News posts

Last week, Adobe announced that there will be no further development of their Fireworks application. Security updates will be provided and bug fixes may arrive, but for all intents and purposes Fireworks CS6 is a dead man walking. The petitions for clemency have already begun, but it seems likely that at some point Adobe’s CEO will give the order to flick the switch and like a paper rocket on a rainy fourth of July, Fireworks will be no more.

Whilst many in the web design community bemoan Adobe’s lack of foresight, there are others — myself included — that...

Adobe has just announced that Creative Suite will cease to exist after CS6 (in name at least), and be replaced exclusively by Creative Cloud. On its most basic level, that means there won’t be perpetual licenses for future Adobe products (though, for now, you’ll still be able to buy CS6 in that format) and instead all of their Creative Cloud software will be available by subscription only.

For creatives, this is a huge shift. Adobe has been the leader in graphics and web software for years (especially after their purchase of Macromedia), and designers...

The long, painful and drawn-out death of skeuomorphic design lurched forward another step this week with a redesign by the world’s biggest social media site, Facebook.

The new look is spearheaded by a logomark that is a simplified version of the pre-existing one. Although the full Facebook logo will remain unchanged, the round-cornered square with the solitary ‘f’ has been carefully refined.

The blue strip, previously positioned at the bottom of the graphic as a nod towards a light reflection has been dropped. The letter ‘f’ has...

Hot on the heels of jQuery Mobile 1.3 comes jQuery 2.0, a brand new, full release version of the popular JavaScript library.

The big news — that we’ve known for a while — is that jQuery 2.0 has dropped the library’s support for Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8. These so-called legacy browsers are slowly creeping towards extinction and it’s certainly true that very few people still use IE6. However, there are still...

jQuery Mobile 1.3 is now available as a stable release.

This new version spearheads the jQuery team’s efforts to fully incorporate responsive web design principles into its robust library. Among the new features are several widgets optimized for touch interfaces, including...

Yesterday, anyone old enough to have been working during the browser wars, felt the icy cold fingers of fear creep up their spine when Google announced that its browser Chrome will be abandoning Webkit in favor of their own Blink rendering engine.

Based on the open source Chromium Project, that will be forking Webkit, Chrome is the biggest browser in the world: statistics place Chrome usage at anywhere up to 41.9%, and growing at more than a percent each month; it’s trusted across MacOS and Windows; it is also the dominant browser in Central and South America, Europe, India and Northern...

Late on Friday night, Norwegian blogger Ally Tenor posted a number of screen grabs from Firebug that appeared to show Apple’s Norway store running scripts through an eu-ampd.swf file — a format output by Adobe’s Flash Professional software.

Over the weekend several other commentators reported the same thing and by Monday morning...

In the web-era, major news sources aren’t restricted to local readership. Whilst a city paper may feature some local news, its sports, national and international news coverage is just as likely to be read by someone on a different continent.

In 2012, The New York Times (44.8m monthly readers) fell behind London’s Daily Mail (45.3m monthly readers) as the popular newspaper website in the world. Largely because, unlike many of its rivals — one...

There’s a concept in web design that is more important than responsive design, more important than mobile-first, more important than separating style and content; the most important concept in web design is backwards compatibility.

Most backwards compatibility is achieved by web designers with careful application of graceful degradation — the process by which advanced features are able to fail silently, without compromising content.

When we’re building sites, we can ensure that we provide support for even obsolete browsers.

When I write about the black and white, crossword puzzle-like QR code, I feel like I’m talking about the stone age of human development.

The few years of existence for the QR code in marketing efforts, seem like they were first experienced by our grandparents when you look at how the code itself has evolved to walk upright. Whatever you read in this article, chances are, as with buying a new mobile phone or computer, it will all be obsolete almost immediately… or possibly not with this latest step.

First, there were those who decided they could beautify the ugly codes with color. Then, savvy coders learned that codes had a 30% error correction and images could be inserted into the codes for a more enticing design for businesses. Some went as far as building codes out of objects such as bottle corks for wineries and bottle caps for breweries.

It didn’t take long for enterprising websites to pop up that allowed people to design their own QR codes, mixing in images and logos without...

The web has grown rapidly in the last two decades and its omnipresence makes it easy to forget that just 20 years ago it was an unheard of concept for most people.

While as designers and developers we feel fully engaged with the web, law makers are, perhaps inevitably, still running to catch up. The flurry of prosecutions worldwide for copyright theft, political dissent, and even bad jokes on twitter, all point to legal bodies struggling to cope with a technological shift that rivals the industrial revolution in significance.

The interests of governments have largely been directed at harnessing...