10. I have tried Opera before and it was noticeably super fast but seemed to lack features. Opera 10 on the other hand has more features than any of the browsers I have looked at and it is still super fast. It is a wonderfully polished browser. I particularly like its Speed Dial screen where you can pick a range of web sites to display as thumbnails and set that as your home. It has a turbo mode where it only loads low resolution graphics for super fast browsing. I highly recommend trying Opera 10. http://www.opera.com/ Google waveDavid Appleby, 18 June 2009 This may well be the next big thing, Google wave appears to combine all the functionality we see on the web in one place. It is only released to developers so far. There is a very very long developer presentation you can watch at http://wave.google.com/. Basically this is like a hybrid email, blog, forum content management system that can be customised by developers enabling collaboration. It is a bit like Facebook on steroids and like Facebook can be updated on a mobile phone. Google giving away $75 advertisingDavid Appleby, 16 May 2009 If you haven't already used Google AdWords you can get $75 free advertising if you sign up before the end of June. You can self manage this or pass in back to me to setup the advertising campaign. I have seen up to 44% increase in customers traffic after setting up campaigns for them. It is a very cost effective way of advertising. Apart from being a search engine Google has a huge network of web sites displaying it's adverts. Some web sites now offer graphic, flash and video banner advert placements in addition to the regular text adverts. How it works: Advertisers could be caught in Google's netJulian Lee, April 23, 2009 HOW much longer can Google maintain its ambiguous status of "frenemy"? As the behemoth moves into other areas of advertising it will inevitably come into conflict with media owners. Read the SMH Article $15b broadband network on wayMatt O'Sullivan, April 7, 2009 - 9:01AM The Federal Government and private sector will invest up to $43 billion over eight years in a super-fast national broadband network. Read the SMH article Good interview about internet security on Toms HardwareSecurity Threat Analysis: Interview With Dino A. Dai Zovi : Read Internet Explore 6 Market ShareDavid Appleby, 18 March 2009 As a web designer I am eagerly awaiting the day I no longer have to consider Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in my design and coding. I spent some time this morning looking for statistical data on browser usage. The most up-to-date information I found was at w3counter. Unfortunately it still indicates IE6 is a contender with about 25% of the market at time of writing but it is falling fast and has lost it's 1st place position to IE7 for good. My own analytics data from customers supports the w3counter numbers. Maybe another year until all web developers can rejoice the death of IE6. Which Browser?David Appleby, 15 January 2009 Which browser do you use? Much as people love to bash Microsoft I have long been a big fan of their products but Internet Explorer (IE) 7 and 8 are wearing thin on me. IE 7 has been very unstable for me with frequent crashes and IE 8 beta has the same crashes with additional compatibility issues with many sites. IE 8 does have a compatibility button that fixes most problems but the basic stability issues are enough that I have to recommend – Don't use Internet Explorer! Due to it's popularity IE has the additional problem of being targeted by allot of mal ware on the internet making it less safe to use despite its high level built in security. Firefox 2 on the other hand has been extremely stable, is W3C standards compliant and has a huge range of wonderful add ons. Some of my favourites would be FireShot (screen capture), FireFTP (upload files to the web), DOM Inspector (detailed web page information for developers) and Cooliris which is a 3D web image browser. Version 3 is available but I haven't tested it as yet. I haven't used Safari extensively other than testing web sites but it seems to be an OK browser. There are some compatibility issues so Firefox is a better bet. Other browsers are too small a percentage of the market to be seriously considered as yet but Google may well muscle Chrome up to be a major player. PS. IE8 beta has been patched to Release Candidate 1. It is more stable than before but still crashes occasionally. Industry NewsDavid Appleby, 1 October 2008 Adobe CS4 has been released and will be available at the end of October. While I cringe at the upgrade costs I can't wait to play with the new features. Highlights for me are adding a 3rd dimension to flash so we can start to see some real 3D animation in Flash. Addition of Flash support to Acrobat could be put to some interesting uses in PDF documents. Adobe claim improvements to speed and on Windows the applications now support 64bit. There are too many new features to list but overall it will mean improved productivity and new creative opportunities. You can read all about it on the Adobe web site. |
 |
What's hot on the web?
|