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The latest Android phones with high resolution offer a wide variety of design related applications that allow designers fully adopting Android apps as excellent portable picture editors. These applications are not only adult and professional’s favorite, but also popular among the kids.

Therefore, this post serves as a collection of 65 amazing Android apps for designers or those who are in love with photography or designing. Full list after jump!

Shortcuts:

• Color Palettes
• Drawing Tools
• Photo Editors
• Image Effects
• Photo Resize
• Photo Search Engine
• Typogrpahy apps
• Misc

Color Palettes

ColorSnap

Capture real world colors and match them to Sherwin-Williams paint colors – for free. With ColorSnap, it’s easy to take color scheme from a photo in your library or one you just snapped.

Iromihon

Iromihon is a color discovery tool for you to see and to adjust the color. In full screen, it also works as color light (flashlight).

Color Pal

Color Pal allows you to quickly browse and search through the latest or the most popular color palettes from COLOURlovers.com. Easily save palettes to your favorites or email them to a friend.

Color Mood Designer

Color Mood Designer is the professional way to quickly find the color combination that is right for your design project. This software application is a much more convenient method to use than having to transport multiple, heavy color swatch books to your client meeting. Demo version has limited color database.

Superdry Color Picker

Superdry Color Picker is color picker library for Android. This app is demonstration.

Pocket Color Chart

The Pantone Matching System (PMS) is a system shared worldwide by the graphic arts industry.

Magic Color Picker

Magic Color Picker is a powerful color selection tool suitable for designers, artists and programmers for selecting colors using different color models. It supports 7 different modes and RGB, HSV, HSL and YUV color models. Use either palette or sliders to adjust the color. Colors are shown in decimal and HEX.

HTML Colors – Quick Reference

An app to use as a reference. Does what it says and not much else. This app is NOT a RGB slider. It is only intended to be a reference for HTML hex codes.

Drawing Tools

Free Draw

With this easy app you can express thoughts or create artworks easily, with various colors and imagination. The folder can store your work and you can share them though e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter.

Glow Paint

Glow Paint is an application simulating glow or neon painting on the touch screen of your mobile phone. Glow Paint allows you to select one of 10 colors of paints, 3 glow sizes, several background patterns and templates, and you can undo or redo the last brush movement. You can also save your created image as a file, set as wallpaper or share image with your friends.

Finger Colors

An application for painting and drawing. Featuring a user interface that lets you focus on your painting and doesn’t let menus and dialogs interrupt your artistic flow.

Draw!

Draw and flash on the go! This app is for easy finger communication in loud places, making quick notes or keeping kids entertained. The app starts up with a blank screen, ready to draw in anytime.

Ultimate Finger Painting

A feature rich kids drawing program, sure to keep the kids occupied and active.

<img src="http://media02.hongkiat.com/android-apps-for-designers/ultimate_finger_painting.jpg" title="Android Apps for Designers" a

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The CSS Regions Galaxy Tab demo

It’s cold here in the Webmonkey offices, Adobe has unveiled a web browser. No, Adobe isn’t really getting into the web browser game, but it does have a few tricks it would like to show off to the world. Adobe’s new demo web browser exists solely to demonstrate the company’s proposed CSS Regions layout tool.

If you’d like to check out the demo browser, head over to Adobe Labs and download a copy. Be sure to open up the included sample pages to see how the HTML and CSS is structured.

Adobe has been working on CSS Regions for some time, trying to develop a set of CSS layout tools that make it easy to build complex, print-style layouts on the web — think text that flows around circular regions, or text structured into shapes. If Adobe can convince browser makers and the W3C to get onboard with the idea, web design might be about to make a huge leap forward. Or backward, depending on how you look at it.

Adobe’s CSS Regions proposal is a back-to-the-future effort to bring some of the layout tools print designers have enjoyed for years to the web.

Typography on the web has improved by leaps and bounds since the dark days of the blink tag and six universal fonts, but it’s still a long way from ideal. Sure there are great ways to serve custom fonts, and you can even use JavaScript libraries like Lettering.js for even more control over your layout. But when it comes to the flow of text around images, pull quotes and other block level elements, well, web typography falls apart.

While web developers have hacked together grids and other print-style layout tools for years, such tools are essentially hacks and limited in their capabilities. But that will change in the near future. The W3C is currently toying with no less than four new grid-based standards designed to handle multi-column text, wrapping text around images and other fancy layout techniques. We’ve looked at the Flexible Box Model, Template Layout (based on Mozilla’s XUL syntax), and Grid Positioning modules before, but so far none are finalized.

Adobe’s CSS Regions is the new entry in the list of layout schemes under consideration. Adobe submitted its CSS Regions proposal to the W3C early this year and it has subsequently been split into two separate but related drafts, the CSS Regions Module Editor’s Draft and the CSS Exclusions Module Editor’s Draft.

CSS Regions shares some similarities with the other proposals (and from what I can tell would play nice with them if multiple proposals end up becoming finalized specs), but goes a good bit further, by abstracting sections of an HTML page into “regions.”

Regions can be both positive and negative space. In other words, you can write CSS rules to flow text into a region — say, as below, a pie graph — or around a region (as in the image of Arches National Park at the top of this post).

Inserting text into regions

Among the interesting layout tools in the CSS Regions proposal are Story Threading, Region Styling and the arbitrary shapes and exclusions concept. Story Threading allows text to flow in multiple disjointed shapes (not just columns) which you can define in CSS and HTML. That means you could easily flow two side-by-side columns of text around an image or a pullquote the way print magazines often do.

The second interesting element is Region Styling, which allows content to be styled based on the region it flows into. For example, if the first few lines of your text fall into one region, you could style it with a different font than the rest, which falls in a different region. Curiously, this part of the proposed Regions spec is not currently implemented in Adobe’s demo browser.

The arbitrary content portion of the draft spec is what allows the layout shown in the screenshots above — flowing content into or around arbitrary shapes.

Lest you think that Adobe is simply trying to improve the web — which may well be true — nevertheless, it’s worth bearing in mind Adobe’s own agenda. We suspect it’s no accident that the company has used WebKit to power the CSS Regions testing browser. WebKit is, after all, the engine that powers the iPad’s web browser.

With Apple banning Flash from its iOS devices, Adobe has little in the way of iPad-friendly tools to offer its big magazine clients. Given that publishers are betting heavily on the iPad’s ability to save their business model, the more iPad tools Adobe can offer, the happier magazine publishers will be. By rolling CSS Regions into WebKit for a demo, Adobe is already one step closer to a toe-hold on iOS devices.

Still, in this case, assuming the W3C pushes forward with the Regions spec, and that browser makers include support in future releases, what’s good for Adobe may end up being good for the web as a whole.

Of course whether or not multi-column layouts on the iPad (or any other web browser) are a good idea is open to debate. Multiple columns combined with scrolling often makes for a reading nightmare. Certainly in the hands of poor designers the results will be ugly, but that doesn’t mean the tools themselves are to blame.

See Also:

• The Future of CSS: Finally, Sane Layout Tools
• Adobe Shows Off Fancy WebKit-Based Typography
• Lettering.js Makes Complex Typography Easy

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Computers, mobile phones and robots are just a few life-changing inventions we tend to take for granted every day. These technologies, however, have enabled us to improve human life by leaps and bounds over the past few decades.

Here are five stories we’ve recently published that showcase how these technologies are changing communities around the world.

• 4 Ways Mobile Tech Is Improving Education
  With Internet in the palm of our hands, educators are looking to mobile as the next big tool for schools.
• Can a Robot Ever Be Man’s Best Friend?
  When is a robot a pet? And are they the future of service animals like seeing-eye dogs? We investigate the current products on the market, and what the future may hold.
• How Cities Are Fighting to Close the Digital Divide
  As the world goes digital, underserved and low-income communities are left behind. Here’s how several cities are using tech education to overcome the digital divide.
• How Smarter Parking Technology Will Reduce Traffic Congestion
  In major cities, you can spend up to 14 minutes looking for a parking spot and cause traffic congestion in the process. Here are a few apps that are improving city transit infrastructure.
• How Mobile Payment Systems Are Redefining Commerce
  Here’s a look at how mobile payment systems are poised to redefine the way business is done at every level.

Of course, if you’re still hungry for more stories on innovative ways that technology is changing the way we live, you can follow Mashable’s Global Innovation Series, which brings you the latest innovations in urban mobility and is supported by BMW i, a new concept dedicated to providing mobility solutions for the urban environment. Happy reading!

What Innovations Are Improving Your Community?

Do you know of a forward-thinking startup or technology that deserves to be a part of the Global Innovation Series? Let us know about it in the comments below.

Image courtesy of Flickr, LGEPR

More About: Global Innovation Series, roundup, tech, technology, trending

For more Tech & Gadgets coverage:

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• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

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I also want to say “thank you” to you, WDL readers, for being Theme Trust customers, providing valuable feedback, and helping spread the word. With almost no marketing, Theme Trust has went from averaging 2 sales per day to over 20 sales per day, in just six months.

Buy 1, Get 1 FREE

The Buy 1, Get 1 FREE deal has been going on for a while now at Theme Trust, and it’s my way to continually show appreciation to the customers. When you buy any theme, you get another one free. Here’s how it works:

• Add any 2 themes to your shopping cart.
• Enter the coupon code “1free” in your shopping cart.
• Then checkout with either Paypal or Google Checkout.

Available WordPress Themes at Theme Trust

Filtered

A stylish portfolio theme that will give your work the type of presentation it deserves. On top of balanced white space and typography, this theme includes several tasteful jQuery effects to help impress your visitors.

Solo

A clean, single page portfolio theme with a sleek style and smooth jQuery effects. Automatic scrolling and expanding project display are just some of the features that will help make your work look even more amazing.

Oracle

A sleek news theme that will give your next blog a clean and professional appearance. Oracle gives you plenty of control, like easily setting your own color scheme or picking which categories to highlight on the home page.

Leverage

An elegant theme that acts as a CMS for your business website. Included are options to define your own color scheme, a built-in icon set, and many other features.

Work

An elegant portfolio theme built for showing off your work. This theme has a clean and professional style that is perfect for displaying anything from illustrations to photography. Easily build your portfolio with the numerous built-in page templates that give you the ability to create one, two, three, and four column gallery layouts.

Pure

A super clean and minimal blog theme. Pure will give your blog an elegant and sophisticated feel without getting in the way of your content. Great typography and a good amount of white space make this theme stand out.

Quantum

A vibrant theme that will bring your business website to life. Quantum is packed with features including a built-in icon set and 16 color and texture combinations.

Thanks again! And you can look forward to more great WordPress themes in the coming months.

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AT&T, criticized and even despised for its inability to keep up with growing mobile data usage, thinks it has found the solution to its network woes. And all it will cost the telecom giant is $39 billion and months (or even years) of regulatory hurdles.

In a stunning move, AT&T has acquired T-Mobile USA for a whopping $39 billion from Deutsche Telekom. Along with acquiring approximately 8% of AT&T, Deutsche Telekom will also be gaining a seat on AT&T’s board of directors.

The new combined entity, if it can garner regulatory approval, will be largest carrier in the U.S. by leaps and bounds. AT&T and T-Mobile USA combined have over 25% more subscribers now than Verizon (125+ million vs. 93+ million).

This acquisition isn’t about subscriber bases, though; it’s about improving AT&T’s reliability and preparing it for the 4G era of wireless communication.

The Spectrum Problem

AT&T’s press release tells a very clear story of why AT&T bought T-Mobile and why T-Mobile bought AT&T.

It’s no secret that AT&T has a tattered reputation. The iPhone may have brought it millions of new customers and billions in revenue, but the vast increase in data usage has also strained the network to unacceptable levels. There wouldn’t have been so much hype surrounding the Verizon iPhone if AT&T’s network didn’t drop so many calls and upset so many customers.

And while AT&T is investing billions to upgrade its network, it takes years to get the approval to build new towers, especially in metropolitan areas such as San Francisco. Without a dramatic move, AT&T’s network wasn’t going to get better anytime soon.

Two sections of AT&T’s press release are devoted specifically to this problem. It’s a testament to just how crucial this problem is to AT&T’s future. The first problem it addresses is spectrum: The wireless carrier simply doesn’t have enough wireless spectrum to fuel the accelerating growth it has experienced over the last few years.

“AT&T’s mobile data traffic grew 8,000 percent over the past four years and by 2015 it is expected to be eight to 10 times what it was in 2010,” AT&T explained in its announcement. “Put another way, all of the mobile traffic volume AT&T carried during 2010 is estimated to be carried in just the first six to seven weeks of 2015.”

AT&T believes it will take years until more spectrum is opened up by the U.S. government for mobile broadband use. The simplest way to get its hands on precious broadband is through acquisition, and T-Mobile USA has the most GSM broadband spectrum after AT&T.

The Infrastructure Problem

The second problem is infrastructure. AT&T simply can’t build towers fast enough, and the approval process to build the unsightly things acts as a major roadblock to the company’s efforts to boost its network reliability. So if you can’t build towers fast enough, what’s the next best way to get them? That’s right: You acquire them.

“At closing, AT&T will immediately gain cell sites equivalent to what would have taken on average five years to build without the transaction, and double that in some markets,” AT&T notes in its press release. “The combination will increase AT&T’s network density by approximately 30 percent in some of its most populated areas, while avoiding the need to construct additional cell towers.”

$39 billion is a lot of money to buy some towers, but because T-Mobile USA utilizes GSM technology (rather than the CDMA technology employed by Verizon), it can immediately use them to boost its network. If the deal is approved, expect AT&T to quickly offload some of its mobile data traffic on T-Mobile’s infrastructure.

AT&T may be talking a lot about 4G in its press release, but T-Mobile has no LTE technology or infrastructure to offer. No, today’s acquisition is all about bolstering AT&T’s network and beginning the process of repairing its reputation.

More About: 4G, acquisition, att, Deutsche Telekom, GSM, T-Mobile, t-mobile usa, verizon

For more Business & Marketing coverage:

• Follow Mashable Business & Marketing on Twitter
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• Download our free apps for Android, Mac, iPhone and iPad

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Spamming – Earliest Form of Online Advertising

The internet was intentionally created as a military and educational tool, and never intended for what it is now: a huge networking, communications and money-making machine.

Thus, the first ‘spam’ was not commercial in nature. The word ‘spam’ comes from a 1970s comedy of a British comedy ‘Monty Python’. In the sketch, a man and his wife are in a restaurant, but everything they ordered has spam on it. While trying to get an order without spam, Vikings from the background sing: ‘Spam, spam, spam. Lovely, spam. Wonderful spam!’

Photo by Wikipedia

You can view the episode here.

The phenomenon later influenced early internet users to flood forums with the word ‘spam’. Soon online marketers got the idea to overpost and flood Usenet groups and emails with junk mail, recounting the repeating the useless presence of spam in the Monty Python sketch.

The first spam email was ‘Arpanet’ on 1978, coming from Gary Thuerk of the Digital Equipment Corporation. The first commercial spam was by lawyers Laurence Canter & Martha Siegel, where they used bulk Usenet posting to promote their immigration law practices. Within a few years, marketers changed their medium of spamming from Usenet forums to e-mail, where it remains until this day. Over 90 million spam emails are sent everyday. 85% of our emails are actually spam. But it’s level of effectiveness in promoting or selling a product is very low—it now barely exists as a nuisance to all.

Photo by First-News

The Era of Banner Ads

The first online advertisement appeared on the web in 1994, prompting the beginning of the online advertising world. The first part was the period of experimentation by the advertisers and publishers, pioneering on ad formats and technology. In 1995, DoubleClick was launched, one of the first ad-serving technologies.

Photo by Ad Week

Photo above is one of the oldest online banner ads, dated October 25, 1994 (so sorry for the bad resolution). The advertiser is A&T, and the ad appeared on Hotwired. Hotwired also launched many online ad campaigns for Club Med, Volvo and MCI, and was eventually acquired by Lycos. Soon after Hewlett-Packard created one of the first interactive online ad, embedding a video arcade game ‘Pong’ into the ad.

From the start advertisers already know that online advertising is very different from traditional advertising. Early on they already did target market research and measurements. However, the media was largely misunderstood. It wasn’t until many years later that the effectiveness and the mechanics of the medium was understood.

Photo by Wiki

There are many forms of old school online ads apart from banner ads. This includes pop-up ads (photo shown above), pop-under ads, hover ads, takeover ads

Online advertising was at its peak in the late 1990s. Investors were dropping billions of dollars into dot com start-ups at an alarmingly fast rate. The internet was the new playing field, and investors fell in love with the novelty factor of it. They have high hopes for their investments–and it made some people very rich–on paper, at least.

by Banner Ad Museum

Back then, ads were in the banner format. Advertisers were required by the clients to provide the standard 468 x 60 px banner ad for their online advertising campaign, like the banner ads on the photo above. Soon, so thousands of entrepreneurs, investors and advertisers are pouring in–nobody wanted to get left behind this brand new money-making machine. In its hey day, it was a lucrative business: Yahoo! could charge up to US $30 to even US $100 to run these banner ads. At its height, internet spending has reached US $8.2 billion. The figure wouldn’t be reached again until 4 years after the dot com bubble burst.

However, banner ads are not effective; it is very expensive but the returns are low. Advertisers were set against the low effectiveness of ads, high prices, and the complex process of online ad auctions. The advertisers realized that the online banner ads pale in comparison to the effectivity of 30-second TV commercial or a full-page print ad.

Dot Com Bubble Burst

Photo by GDS Infographics

Mid-2000, the huge influx of money that created the online advertising bubble started to dry up. Companies now have no interest with online advertising and the online banner bubble burst happened. The stock market collapsed, resulting into a recession. The ‘bubble’ covered for five years from 1995 to 2000. From within that time frame the stock value rose steadily and rapidly at an astronomical rate. And then suddenly in just one day, the bubble burst–everything is gone in a flash.

NASDAQ peaked at 5,049 in March of 2000, and declined on October 2002 at 1,100. One one dot com company after another went bankrupt. Soon online advertising dollars had a dramatic fall of 32%, from US $8.2 billion to US $6.2 billion. As the market went sour, advertisers and agencies lost interest in using this unproven and unstable new medium.

Enter Google: The Era of Google Ads

After the bubble burst, advertising on the internet was in rapid decline except for search, because search engine technology has shown efficiency. Because of its ROI, Search engine market grew to US $2.3 billion in 2003. The search engine technology was highly efficient and dependable.

Google was, once upon a time, just a search engine. Google worked mainly on its functionality, perfecting the algorithm to produce the most appropriate results. Google drove plenty of traffic, but didn’t sell anything. But on the start of the millennium, 2000, Google AdWords was born. Google revolutionized online advertising–instead of using the banner ad format; which is the dominant advertising format of that time, they decided to sell through text ads. These ads are based on search engines, kept separate and on top or on the side of the main search results.

Why did Google’s text ads succeed and the banner ads did not? First of all, Google knew the weight of relevance. They introduced the click-through rate, creating a ranking algorithm to measure the advertisement’s relevance. Google only requires payment when the people click on them. Another stroke of genius from google is Page Rank.

Google did not create search engine or pay-per-click advertising–instead they focused on perfecting it. Google AdWords marked the New Growth Period of Online Advertising. Google has changed how we approach online advertising. Rather than mere selling or marketing, advertisers are now focusing in creating relevant content for consumers.

Ads make use of two different advertising model: the Pay-per-click and the Pay-per-impression. What’s the difference between the two? Pay-per-click requires advertisers to pay the host for every time the ad is clicked. Pay-per-impression is used to measure the cost and worth of the whole online marketing campaign. Both models are used to online ads such as text links, SEO marketing, web banners and e-mail advertising.

Photo by Searchlinqs

In search engines, advertisers bid on keyword terms and phrases relevant to their market. But with content sites, they use a fixed price for every click or impression. Pay-per-click model is perfect for bringing the targeted market into the website efficiently, while the Pay-per-impression is best for building brand recognition. Although these models are open to abuse through click fraud, Google and others have devised automated systems against corrupt advertisers or competitors.

Advertising through Social Media

If you haven’t heard of social media, then you’ve probably been living under a rock for the past five years. Social media, in its simplest terms, is a social tool for communications and networking. Rather than a web site merely providing you with information, social media sites are interactive; giving you the freedom to comment, rate and share information. There are four types of Social Media:

1. Social Networking Tools – Facebook, Twitter, Hi-5

2. Social News – Reddit, Digg Propeller

3. Social Photo & Video Sharing – Photobucket, Flickr, YouTube

4. Social Bookmarking – Del.icio.us, Simpy

One of the biggest advantages of social media advertising is proper targeting of market through the use of the users’ demographic information provided.

Photo by Singapore SEO

Social media advertising is now apparently more effective than traditional advertising! Some even go through lengths as to have a billboard with their own Twitter ID—such as Naked Pizza of New Orleans. Naked Pizza, reputedly the healthiest pizza in the world, erected a billboard prompting viewers to add them on Twitter. It’s not the first time Twitter is featured on a billboard, and surely not the last. It’s a smart marketing move, they will gain more followers and thus increase their marketing and advertising scope and awareness.

Photo by Wikimedia

Nowadays, it is now necessary for businesses to have a Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn page. Social media is the best thing online advertising could get: it’s free, it’s far and wide-reaching (500 million users) and it’s viral. The disadvantage is probably measuring effectivity of social media advertising, whether or not the number of ‘likes’, ‘friends’ or ‘follows’ could convert to actual sales.

Online Advertising as of Today

Since 2004 online advertising has recovered. Advertisers have seen (almost reluctantly) the importance of advertising online, and the number of hours consumer used on the internet. Now the web is used by many companies on their overall marketing campaign. Online ads make use of Flash and JavaScript to improve graphics and interactivity. Online advertising is now more sophisticated, the branding tools and technologies are diversified. There are now online blogs, social media, SEO marketing and more.

Viral marketing is now more popular, making use of video ads to market a product or brand. Old Spice (video still shown above) is one of the many companies that have gone into viral marketing. They posted numerous videos on YouTube starring Old Spice guy. It was a huge hit, having 30 million views to date and considered to be one of the most successful advertising campaigns in 2010. Isaiah Mustafah is now a household name. Other successful viral campaigns include Levi’s, Guitar Hero and Super Bowl. We see a regrowth in advertising on the web, which is now equals to the total internet spending.

This does not mean that Online Advertising has now been perfected. Annoying pop up and pop under ads still persist. One of the most annoying and interruptive of ad formats, the pre-roll ads are now used in YouTube. YouTube used to be a free site for uploading and viewing videos. But YouTube has problems generating income–so they added pre-roll ads, or commercials that run before a video that cannot be bypassed. So if you need to watch a 1 minute video you have to sit through a 30-second ad first. Most music videos uploaded on YouTube are now from VEVO, and not from actual users. Which means that there are ads on top, on the bottom and on the background of the page.

So will the internet’s bubble burst again? We are hopeful it won’t. Millions of people are now relying on the internet for advertising, promotions, business and employment. However, one thing is clear; we have learned a lot from the first bubble burst. Only time will tell.

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Overall IE9 RC1 is a huge leap forward for Microsoft, embracing web standards and speeding up the browser. When IE9 is released web developers will finally be able to stop using CSS hacks and start using HTML5 with more confidence. Of course IE8 and IE7 will still be with us for some time to come, but things are looking up.

Curious developers running Windows can download the release candidate from Microsoft. This version of IE9 expands support for semantic HTML5 elements (like <nav>, <section> and <article>), adds more CSS 3 properties and introduces support for the geolocation API.

The additional geolocation support rounds out Internet Explorer’s new HTML5 features. While IE9’s competitors have implemented some of the more experimental APIs (like Web Workers and offline cacheing), IE9 does close the feature gap considerably and is leaps and bounds beyond where IE8 left off.

When it comes to CSS 3 the new IE offers nearly full support, though it still doesn’t understand text-shadow (which is actually been around since CSS 2.1) or the new CSS 3 multi-column text layout tools. On the bright side, IE9 does render border-radius, 2D transforms and new CSS 3 selectors like :first-of-type. For a full rundown of IE9’s HTML5 and CSS 3 features, see our earlier coverage. Also, be sure to head over to the IE9 Test Drive website for some demos that show off IE9’s new standards support.

IE9′s CSS 3 support handles border-radius rules

The new IE9 release candidate adds some privacy controls similar to those Mozilla and Google have been adding to their browsers. IE9 will support the Do Not Track HTTP header [Update: Microsoft says that IE9 does not support an HTTP header at the moment, but does offer Tracking Protection Lists which can block cookies, beacons, pixels and more]. IE9 also supports cookie-based blacklists to stop advertisers from tracking your movements around the web.

If you’ve been using the beta releases of IE9, you’ll notice several changes to the look of IE9, including the ability to put tabs back in their own row, rather than next to the address bar, which is the default setting. To give your tabs a bit more breathing room, just right click on the tab bar and select the “Show tabs on a separate row” option.

Top: the default tab arrangement; Bottom: tabs in their own row

This release also adds a new security feature which allows you to turn off ActiveX for all sites and then re-enable it on a site by site basis. ActiveX, a Windows-only “enhancement” that allows webpages to install code on your PC, has long been an excellent way to load up your Windows machine with viruses and other malware. The new controls mean you can turn off ActiveX entirely and avoid malicious code being installed.

Microsoft is also touting IE9’s hardware acceleration improvements in this release. According the IEblog, the release candidate is 35 percent faster than the previous IE9 beta. Indeed, in our informal testing IE held its own with Firefox 4 and Chrome 11. Pitted against stable releases like Firefox 3.6 or Chrome 9, IE9 fares even better.

Microsoft has not yet set an official release date for IE9, though the company’s web-centric MIX conference, which starts April 12, has historically been host to major IE announcements.

See Also:

• Microsoft Drops a New IE9 Preview, Boosts CSS Support
• A Guide to Internet Explorer 9’s HTML5/CSS 3 Support
• New Hardware-Accelerated IE9 Preview Arrives

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The Social Analyst is a column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.

In 2010, we got the iPad, the Nexus One and Nexus S, the Facebook Open Graph, Gmail Priority Inbox, the fall of Digg, the iPhone 4 (and Gizmodo controversy), Google’s acquisition of ITA, the WikiLeaks phenomenon and the ascension of Mark Zuckerberg.

How’s that for an eventful year in tech? And this list only scratches the surface of tech’s biggest stories. But while many companies rocked the tech world in 2010 (in both good ways and bad), only a few companies can lay claim to creating tech’s biggest win, its biggest flop and its biggest surprise.

So which products and companies top the list? After browsing the Mashable archives and pondering the question over many cups of tea, I have come up with my list for tech’s biggest win, flop and surprise, along with runners-up in each category.

As I am not the end-all for what’s hot in tech, I expect many people to disagree with my picks, so I encourage you to challenge my choices in the comments with what topped your own list.

Tech’s Biggest Win of 2010: Apple iPad

The past year was the year of Facebook and Apple. Both companies grew by leaps and bounds, increased their valuations by billions of dollars and made a significant impact on the world.

Only one, however, established an entirely new market that it now dominates with an iron fist. It’s hard to believe that it hasn’t even been a year since Apple launched the iPad, a device that has turned the tablet form factor into a must-have. Apple is expected to sell 13.3 million iPads this year, up from… well, up from zero iPads in 2009.

It’s not just the fact that Apple single handedly created a new multi-billion-dollar revenue stream, but that it’s redefining all of computing. Notebook sales have dropped since the iPad’s introduction. Apple accelerated the rise of HTML5 with its tablet device at the expense of Flash. Its influence is already affecting countless web apps. Oh, and it’s redefining the meaning of “mobile.”

Apple isn’t done, though. The iPad 2 will arrive in the next few months, and its difficult to find any circumstance where it wouldn’t extend Apple’s supremacy over the market it created.

It took Facebook just one week to get the “Like” button on 50,000 websites. Now 10,000 new websites integrate with Facebook every day.

Few things have permeated the web as quickly as the Facebook Open Graph and its ubiquitous “Like” button. In 2010, Facebook gained reach and interest data at a scale that has Google running scared.

Tech’s Biggest Flop of 2010: Google Buzz

Google Buzz doesn’t top my list of biggest tech flops because it had a spectacular crash-and-burn event, nor does it top my list because, along with Google Wave, it exposed the search giant as a mortal company with many flaws.

No, Buzz’s failure tops my list because of the vast repercussions it will have on both Google and the web.

With the exception of YouTube, Google has failed at social. Blogger, Orkut, Dodgeball, Picasa, Jaiku, Google Friend Connect, Google Latitude, Google Wave, and Google Knowl have either been shut down or dominated by upstart competitors like Foursquare, Facebook, WordPress and Twitter.

With Google’s biggest attempt at social now a mere afterthought, nothing stands in Facebook’s way. The social network will eventually surpass its Silicon Valley rival both in terms of net worth and dominance of the web. Google will become the next Microsoft, profitable but unable to grow, and Facebook will become the next Google whose influence will be felt for years to come.

Microsoft wrote off $240 million in costs due to the abysmal failure of the Kin phone, but it likely cost the company far more than that. Interesting in concept, a wave of bad decisions led to its quick destruction.

Now Microsoft will try to wipe that failure from its memory with Windows Phone 7, the company’s challenger to the rise of Android and iPhone. It’s off to a slow start, but Microsoft has made it clear that it is in the mobile game for the long haul.

Tech’s Biggest Surprise of 2010: The Rise of Groupon

In April, Groupon was worth $1 billion. By November, it was worth $6 billion. In other words, the group-buying website’s average value is growing by more than $20 million in value per day. That makes it the fastest growing company in history.

Chew on that one.

Groupon now has more than 3,000 employees selling brands on the daily deal business model. And business is booming. Now the company is shooting for greatness after turning down Google’s $6 billion offer. The eventual Groupon IPO will be the most anticipated public offering since Google (unless Facebook beats them to the punch).

Nobody could have predicted that Groupon and the group buying business model would explode like it did in 2010, not even Groupon’s founders. Local business and advertising has been changed forever by the flood of daily deals that now permeate the web. And remember this: We have yet to see the limits of the Groupon phenomenon.

HP was on track for record profits and a big push into mobile through its acquisition of Palm. Then CEO Mark Hurd shocked the tech world with his resignation after a sexual harassment scandal that played out for weeks in the tech press.

Then Oracle CEO Larry Ellison brought Mark Hurd on board as co-president, sparking a fight between Oracle and HP and bringing their rivalry to a whole new level.

Oh, and who would have guessed HP would choose former SAP CEO Léo Apotheker as its new CEO? We certainly didn’t.

Bonus Surprise/Flop: Digg’s Total Implosion

After writing this post, I had to add an honorable (but unfortunate) mention to the list: The dramatic fall of Digg from the social web’s graces.

Remember when Digg was one of the web’s biggest traffic referrers? Remember when Digg users could take down a website or create a major controversy?

Those days are over. In its place is a new version of Digg that its users hate. The heavy competition between publishers for the front page of Digg is gone, replaced by the rise of Twitter, Facebook and other social news tools.

Digg gambled and it lost big. Now the company is just trying to survive. It’s a dramatic change from just a year ago, when it was one of the kings of the social media universe.

More About: apple, Column, digg, facebook, Facebook Like, Google, google buzz, groupon, HP, ipad, mark hurd, Opinion, oracle, Social Analyst, tech

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The Internet continues to evolve in leaps and bounds, and countless innovations have been witnessed since it was initially made open to the public. With an astounding number of men and women who have access to the Internet and the many business prospects that come with it, it is not surprising that those who desire to take charge of their everyday lives and become self-employed would utilize the Internet to make their own way. Article marketing and SEO are just two of the most popular ways to earn a living online, but few know of the similarities and differences between these 2 techniques. This article tackles article promotion and search engine optimization, plus the different rewards of having one or both as the foundation of your online business venture.

Article marketing is defined as the crafting of helpful content pieces and their distribution to plenty of article banks. The objective of these content pieces is for a corporation to catch end users’ interest and offer them various products and services in a discreet manner, plus compel them to go to the agency’s primary website. SEO is considered the base of modern Internet trade and entails the implementation of numerous promotional schemes and sufficient keyword research in order to direct the necessary traffic to a site.

The biggest similarity between article marketing and search engine optimization is that both are designed to put a website at the top of search engines’ results pages or one of the first ten results. Article marketing and SEO do this via keyword phrases and online visibility: if you carry out proper keyword research, choose the most suitable key phrases and utilize them well throughout your content, you are going to attract more website traffic, sales as well as recognition.

On top of that, keyword density is a critical factor in both SEO and article marketing. You must have the correct amount of keywords in your material in order to make it enticing to both people and search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Basically, it’s important that you grasp the significance and strength of article promotion and SEO; even if the deepest secrets of these approaches aren’t revealed by lots of specialists, it’s a widely known fact that they would take your online company to the next level if done correctly.

As article marketing and search engine optimization are pretty similar, they may be used in tandem for your enterprise. They work well with one another and offer substantial revenues. Here’s how they are going to produce favorable outcomes: your page ranking can be raised when you craft an entertaining and useful article, add a one-way link to your site in the content piece, and submit that content piece to reliable article directory sites. These article submission sites would subsequently distribute your article to webmasters, websites and organizations that need well-made content. End users will spot your write-up as one of the leading search engine results and check it out, then click on the backlink that you provided in order to learn more about you and your business venture. Thus, article marketing can be thought of as a form of search engine optimization.

The article promotion-search engine optimization pairing could be seen as the strongest and also cost-effective internet sales and advertising tool. If you decide to carry out both tactics, bear in mind that you must focus on a crucial component: your website subject material. The value of your site is based on and is magnified by your content. The content pieces that you publish need to be unique, useful and also engaging to grab the interest of consumers around the world. There are a lot of web marketers who make bulk write-ups that don’t have any substance, so beware of those people. Granted, because of the flood of unfavorable web marketers, it is tough to find high-quality material that will provide you with what you need and want.

The advantages of making use of both SEO and article marketing would be seen shortly after you put them into practice. The simple step-by-step procedure for both approaches would help you become more efficient and have extra time to focus on other urgent concerns. In addition, this mixture of tactics works every time, which would mean that you generate more profits and do it more quickly! Having said that, you’ll have to be really cautious; conduct your research, confirm the amount of earnings that come in from advertising and article distribution before employing them, and utilize only ethical and legitimate advertising and optimization methods for your business. You’ll have a prosperous home business before long!

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It’s a great time for JavaScript. Not only is it becoming a much more respected language, but it’s also growing in leaps and bounds – both in popularity and features. As more browsers begin to implement the features of the ECMAScript 5th edition standard, JavaScript becomes an even more powerful platform for you to develop on. In this tutorial, we’ll talk about the new methods that are available to you.

What is ECMAScript 5?

ECMAScript is the official name of what we all call JavaScript. That doesn’t mean we’re wrong; it’s just that the name “JavaScript” is a trademark of Oracle; so Ecma International (originally the European Computer Manufacturers Association—hence ECMA) uses the term “ECMAScript” to refer to the standard of JavaScript. The latest version of this standard is the 5th edition, and it was approved just over a year ago (on December 3, 2009). It encompasses a huge range of great additions, and several of those are starting to show up in browsers. The implementations of ECMAScript 5 is called JavaScript 1.8.5.

In this tutorial, we’re going to be looking at the JavaScript 1.8.5 functions that are available to us in the Firefox 4 betas. You’ll be happy to discover that most of the latest versions of other browsers have these, too . . . except for one. This time, it’s Opera, as IE9 has included many of these.

Function 1: Object.create

This method is a very important one; it really cleans up prototypal inheritance. Previously (in ECMAScript 3rd edition), to create an object and set its prototype, you’d do something like this:

function Cat(name) {
    this.name   = name;
    this.paws   = 4;
    this.hungry = false;
    this.eaten  = [];
}
Cat.prototype = {
    constructor : Cat,
    play        : function () { this.hungry = true; return "playing!"; },
    feed        : function (food) { this.eaten.push(food); this.hungry = false; },
    speak       : function () { return "Meow" }
};

Am I the only one who thinks it looks weird to have the prototype outside the constructor function? And inheriting gets even messier. With Object.create, things get a lot easier. The above could be coded like this:

var dog = {
    name   : "dog",
    paws   : 4,
    hungry : false,
    eaten  : null,
    play        : function () { this.hungry = true; return "playing!"; },
    feed        : function (food) { if (!this.eaten) { this.eaten = []; } this.eaten.push(food); this.hungry = false; },
    speak       : function () { return "Woof!" }
};

var my_dog = Object.create(dog);

What’s going on here is this: I’m calling object.create, passing it an object to use as the prototype of the new object that Object.create is returning. When using Object.create, I don’t have to worry about defining the prototype separately. In fact, I have a lot more flexibility to decide how to go about creating and inheriting objects. For example, I can’t put the eaten array on the prototype, because an array is a reference value, so every object created from dog will share that array. I’ve decided to check for it before using it here, but if I wanted to wrap Object.create(dog) in a make_dog function, I could assign it there just as easily.

That’s what’s great about Object.create; you can choose how to do it.

There’s a second parameter that Object.create takes; it’s a properties descriptor object. It’s a bit complicated, but it’s also a part of the next function we’ll look at, so let’s check that out.

• MDN Documentation
• Browser Support
  • Firefox 4
  • Internet Explorer 9
  • Safari 5
  • Chrome 5+

Function 2: Object.defineProperty

If you’ve got an object that you want to define a property on, you’ll probably do it this way:

my_dog.age = 2;

This still works fine in ES5, but if you want some more fine-grained control, you can have it with Object.defineProperty. The first parameter is the object you’re assigning the property on. The second parameter is the name of the property, as a string. The final property is the descriptor object. Here’s how that works. It’s (obviously) an object and it can have a combination of the following properties, all of which describe the property we’re adding:

• value: use this to set the value of a property. Defaults to undefined.
• writable: use this boolean to define whether this is a read-only variable. If it’s writable, it’s true. Defaults to false.
• configurable: use this boolean to define whether the type (value vs. method) of this property can be changed, or whether the property can be deleted. If it’s configurable, it’s true. Defaults to false.
• enumerable: use this boolean to define whether this property is included when the properties of the object are enumerated (a for-in loop or the keys method). Defaults to false.
• get: use this to define a custom getter method. Defaults to undefined.
• set: use this to define a custom setter method. Defaults to undefined.

Notice that the defaults for the boolean options above are the reverse of the old obj.prop = val standards. Also, know that you can’t define value or writable when get or set are defined, and vice versa.

So, how would you use this? Try this:

// assume my_dog from above

Object.defineProperty(my_dog, "age", {
    set : function (age) { this.human_years = age * 7; },
    get : function () { return this.human_years / 7; },
    enumerable : true
});

my_dog.age = 2;
my_dog.human_years; // 14

Apart from the fact that dog years aren’t really 7 human years, you should notice that we didn’t set value or writable here, because we’re using get and set. These functions aren’t ever accessed directly. They are “magically” run behind the scenes when you assign or request a property. In this example, I’m using these functions to keep age and human_years in “sync.” If you don’t want the “other” value accessible, you could use a anonymous, self-invoking function to hide it with closure:

Object.defineProperty(my_dog, "age", (function () {
    var human_years;

    return {
        set : function (age) { human_years = age * 7; },
        get : function () { return human_years / 7; },
        enumerable : true
    };

}()));

Of course, there’s nothing to stop you from doing something stupid inside get or set, so use it wisely.

You can use a form of the property descriptor object to add properties to objects with Object.create. Do it as follows:

var your_dog = Object.create(dog, {
    age : {
        get : function () { /* . . . */ },
        set : function () { /* . . . */ },
        enumerable: true
    },
    gender : {
        value : "female"
    }
});

Just use the property name as a property of the descriptor object; then, set the attributes via an object in the value.

• MDN Documentation
• Browser Support
  • Firefox 4
  • Internet Explorer 9
  • Safari 5
  • Chrome 5+

Function 3: Object.defineProperties

If you want to define several properties at once, you can use a property descriptors object just as with Object.create to define them, using Object.defineProperties.

Object.defineProperties(my_dog, {
    age : {
        get : function () { /* . . . */ },
        set : function () { /* . . . */ },
        enumerable: true
    },
    gender : {
        value : "female"
    }
});

You’ll want to note—for the rare case when you’re not using an object literal as the second parameter—that only the enumerable properties of the properties object will be used.

• MDN Documentation
• Browser Support
  • Firefox 4
  • Internet Explorer 9
  • Safari 5
  • Chrome 5+

Function 4: Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor

If you ever want to know the specifics of a property, you can use this function, Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor. Take note of the “Own”; this only works with properties on the object itself, not up its prototype chain.

var person = { name : "Joe" };

Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor(person, "name"); // { configurable : true, enumerable : true, value : "Joe", writable : true }

As you can see, this works with properties set in both the old and new way. Object.getOwnPropertyDescriptor takes two parameters: the object and the property name as a string.

• MDN Documentation
• Browser Support
  • Firefox 4
  • Internet Explorer 8+
  • Safari 5
  • Chrome 5+

Function 5: Object.keys

Ever wanted to get all the keys of an object? Now, you can do so easily with Object.keys. Pass this function an object, and it will return an array of all the enumerable properties of that object. You can also pass it an array, and you’ll get back an array of the indices.

var horse = { name : "Ed", age : 4, job : "jumping", owner : "Jim" };

var horse_keys = Object.keys(horse); // ["name", "age", "job", "owner"];

• MDN Documentation
• Browser Support
  • Firefox 4
  • Internet Explorer 9
  • Safari 5
  • Chrome 5+

Function 6: Object.getOwnPropertyNames

This one is just like Object.keys, except that it includes all the properties—even the ones that aren’t enumerable. By the longer function name, you can tell they discourage the use of it. Usually, you’ll want keys instead.

• MDN Documentation
• Browser Support
  • Firefox 4
  • Internet Explorer 9
  • Safari 5
  • Chrome 5+

Function 7: Object.preventExtensions / Object.isExtensible

If you’ve ever wanted to create a function that doesn’t accept new parameters, you can do so now. Run your object through Object.preventExtensions, and it will decline all attempts to add new parameters. This function goes hand in hand with Object.isExtensible, which returns true if you can extend the object and false if you can’t.

    var product = { name : "Foobar", rating : 3.5 };

    Object.isExtensible(product); // true

    Object.preventExtentions(product);

    Object.isExtensible(product); // false

    product.price = "$10.00"; // doesn't work

    product.price; // undefined

You should note that all the properties on the object at the time you run Object.preventExtensions can still be changed or deleted (assuming their attributes allow that).

• MDN Documentation
• Browser Support
  • Firefox 4
  • Internet Explorer 9
  • Chrome 6+

Function 8: Object.seal / Object.isSealed

Sealing an object is one step up from preventing extensions. A sealed object won’t let you add or delete properties, or change properties from a value (like a string) to an accessor (a method) or vice versa. You’ll still be able to read and write properties, of course. You can find out if an object is sealed by using Object.isSealed.

var pet = { name : "Browser", type : "dog" };

Object.seal(pet);

pet.name = "Oreo";

pet.age = 2; // doesn't work

pet.type = function () { /**/ }; // doesn't work

delete pet.name; // doesn't work

• MDN Documentation
• Browser Support
  • Firefox 4
  • Internet Explorer 9
  • Chrome 6+

Function 9: Object.freeze / Object.isFrozen

Freezing it yet another step further. A frozen object can’t be changed in any way; it’s read-only. You can verify the frozenness of an object with, you guessed it, Object.isFrozen.

var obj = { greeting : "Hi!" };

Object.freeze(obj);

Object.isFrozen(obj); // true

• MDN Documentation
• Browser Support
  • Firefox 4
  • Internet Explorer 9
  • Chrome 6+

Function 10: Array.isArray

You’d think that it wouldn’t be too hard to determine that a given variable is an array. After all, everything else works fine with the typeof operator. However, JavaScript arrays are of inconsistent ilk. They’re actually closer array-like objects (even though we usually use that term to refer to things like arguments and NodeLists). This function gives you a way to be 100% sure that what you’re working with is an array. Pass it a variable, and it returns the boolean.

var names = ["Collis", "Cyan"];

Array.isArray(names); // true

For more on why we need this function, check out the docs, linked to below.

• MDN Documentation
• Browser Support
  • Firefox 4
  • Internet Explorer 9
  • Safari 5
  • Chrome 5+
  • Opera 10.5+

Function 11: Date.prototype.toJSON

This isn’t too big, but if you ever want to store dates in JSON, you might find this useful. Date objects now have a toJSON function that will convert the date to a JSON string date.

new Date().toJSON(); // "2010-12-06T16:25:40.040Z"

• MDN Documentation

Function 12: Function.prototype.bind

You’re probably familiar with using call and apply to reassign the value of this in a function.

var arr1 = ["1", "2", "3"],
    arr2 = ["4", "5", "6"];

Array.prototype.push.apply(arr1, arr2);

These methods allow you to change the value of this within a function. If you want to do something like this often, Function.prototype.bind returns a new function with this bound to whatever you pass in, so you can save it to a variable.

var tooltip = { text: "Click here to . . . " },
    overlay = { text: "Please enter the number of attendees" };

function show_text () {
    // really, do something more useful here
    console.log(this.text);
}

tooltip.show = show_text.bind(tooltip);
tooltip.show();

overlay.show = show_text.bind(overlay);

overlay.show();

Of course, this might not be the most practical example, but it gives you the idea!

• MDN Documentation
• Browser Support
  • Firefox 4
  • Internet Explorer 9
  • Chrome 7+

But Wait, There’s More …

Those are the ECMAScript 5th Edition (or JavaScript 1.8.5) functions that have been added to the Firefox 4 betas. There are a few other changes to JavaScript that they are implementing as well, which you can check out in the release notes.

However, there are a bunch of ECMAScipt 5 functions that were already supported in Firefox 3, and several other browsers. Have you played with any of these?

• Object.getPrototypeOf
• String.prototype.trim
• Array.prototype.indexOf
• Array.prototype.lastIndexOf
• Array.prototype.every
• Array.prototype.some
• Array.prototype.forEach
• Array.prototype.map
• Array.prototype.filter
• Array.prototype.reduce
• Array.prototype.reduceRight

Note: these are linked to their MDN Documentation.

If you want to see which browsers and versions support these functions, you can check out this compatibility table, made by Juriy Zaytsev (Kangax). The nice thing about most of these functions is that if a browser doesn’t support it, you can usually add support, with something like this:

if (typeof Object.create !== 'function') {
    Object.create = function (o) {
        function F() {}
        F.prototype = o;
        return new F();
    };
}
// Courtesy of Douglas Crockford: http://javascript.crockford.com/prototypal.html

What ECMAScript 5 Features are you Using?

The slew of new functions we’ve looked at here is really only a small part of the goodness added to the ECMAScript standard in the 5th edition. Are there any other features you’re specifically looking forward to using, or maybe even using right now? Let’s here it in the comments!

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<p style="text-align: center;"

Continue reading: Mobile Health Apps Will Be Used By 500 Million People By 2015 [Smartphone Mobile Health Apps Gaining Popularity All The Time, To Reach Staggering Usage Rates In Five Years]

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2. HTC Is Growing Fastest In United States [HTC Gaining Brand Recongition, Support From Carriers In United States, "Quietly Brilliant" Manufacturer Gaining Mindshare] by Kevin Schram
3. Android’s Popularity Grows By Leaps And Bounds [Recent AdMob Mobile Usage Report Shows Android Gains, iPhone Loses In Last Month] by Kevin Schram
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In addition to donating an excerpt of his excellent new book to Nettuts+, Christian and Pearson books have also been generous enough to provide us with five digital copies of the book to give away.

How to Win a Copy

Despite the fact that the JavaScript language has grown in leaps and bounds over the last few years — in both features and popularity — it’s still one of the most least tested languages. Why do you think that is? Leave a comment and let us know your honest opinion. On November 22nd (EST), we’ll choose five winners, and send them a free copy of the book! That’s all there is to it.

Tired of console.log-ing your way out of trouble? Weary from constant fear of cross-browser issues? Scared of making even the slightest change to production code? Test-Driven JavaScript Development teaches you how to solve those issues and more using unit tests and TDD. Rich with examples, the book provides a solid foundation on automated testing, a test-driven walk-through of JavaScript’s unique qualities, and five practical examples of building solid, reusable, cross-browser JavaScript using TDD.

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Learn more about Markerr.com in Dataopedia.com

Find out how much Markerr.com is worth with Stimator.com

Have a business question? Ask Startups.com

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Typography on the web has improved by leaps and bounds since the dark days of the blink tag, but it’s still a long way from ideal.

Sure there are great ways to serve custom fonts, and you can even use JavaScript libraries like Lettering.js for even more control over your layout. But when it comes to the flow of text around images, pull quotes and other block level elements, well, web typography falls apart.

The demo movie above from Adobe shows off some WebKit-based experiments that seek to change that. Adobe Engineering VP Paul Betlem narrates and the demo, and he shows how his team is extending the WebKit browser to do some new typographic tricks. WebKit is the open source engine behind Safari and Google Chrome, and it powers the most popular mobile browsers like the ones on the iPhone, iPad, iPod and all the Android phones. The demo certainly shows some impressive results.

However, we’re a bit suspicious of the methodology behind the results. Betlem talks about extending WebKit’s CSS support via vendor prefixes, but neglects to mention what those prefixes are built against — in other words, there’s no mention of submitting a standard that other browsers could work from.

In fact, while the demo is pretty cool, the whole overview is too vague to say much about other than, “that would be nice.”

Also, note to Adobe, you don’t need to work with Google to work on WebKit. It’s an open source project. You can just submit your patches (instructions are here).

[via John Nack]

See Also:

• Design for Readability First
• 
  FontFonter: Test Web Fonts on Any Website
• Mozilla Throws Its Weight Behind Improving Web Type, Adopts WOFF for Firefox

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Continue reading: Colleges Switch To E-Text To Save Money & Help Save Environment [E-Textbooks Are Seen As A Way To Save Money & Lessen The Use Of Paper]

Comment | View latest news in Educational Gadgets | Green Technology | TFTS Home.

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1. Are Plant-Derived Plastics Beneficial To The Environment Or Not? [Scientific American Wonders Whether Benefits of Plant-Based Plastics, like Coca Cola PET Bottles, Have a Negative Impact On Food Production] by J. Angelo Racoma
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4. Paper Company Wants Everybody To Print More [CEO of Domtar Says Anti-Printing Mentality Is "Just Bull", Kids Should Love To Print] by Kevin Schram

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Android has just rocketed past a major milestone: 100,000 applications available in the Android Marketplace.

The announcement was made with just a tweet from the Android Dev Twitter account. “One hundred thousand apps in Android Market,” was all the tweet needed to say to spread the news. The search giant recently expanded the Android Marketplace to 20+ countries in an effort to kick its developer ecosystem in high gear.

Google’s open-source mobile OS has been on a tear, but its rapid growth has come at the cost of OS fragmentation across hundreds of devices. And while Android may be flooding the market at breakneck speed, Apple’s iOS App Store is the dominant mobile store by leaps and bounds. There are more than 280,000 iOS apps available, nearly triple the offerings on Android.

Do you think Android can catch up to iOS, or does Google have a lot more to do before it can challenge Apple’s supremacy in the mobile application space? Let us know our thoughts in the comments.

More About: android, android marketplace, Google

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For the first half of the year, US internet ad revenues totalled $12.1B, the best recorded number ever for the period, reflecting 11.3% growth over the same period last year.

Q2 was even rosier when broken out. Revenues of $6.2B reflect the second-highest quarterly results ever, and a near 14% increase over Q2 2009.

Want still more good news? OK, here goes:

– Display grew 16%

– Paid search was up 12%

– Sponsorship revenue +32%

– Digital video up 31%

– Impression and hybrid ad pricing models up 4% and 6%, respectively.

– Q2 revenue of $6.2B is closing in on Nielsen’s extimates for cable and broadcast TV revenues for the period ($6.6B and $6B, respectively).

Sherrill Mane, the IAB’s SVP of industry services, was almost giddily optimistic. “Internet advertising growth is outpacing the rest of the media market,” she stated, “All the other media are growing at far slower rates. We’re definitely leading and outpacing the total market.”

Calling this year a “stellar first half,” She continued: “If you look at the data and display related formats…those are growing by leaps and bounds. An influx of brand dollars is moving this way.”

PwC Partner David Silverman was equally buoyant: “The underlying fundamental growth for the industry is still there.”

If you’d like to know exactly where Internet Explorer 9 stands on support for emerging web standards in its current beta release form, Microsoft has put together a comprehensive list of all the supported HTML5 and CSS 3 features in IE9. The document notes that IE 9 is still a beta release, and the list is subject to change, but it makes a good list to help you get up to speed on IE 9’s new capabilities.

Internet Explorer 9 is a major leap forward for Microsoft in its promise to deliver solid web standards support. Although IE 9 still lags behind its competitors when it comes to supporting the latest HTML5 and CSS 3 code, it’s leaps and bounds beyond where IE 8 left off.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the list is that Microsoft has opted to skip the vender prefix in most of its CSS 3 support and simply use, for example, the border-radius rule. That means if you’ve been adding the straight CSS 3 rules in additions to the -webkit, -moz and -o prefixes, your fancy style sheets should already work in IE 9.

Among the good news for web developers in IE 9 is support for CSS 3’s border-radius property, opacity in images, CSS media queries and the new web fonts format, WOFF.

IE9’s WOFF support even has a nice showcase: a series of CSS font experiments dubbed Lost World’s Fairs. Using WOFF and Typekit, web designers Jason Santa Maria, Frank Chimero and Naz Hamid have put together some very impressive font demos to advertise World’s Fairs that never happened (we’re partial to the Atlantis World’s Fair).

The demos will work in any modern browser, including the new IE 9 beta.

While IE 9 isn’t a final release yet, things are definitely look up for web developers. Yes, we’ll still be supporting IE 7 and IE 8 for some time, and yes, IE9 still lacks a few things, like support for CSS 3 text-shadows or HTML5’s form elements, but it’s a step in the right direction.

See Also:

• Web Heavies Send a Love Letter to Open Web Fonts
• Typekit Teams Up With Adobe to Offer More Web Fonts
• Internet Explorer 9 Beta Drops. It’s Lean, Fast and Modern
• New Hardware-Accelerated IE9 Preview Arrives

Go to Source

Design Informer

The Process Behind Good Illustration – According to a Young Illustrator (Part II)

by Natalie Sklobovskaya for DesignInformer

Good Process and Good Design

In Part I we skimmed the surface on a few points regarding when an image becomes an illustration. But, of course, this knowledge isn’t very useful if we don’t know how to apply it to our work when the pencil hits the paper! Or, stylus hits the tablet, whatever it is you do.

It’s easy to think there’s no way you can make anything look good because you don’t know how to use Adobe Illustrator, or can’t draw people worth beans, etc. And if that’s your concern, don’t worry one bit — skill-related knowledge is nothing that can’t be built up with practice and time. Those that have natural gifts will get there faster, but the doors are closed to no one. There are, however, staples to illustration that have nothing to do with how good you are at drawing or using Photoshop — they transcend into the realm of good process and good design, and I’ve believed that studying illustration is much more about this than about the former.

In this second part of the article, I’d like to share some of these practices that have been invaluable to me as an illustration student, and ones I think I will carry with me for a long time to come.

This part deals a lot more with actual practice, technique, etc. — so, not everyone will think and work this way best. My goal here is not to provide an exhaustive and definitive list, but just to share a few tips that I felt have really pushed my own learning leaps and bounds. Part III (next week) will pick up with the second half of this list, but please feel free to share your responses so far in the comments!

Without further ado…

Part II: So how do we do it?

Draw actively.

If it’s not distracting, add it. If it’s not necessary, remove it.

…And this is why it can take a very long time! In the end the goal is to get your illustration down to a point when as much as possible of what’s in it (people, their actions, props, setting, shapes, whatever it may be) is actively catering to your purpose — and as much of what’s not is removed. Heck, you might not need more than a line-drawing or stick figures.

Some assorted points in my head on this:

1. More generally, just answer the “why” question at every step — why you chose those colors and those sharp edges here, why this character’s head is so big, why is the focus on the red circle — what is it doing to communicate the idea, and is there a clearer way to do it? And if you ever catch yourself rationalizing something with “it just looks cool” — take a step back. Illustration can definitely look cool, but everything cool in it has got to be for a reason.
2. In general, always think “pare down” and “less is more” — chances are you have way more stuff in your picture than is really necessary!
3. On the flip side, a good illustration can be as fully-rendered as a detailed painting — but that would mean that you didn’t just add it because you felt like it. For instance, if that was the only way to get a necessary mood across, or if the illustration specifically relied on referencing Renaissance-era fine art, for example.
4. If you arrived at a decision (style, colors, etc.) "by accident" that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s inappropriate or unjustified. In fact, experimenting is often the only way to determine if something works or not!

5. Think about specific visual metaphors that get your point across most clearly — for example, how do you illustrate a feeling of happiness? A character looking euphoric, light colors, anything cute and personified (alas), a big grin, radiating beams, whatever it may be — and that might be all you need.

   If you’re having a hard time with this, there is a great article by illustrator Jillian Tamaki on this subject that has helped me tremendously. I couldn’t have said what she wrote better.

6. Pay a great deal of attention to hierarchy, or the order of importance. There are several hierarchies to consider — hierarchy of color, value, scale, etc. — they all work together to comprise one overall visual hierarchy. As an illustrator, your job to define exactly what your viewer sees first, where and how their eye is guided around the picture, and what narrative, if any, unfolds from it (this is crucial to getting a message across). Be thinking about how changing the color and size of elements affects this balance and how to use it to your advantage.

   You’ll find a lot of it is common sense — for instance, bigger things are seen first, as are more vibrant colors. A greyscale illustration with one bright red object will draw very particular attention to that object. A picture where the front-and-center is dominated by a figure will place a lot of importance on that figure, no matter its color. Moving that figure off to the side would already shift the balance a great deal. So on and so forth. There’s no rule to figuring out the best composition; again, and again, the general recipe is Try it and See.

7. Be careful where you add details — details are closely related to where the viewer should be getting more visual information out of (which could really affect your hierarchy and, in turn, your illustration’s effectiveness). Inaccurate details could be distracting as well, so using informed visual references where needed is very key (more on this later).
8. Think “more obvious” — you don’t have to beat the viewer over the head with what you’re trying to say, but the more blunt you are, the faster you’ll get the point across. And sometimes that will mean exaggeration and altering reality. For example, it’s much easier to convey the fact that something is shiny or glowing by drawing little cartoon lightbulb rays coming out of it, than it is to render the whole thing in realistic lighting and set that object in a realistic glow. (This is one of those things that could do a lot to dictate what visual style you execute your illustration in.)

Use color with discretion.

…Are you sure your illustration needs color? It might not, for instance, if your line work gets the work done. Don’t forget that a nice clean sketch or a non-colored line work drawing can be a finished illustration!

Illustration © Chi-Wen Lee. Used with permission.

If you add color, it should be because you need it (you very often will).

You might need color, for instance, if your line work alone does not separate shapes as clearly by itself (for instance if all your line-weights are very similar and it’s difficult to see what is where), and if color will help set apart foreground and background, focus attention on something, set a necessary mood, etc.

On the left are two versions of Chi-Wen Lee‘s illustration (you can view her entire process on this project on her blog here). The cut-out by itself does not read as clearly because of the complexity of the lines, all of which have similar weights (thickness). In other words, it’s very hard to see where the dragon is! But, upon adding color, however, the image is much clearer, and there’s a sense of hierarchy and even space that was not there before.

If you must color…

…Then remember you’ll probably need far fewer colors than you think. Look at your favorite illustrations, and I bet you you can identify 3-4 hues tops (if not just 1-2) that it uses for all its parts. And it’s true! You don’t need the whole rainbow.

Get yourself a color wheel and pick a palette of 2-3 compatible colors and stick to them (and perhaps different shades of them, but no more hues). The fewer your choices, the more strict and grounded your decisions will have to be as to which part of the picture needs what color, which means you must make good design decisions in picking them. (And any time you make good design decisions, you score major brownie points!)

Hold up. What does “compatible” mean, and how do I pick these compatible colors?

“Compatible” colors merely means they work together harmoniously. Harmonious doesn’t necessarily mean “tranquil” or “happy” — it just means having some sort of relationship amongst all of them that permeates them.

The goal isn’t to starve you of color choices, or force you to make unrealistic ones. Just like an outfit becomes harder and harder to put together the more colors and patterns you introduce, it becomes harder and harder to make a drawing’s colors look good together the more of them there are. Which is why a limited and considered color palette is very important, lest color become a distraction because of its incongruence.

Any two colors could work together, two colors can be bridged with a third color that would work well with them, and any one color will resolve well with shades of itself.Knowing this, how can we come up with a limited but flexible color palette without using the whole rainbow?

First, let’s look at some ways to select up to 3 hues from our color wheel. (This is the method that I’ve been taught and that I use myself, but I’m sure there’s more than one way to wrap one’s brain around this.)

Now, you can generate other compatible colors that stick within your palette by pulling those colors apart a little bit. To do so, adjust their value (light and dark) and saturation (also known as chroma — how vibrant the color is). You can adjust the hue a bit as well for some nice analogous shades.

Illustration © Tomer Hanuka. Used with permission.

…Though, don’t forget how flexible even one hue can be! (If one is all you need, then one is all you need.) In the illustration below, the blue color is pulled apart to generate many gray-ish, green-ish, purple-ish, brighter, lighter, and darker blues that serve all the needs of the illustration, but still work together as a small family.

Illustration © Tomer Hanuka. Used with permission.

Illustrator Tomer Hanuka was kind enough to give me permission to use his works in this article… I selected his illustrations as my guinea pigs here because I distinctly remember once thinking that colors needed to be photography-realistic to tell a realistic story. Tomer, of course, proved me wrong, and I wanted to pass that on! )

When coloring a drawing, it can be difficult to know where to start, when all you have is your black and white sketch staring at you. What I sometimes do before I even start experimenting with color palettes is just zoom out and block in my entire drawing in black-and-white first (or in one hue), focusing on getting the balance and composition of the relative values right. Once those are there (if you are working digitally), it’s much easier to dive into some color studies.

If you want to keep reading, Douglas Dowd has a great blog post on this topic that really expands on this. (My summary herein hardly does it justice.)

For when you’re in a hurry or just feel like browsing, Adobe has a nifty tool called Kuler that will generate lovely compatible palettes for you.

Use with great discretion.

Go out into the world.

Why can’t I just search online for inspiration? The Internet is much bigger than anywhere I can walk or drive!

I know, right?? My professors are sticklers for requiring us to obtain ideas and inspiration from everywhere but the Internet, which used to perplex me. And I actually didn’t internalize the answer until my professor (and illustrator) John Hendrix laid it out.

And here’s the deal. The Internet indeed makes visual stimulus very easy to find these days. There are thousands of blogs dedicated to aggregating inspirational material from website designs to comics, and Google is available right there for your searching pleasure. But it’s not “searching” for ideas you want to be doing. You want to be happening upon them, be surprised by them, have absolutely no influence on their having found you. Anything with you more in control means they’re coming from your head one way or another.

Discovering brand new ideas online is nigh impossible for exactly this reason, since things you find on the Internet are inherently based on your somehow searching for them. You’re going to need to type some keywords into the search box, or consciously go to a blog that has material of a known type — yes, even StumbleUpon is limiting. Using the Internet, thus, means you need to have some idea in your head to search for — and how can you search for things that you don’t know you’re looking for?

So. Keep your sketchbook (or even your camera phone) with you and just observe, actively. Take photographs, makes doodles, notes, visit corners of the bookstore or the library you always avoid, browse magazines from the 1930s. You’re surrounded by visual inspiration every day, most of which you usually dismiss — but all of it is out there waiting for you, it is not already in your head, and you will not find it unless you open your eyes and let it find you.

Experiment. And then experiment more.

Don’t ever throw away what you’ve done — but take a few minutes to mock up some thumbnails of alternative solutions to whatever it is you’re doing, be it picking a composition, color-choosing, alternative visual metaphors, etc. Don’t be timid, and don’t be afraid to “ruin” it (as long as you keep backups). Good design loves rough play; get as big a range of possibilities as possible! So flip that thing horizontally, mess up all the colors to something completely unexpected, change the point of view, upturn the composition to a different angle, add more objects in, remove them, crop the format to a completely different shape, and go nuts. Even if you think the idea won’t fly. Just try it and see. If you can get a range of 20-50 crazy ideas, you’ll hit on 2-3 really, really, really good ones you would have never come up with otherwise.

Here are some examples of concrete tips to try that have helped me a lot:

• If you’re working digitally, such as in Photoshop, separate your work into layers as much as possible, so you can move things around and reposition them easier. I’ll often have 10-20 layers devoted to just line work (even if it’s all one color and all part of the same “outline”) — just so I can easily nudge and move and rotate several pieces into good compositional places before I decide on anything.
• Backtrack in your process and try to find points at which there were alternative directions you could have taken, instead of the one that led you to where you are now. And try them.
• Possibly the tip I hold closest to my heart: Zoom out and be rough before you zoom in and be painstaking. If you reverse this, the sky will fall on your head! Block in colors roughly first to get the overall balance right, do rough thumbnails of compositions without spending too much love on any one of them, et cetera. If it looks good and balanced zoomed out, you can be confident that when you zoom in to work small it’ll all still sing.
• Be inspired. Go out into the world, take two! (If you are keeping a folder of inspirational material, that would be great to dive into too.) Try looking at illustrations, designs, and other visual material that have nothing to do with what you’re working on — they would offer up the biggest surprises in terms of directions you didn’t consider that might work with your drawing, too.
• Is it an abstract composition? One super-easy trick to reconsider the composition is just to rotate the format. (Or spend some time re-arranging the elements on the page — which should the viewer be drawn to first, and how does rearranging them change the hierarchy?)
• …or perhaps you’re drawing a person, or people. Do they really need to be visible head to toe, or be right in the center? Things tend to get more interesting if you change the scale of the subject relative to the size of the format, experiment with the foregound/middle-ground/background, or play with the edge relationships.

So, why “waste time” on so much experimenting? What if you’ve got a great idea right away and you’re certain you love it?

…it very well may be good, but it may not be the best. And, the only way to evaluate if it’s “the best” or not to compare it to something else — and if you make lots of variations of your idea, the more successful will very clearly shine against the less successful ones.

Especially if one’s illustration experience is still in the works, trusting your brain to always be right the first time isn’t the best idea, which is something I learned the hard way! My last three studio projects were the results of margin sketches I scribbled on loose-leaf paper off-hand, that my professor pointed to and said, “That. Do that. Throw away this… *point to sketch I spent 6 hours on*… and do that.”

I found that it’s actually important that you do this step even if you’re happy with what you have, almost more so. Something that you really like could be the very pinnacle of your internal idiosyncrasies and thought patterns! So, by all means save what you did, but take even just a few minutes to entertain the idea that you had to completely rethink everything you just made. You just might find that your half-hearted experiment just… works!

This list has a bit more to it, so stick around for Part III as well next week, in which we will wrap up this outline. Hope some of these are helpful so far!

Go to Source

Newsweek’s got a problem (aside from the fact that it’s currently a publication in search of a buyer.) The company has a smart, adept digital arm. But the product that is getting the most positive attention right now doesn’t support any advertising. And it’s not directly attached to the company’s business model. It’s called Newsweek.Tumblr.com.

Newsweek is one of the few old media brands that has taken to Tumblr quickly and adamantly. The company has developed a friendly but snarky persona with Mark Coatney at the helm that is increasingly winning fans.

But Tumblr has no ad placements, and that voice is often lacking at the magazine’s monetizable products. With the magazine up for sale, the brand is currently taking a beating online. There seems to be a new satirical purchase offer popping up every day. Henry Blodget recently offered $1 to buy the mag. But as The New York Times‘ David Carr wrote this weekend:

“Unless someone is looking for a machine that makes money disappear very quickly, why would they buy Newsweek?”

That’s hard for any brand to take. And yet, Newsweel’s tumblr had a pretty great rebuttal. Today in a post titled,

Every Day is, Like, Sunday, the tumblr expounded:

“June already! Where does the time go? Nothing like an uncertain future
to telescope the hours. Remember, buyers: Bids are due Wednesday!”

This is not the tone that’s become expected from a stalwart weekly news magazine. Even Carr acknowledged it on Twitter:

Newsweeks v smart tumblr http://bit.ly/9hRS4R on state of play at mag, including push backs on my column http://nyti.ms/aDHyxE and Graham

Even as Newsweek struggles to find a buyer, the company is making leaps and bounds in digital. A newly unveiled website is both sleek and direct. Meanwhile, the company’s Twitter feed often strikes a similarly fun and irreverent tone. Take for instance, this recent tweet:

And yet, it’s hard to ignore that most of the interesting links in the company’s Twitter feed send readers not to the magazine, but to Tumblr posts.

And even that always chipper Tumblr persona doesn’t have the best of scenarios for the company’s future revenue options:

“We can think of a lot of ways! For instance, there’s the Time Inc.
model, in which costs are spread around a lot of publications. There
is, as Carr points out, the rich guy option. We’re thinking of starting
a Kickstarter account. Also, as our numbers do show, our losses have
narrowed considerably over last year, and we expect that situation to
continue to improve.”

Despite an impressive — and quickly improving — digital product, Newsweek still has to figure out how to sell more magazines
to survive. The revenue for digital ad sales is simply not strong
enough to support a newsweekly sized staff. Unfortunately, the prospect of “narrowed losses” isn’t enough to win over most buyers. At this point, the best Newsweek may be able to hope for is a buyer so impressed by the strides the company has made in digital that s/he thinks the staff can extend that makeover to the print side.

But at the very least, Newsweek’s Tumblr will go down fighting. Another Tumblr rebuttal to Carr’s Sunday column:

Carr: In the current digital news ecosystem, having “week” in your title
is anachronistic in the extreme, what an investor would call negative
equity.

Newsweek.Tumblr: This is a small irritant, but what the hell: So what? In the
“digital news ecosystem,” “Newsweek” is a better name than “Time” or
“People”; ever try Googling “Time”?

Adam Rosenberg is the Online Community Manager at Salsa Labs. Most recently, he was the New Media Manager at the Center for Democracy & Technology where his work focused on Internet privacy, data protection, cybersecurity and open government issues.

The latest changes to Facebook have seen their fair share of criticism, with many users examining more closely the definition of “public vs. private.” Some users have been turned off enough by Facebook’s envelope pushing when it comes to privacy to go so far as to contemplate a mass Facebook exodus.

Whether or not the changes become the final blow to Facebook’s tenuous relationship with privacy remains to be seen. However, protecting your privacy is important on any social network, so while you’re still on Facebook, here are a few important privacy tips to keep in mind as you navigate the site’s newest incarnation.

1. Lists: Learn to Love ‘Em

The list function seems to be one of the most underrated privacy tools on Facebook. All privacy snafus aside, the past year has seen Facebook improve the granularity of privacy control settings by leaps and bounds. Users often forget that the tiny dial in the lower-right corner next to each post they share gives them an option to make that item visible to “Everyone,” “Friends Only,” or even particular lists.

It’s important to know that “Everyone” doesn’t just mean all Facebook users anymore. According to Facebook’s own website, it means the entire Internet. This is a good thing to keep in mind if you select “Everyone” as a share setting for a post. A search for the term “soo drunk” with Facebook’s “Posts by Everyone” option reveals some openly available results that were probably not intended for public consumption.

Lists can be extremely valuable for both privacy advocates and marketing professionals. The privacy cautious may want to use lists to restrict co-workers or professional contacts from knowing their relationship status, favorite movies, political views, etc. The marketer can use lists as a way to keep groups aware of products, announcements and events. And with “likes” now a very open cluster of data on the web, the list function is a more important privacy feature than ever.

To create and edit lists:

• Go to Account
• Click Edit Friends
• Click Create New List (or Edit List if it’s for an existing list)
• Add friends to this list

To use lists:

• Go to Account
• Click Privacy Settings
• Click Personal Information and Posts
• Select different areas and click Customize

You can also use lists on every post and update you make on your profile. Just look for the “lock” symbol and follow the “customize” directions above.

2. When in Doubt, Just Log Out

While the ability to “Preview My Profile” can be used to find out what specific people in your network can see, it still doesn’t give you the full picture of what the general public will find when they come to your page.

Sharing personal information with friends is one thing, but it’s important to be aware of the content you present to the world from Facebook. A great way to check this is simply to log out of your profile, refresh your browser, and then visit your Facebook page. If you see something there that you don’t want available to the public, go back in and make the change.

Another option is to completely remove your profile’s visibility outside of Facebook. To do this, simply:

• Click Account
• Click Privacy Settings
• Click Search
• Uncheck the Public Search Results option
• This makes your profile invisible to non-Facebook users.

3. Audit Your “Likes”

Many Facebook users are eager to “Like” (previously, “Become a Fan Of”) many brands, causes, entertainers, etc. But the recent privacy changes have shined a brighter spotlight on the issue of “oversharing” information through social networks.

Unfortunately, the pages you “Like” cannot be masked through Facebook’s privacy settings, so anyone who has access to your profile can see them, and consequently make assumptions about your personality. While it may not be a big deal for people to see that I “Like” my employer’s Fan Page, or my favorite band, there may be things in your fan history that you’ve forgotten about — things you may or may not want the world to associate you with.

To combat this, it’s a good idea to edit your “Likes.” The easiest way is to do the following:

• Click Account
• Click Edit Friends
• Click Pages on the left-hand column (remember, this includes pages for things in your activities, music, and movies sections of your profile, in addition to anything you’ve “liked”)
• Go through this list and ask yourself, “Do I want this to be public?”
• Then ask yourself, “If I want it public, would I be comfortable with strangers networking with me through these channels?”
• If something doesn’t meet your criteria, click Remove Connection (click the X).

4. Spring Clean Your Third-Party Applications

One of the big changes to Facebook is the “Instant Personalization” feature, which allows several sites, including Microsoft’s docs.com, Yelp, and Pandora, to automatically connect to your feed by default.

Facebook has allowed these trusted partners access to your profile information in an effort to “create a better user experience.” Those who aren’t interested in these auto-connections, or who have privacy concerns, are required to manually opt out — and it’s not a very straightforward process. Here’s how to do it:

• Click Account
• Click Privacy Settings
• Click Applications and Websites
• Click Instant Personalization Pilot Program

While opting out will stop the flow of information to these partner sites, your Facebook friends who use them may still share information about you, unless you block the application altogether. To do that, you’ll need to visit the application pages for Docs, Yelp, and Pandora and click “block application.” It’s probably a good idea to login to your accounts on these sites to make sure you have opted out on that end as well.

Facebook organizes your applications in categories so you can easily see which ones have been granted access to your profile information. The trouble is, they also make it difficult to simply find a list of “all” applications that you can manage in one place. If you only do an audit on one “section” of applications, make it the “authorized” section, as these apps have access to more data and information than others.

It’s not that connecting to these sites through Facebook is necessarily a bad thing. It’s just important to understand how your information is being shared, and make the decision yourself about how much you want to put out there.

5. Control What Friends Can Share About You Through Applications

In December 2009, Facebook introduced a new privacy setting to control what information could be shared with friends through applications. This is a key privacy feature because it relates to not just information you post on your profile, but what your friends could offer up about you to an application or website they are using through Facebook.

For example, your friend might use the “Give a Dog” application, which can access information you have made public including your name, gender, birthday, photos, videos, etc. Your information is used and collected by the app developer, even though you were not the one to actively share it.

To manage these settings:

• Go to Account
• Click Privacy Settings
• Click Applications and Websites
• Uncheck everything you don’t want applications to share without you knowing
• Click Save Changes (Note that most Facebook settings pages will auto-save for you, but application privacy settings require this extra step)

This somewhat confusing section is really just asking you what information you want collected and shared by third-party applications using your friends’ profiles as a conduit. It will not affect how much your friends can see on your profile. If you want to be in control of all of your data, we advise that you uncheck all the boxes here.

What other privacy settings have you found useful or important on the “new” Facebook? Be sure to share them in the comments.

More Facebook resources from Mashable:

– Facebook Open Graph: What it Means for Privacy
– HOW TO: Disable Facebook’s “Instant Personalization” [PRIVACY]
– HOW TO: Find Long Lost Friends on Facebook
– HOW TO: Add Facebook “Like” Buttons to Your WordPress Blog
– What Facebook’s Open Graph Means for Your Business

Tags: facebook, List, Lists, privacy, social media, trending

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Political pundit and comedian Bill Maher claimed last night that Steve Jobs would do a better job of running America than the Obama administration.

The comments, inspired by Obama’s recent claims that he doesn’t know how to work an iPod, point to Maher’s frustration with the conflation of backwardness and likability — shunning new-fangled gizmos is seen as endearing in America, he explains.

Maher’s solution? Bring in Steve Jobs to push the country forward:

“America needs to focus on getting Jobs — Steve Jobs. Because something tells me that Apple would have come up with a better idea for stopping an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico than putting a giant box on top of it.

In 2001, Apple reinvented the record player. In 2007, the phone. This year, the computer. I say, for 2011, we let them take a crack at America. Our infrastructure, our business model, our institutions. Get rid of the stuff that’s not working, replace it with something that does. For example, goodbye US Senate — Hello Genius Bar! So good luck, Steve — you’ll need it!”

The sentiments echo much of what’s being said about the two most controversial companies in the tech press right now: Facebook and Apple. While Jobs and Zuckerberg are seen as uncompromising, ruthless, even arrogant in their way of doing business, this decisiveness has also pushed tech forward in leaps and bounds.

Is Obama too concerned with being agreeable? Can he learn anything from Jobs? And can leaders be likable and revolutionary, or are these qualities mutually exclusive? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Tags: apple, obama, steve jobs

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3. The Secrets Behind the Making of the Motorola Droid Are Revealed [What Did Motorola Do to Come Back Triumphant?]
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5. Motorola to Launch 20 to 30 Android Phones in 2010? [Motorola Rides the Android Wave and Likes It]
6. Motorola Droid Specifications & Features Unveiled [Motorola Droid Release Date Set for Late October, Fastest Android Smartphone So Far]

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3. Microsoft Loses On HP-Palm Deal, Too [Analysts & Insiders Report That Palm Purchase Inclines HP To Go With webOS For Tablets, Phones, Leaving Windows Out]
4. Android’s Popularity Grows By Leaps And Bounds [Recent AdMob Mobile Usage Report Shows Android Gains, iPhone Loses In Last Month]
5. Report: Manufacturers “Abandoning” Android [Bloomberg Reports That Wall Street, Phone Manufacturers 'Losing Faith' In Google & Android]
6. T-Mobile Ditches Yahoo Search in Favor of Google Search [T-Mobile USA Moves to Google Search; T-Mobile Europe Stays the Course]

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Related posts on TFTS:

1. iPhone and Android Dominate Smartphone Market (according to web traffic) [Web Ad Firm AdMob Finds Most Smartphone Web Surfers Surf on iPhone or Android]
2. Android’s Popularity Grows By Leaps And Bounds [Recent AdMob Mobile Usage Report Shows Android Gains, iPhone Loses In Last Month]
3. Mobile Data Traffic Passes Voice Traffic [Telcoms Report That Mobile Data Traffic Overtook Voice Traffic in 2009, Smartphones Are Officially Mainstream]
4. Verizon Motorola Droid New Commercials Advertise Multitasking & the Android Market [“All Comers” & “Other Planets” Motorola Droid Ads Centered on Android Apps; Taking a Hit at the iPhone]
5. Motorola Droid Specifications & Features Unveiled [Motorola Droid Release Date Set for Late October, Fastest Android Smartphone So Far]
6. 100,000 Motorola Droid Smartphones Sold in First Weekend [Motorola to Sell 1 Million Android Handsets in Q4 2009?]

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Today, personal finance web app Mint is announcing that the number of financial institutions it works with — and the number of consumers it’s prepared to serve — will grow by leaps and bounds.

Last fall, Mint was acquired for $170 million by Intuit, the makers of Quicken and TurboTax. Mint has incorporated Intuit’s coverage capabilities to connect to a vast network of banks, credit unions and credit card companies throughout the United States.

Mint’s stats show that most Americans have an average of 11 different financial companies that they work with. As a result, Mint is only truly valuable as long as all those accounts can be managed from a central location.

“Intuit Financial Services directly serve banks, so its aggregations works better than anything else out there,” said Aaron Patzer, vice president and general manager of Intuit’s personal finance group. “This is an incredible benefit that results from Mint.com becoming part of Intuit. If you’ve tried Mint.com in the past and you couldn’t connect to one of your checking, savings, or credit card accounts, come back and check us out.”

Currently, Mint has three million users. Patzer said that users’ top request from Mint was to support more banks and make information more timely and accurate. Transaction information will now be available for twice the number of accounts Mint could previously access, a total of more than 16,000 financial institutions and 17 million individual accounts. Moreover, Mint has added access for the 20 most-requested financial institutions.

Mint just announced last week that it was adding the ability to manually enter cash and check transactions

Tags: business, finance, intuit, mint, money

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This series is supported by Appboy – the most popular social outlet for mobile app lovers. Find out more about Appboy and be sure to check out their blog.

It’s inevitable that wherever you look, if you’re checking out news about mobile applications, you’re seeing that the industry is growing. It’s not just growing by a little bit either, it’s growing by leaps and bounds. Last week ABI Research released some numbers suggesting that mobile app downloads will exceed 6 billion, in 2010, that’s well over 50% growth over the number of downloads seen in 2010.

This type of growth is driven by a few factors:

• More users are adopting smartphones
• More apps are being added to the market everyday
• New devices are being introduced (better phones, tablets)
• New/Updated operating systems continue to improve functionality – iPhone 4.0, Windows Phone 7, Samsung Bada OS

Mobile is an industry worth paying attention to. With that, here are a few stories from last week that I feel have some important implications to the app community moving forward.

iPad, iAd and Other Apple News

With the iPad released last week, there was a lot of excitement, with initial projections suggesting sales of up to 600,000 units over the weekend. In the end, the iPad sold 450,000 units in 5 days, still a very respectable number, which will surely drive higher over the coming weeks and potentially spike a little when the 3G version of the device is released. In conjunction with the release, users downloaded 3.5 million apps for their new iPads.

Despite this early success, there are those who are still questioning whether the iPad will be successful over the long-term. The Associated Press, as covered here in the NY Times, questions whether iPad users will actually download that many apps. Others have suggested that while the device is cool, it lacks some of the features that would make the device truly amazing.

One of the biggest complaints from users of the iPad was the lack of multi-tasking ability. Certainly Apple was well aware that this would be a concern and criticism, perhaps that’s why they didn’t announce the release of iPhone 4.0 until after the release of the device, just to raise a little additional buzz. But, on Thursday, Apple provided news that indeed iPhone 4.0 would be coming and it would include multitasking, along with a host of other features.

The other major feature coming out of Apple’s announcement was the introduction of the iAd platform. iAd will allow developers to integrate advertising into their apps in a very simple way and provides OS level integration which expands the possibilities more.

Apple continues to innovate on their mobile products, but they remain largely closed and controlled. Will Apple open up as time goes on, more like the Android platform? Are developers going to start drifting away from Apple as a result of the “hoops” they have to jump through to work on the Apple platforms? Time will tell.

Big Month for Android

IMS released a research report in which they suggest that Google needs to quickly work to standardize which OS it is going to support as current, or potentially face backlash from developers who are struggling to build apps which will work on the multiple versions fo the Android OS that are currently available on various devices. IMS analyst Chris Schreck said that Google is rumored to be working on a solution which would see updates come through the Android Market rather than the devices or through carriers, which could help to solve this issue.

Despite whatever issues there are with the OS and the difficulties associated, March was a huge month for Android. Over 9,000 new apps were made available, nearly 1/3 of the total apps for Android. One of the major advantages that the iPhone has over Android is the number of available apps and this type of growth, if it continues, will start to bring Android closer to the number of apps available in the App Store. The disadvantage is that with the volume of apps increasing, the number of “junk” apps is also likely to increase, and the Android Market doesn’t maintain the same level of quality control that Apple does, which could make things even worse.

The Android news from last week extends beyond just phones. In another report, IMS Research posited that 2010 will be a good one for Tablets, and while Apple’s iPad will certainly take the Lion’s share of 24% of tablets sold will actually be running the Android OS. In addition, a Swedish company, People of Lava, has introduced the first Android TV. The television, which is also the first to be manufactured in Sweden in years, will allow access to sites such as YouTube, NetFlix and Hulu, as well as apps for Twitter and Facebook among others. Whether the usage of apps on televisions is a growth area will remain to be seen, but certainly being able to access video services directly from the TV can’t hurt.

Twitter Changes Their Game

Early last week, Fred Wilson released a post which some feel implied a few things about what Twitter may do moving forward. In the post, Wilson compared developers of Twitter apps to the relationship between Apple and General Computers of years ago. From that it can be extrapolated that the implication was that Twitter could actually now start taking over some of the roles that to this point have been filled by other companies building their apps on the Twitter platform.

In the post Wilson stated that he was not hinting at anything, however by the end of the week an announcement had been made that Twitter had purchased the popular iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie. Not only that, but the week saw the release of the official Twitter app for BlackBerry which had been announced a couple of weeks ago. It seems that the post from Wilson, Twitter’s top investor, may have been a hint after all.

Which other areas Twitter will venture into and how it will impact developers who have leveraged the Twitter platform remains to be seen. For atebits, the acquisition of Tweetie was certainly worthwhile, but other developers may not be so lucky.

Ta-Ta For Now

As always, there is much more news than I can cover, let alone get into in depth.

images copyrighted by laihiu, Richard-G, tomsun & christianrasmussen

If you enjoyed this post, please bookmark it on Delicious. It’s highly appreciated :-]

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Related posts on TFTS:

1. Android Market Has 30,000 Apps [Android Apps Market Seeing Tons of Growth, Outnumbered by iTunes Five To One]
2. Android Market App Copunt Hits 20,000 Mark [Android Market App Store Growing by Around 100 Apps Per Day]
3. Google Said To Be Removing Games From South Korean Android Market [Korean Game Rating Board Will Cause Google To Remove Games Category From Android Market in South Korea]
4. iPhone Apps Still Live After Rejection [Rejected iPhone Apps Have Their Own Site]
5. Verizon Motorola Droid New Commercials Advertise Multitasking & the Android Market [“All Comers” & “Other Planets” Motorola Droid Ads Centered on Android Apps; Taking a Hit at the iPhone]
6. Apple Bans WiFi Hotspot Detecting Apps from iTunes [iPhone & iPod Touch Apps Using ‘Private Frameworks’ Pulled]

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The iPad may indeed be the future of computing, at least when it comes to the way you interact with it. According to IT research company Gartner, more than 50% of PCs, purchased for users under 15 years of age, will have touchscreens by 2015.

Leslie Fiering, research vice president at Gartner, thinks kids will pave the way, with the corporate world lagging behind. “By 2015, we expect more than 50 percent of PCs purchased for users under the age of 15 will have touchscreens, up from fewer than 2 percent in 2009. On the other hand, we are predicting that fewer than 10 percent of PCs sold to enterprises in 2015 for mainstream knowledge workers will have touchscreens,” she said.

Gartner claims that this change will be driven by media content consumption and the content delivery ecosystem. Touchscreen devices have been around for 20 years, but Apple has gone leaps and bounds with its App Store concept, and analysts at Gartner think that its success will “create greater market awareness of and demand for touch in other PC applications.”

Furthermore, Gartner sees huge potential for touchscreen devices in education. “Consensus among the Gartner client U.S. school districts is that over half, and possibly as many as 75 percent, will be specifying touch and/or pen input within the next five years,” said Ms. Fiering. Based on this prediction, Gartner analysts also predict that in 10 to 15 years an entire generation will have grown up accustomed to working on touchscreen devices.

These predictions don’t necessarily tell us much about the first generation of the iPad (and how well it’ll do on the market), but they do show that Apple’s idea of a keyboardless, simple tablet computer may have indeed created an entirely new category of PC devices, one that might be an important part of the PC market in years to come.

Tags: Gartner, pc, touchscreens

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Cnet’s Matter/Anti-Matter blog points to the quake response as evidence of Twitter’s “growing power.” The service has clearly been a major source of news about the quake. But Matter/Anti-Matter and other blogs caution that the power comes with “new responsibilities.” Warnings about scams popped up soon after the quake and included both Twitter and Facebook, as well as efforts to promote donations through texting.

Even better-known charities working through social-networking sites have come under scrutiny. WSJ’s Speakeasy reported last week on one of the first celebrities to push for Haiti aid — musician Wyclef Jean, who headed to Twitter almost immediately after the quake to seek donations through his Yele foundation. Mr. Jean’s foundation has come under fire over the amount of money it actually spends on charity work. Mr. Jean has denied the allegations and continues to raise money for disaster relief, tweeting this morning that he would be on the Oprah Winfrey show to discuss the earthquake and providing updates on the effort in Haiti, including on a 6.1-magnitude aftershock that rocked the capital this morning.

Despite the controversy, charity efforts on Facebook and Twitter have grown by leaps and bounds this week, and it looks for now as though the sites will remain important tools for future relief work. Facebook’s Global Disaster Relief page, which was launched last week in response to the earthquake, now has more than 146,000 fans.

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Well, it was quite a week here at the Echo Enduring Blog! The response to my “The One Thing You Need to Do to Become a Better Designer” post was tremendous! It has become the most popular article on here by leaps and bounds, and been tweeted more than I would have every expected (325 at the time of writing)!

Actually, I really have Twitter to thank for the incredible traffic spike that I’ve seen over the past few days. A couple of the biggest design related accounts actually Tweeted the post, which was a huge source of traffic to the article! It also appeared on the front/popular pages of several major social bookmarking sites – DesignFloat, DesignBump and Delicious, for example. So thanks to everyone who promoted the post! I really appreciate all of your support!

Now onto this week’s Echoes.

Logo – Musikings

This week’s logo does a really good job of playing with two different shapes and concepts, both of which are related to the company name, fusing them into one modern and attractive design.

Musikings

I really like this one. Probably one of my favorite logos that I’ve seen in a while (I’m actually kind of surprised that I hadn’t run into it before now). It does a really good job of combining the musically iconic symbol of level (volume) bars with the shape of a crown, effectively combining the concepts of both music and kings.

I also really like the typeface on this one. It is sleek a modern and works really well with the overall design. I don’t ever remember seeing a font quite like it, though of course I certainly haven’t seen all the fonts that exist out there. Still, I can’t help but wonder if it’s custom. Either way, I like it and I think it works quite well in this logo design!

Art – The Polar Express

With Christmas just around the corner, I thought it would be a good idea to feature some holiday-related art over the coming weeks, and I’m going to start it off with this one, which is perhaps only very loosely connected with Christmas. It’s “The Polar Express” by Raphael Lacoste.

The Polar Express

Like so many of Lacoste’s other works, the landscape in this one has a strikingly barren feel. The colours are cold and stark, and there is something strangely fantastic about the entire piece. The train itself looms high above the tiny town, seeming to dwarf the buildings, like some sort of mechanical behemoth.

There is also something fantastic about the mountains in the background, which almost look more like spines running along some monster’s back. Of course, this only adds to the sinister feeling of the image.

All in all, it’s an interesting concept. I’m not overly familiar with the story of the Polar Express, but my understanding is that it has something to do with going to visit Santa Claus. Maybe I’m totally off-base on that one, but if that’s really the case, I wonder what kind of Santa this train is taking its passengers to? Somehow, I doubt that it’s the same jolly old elf that Coca-Cola has made so famous!

Tutorial – Create a Watercolor-Themed Website Design with Photoshop

I think that “how to design an (insert adjectives here) website in Photoshop” tutorials are probably one of the most common type of blog posts out there today (after lists, of course), and I know that I’ve featured several of these in the past. Well I’m back with another one, which made this week’s Echoes pretty much entirely because of just one of its 30 steps!

Create a Watercolor-Themed Website Design with Photoshop

This is a pretty sweet tutorial – probably one of the most original Photoshop website tuts that I’ve seen in a while – but I would like to direct your attention primarily to Step 5, in which the author explains how to use the Art History Brush to transform a fairly ordinary looking photograph of some trees into a bold and beautiful watercolour image, which is used as the foundational graphic for the entire design!

This looks like a pretty sweet technique, and one that gives you a lot more organic control than something like a filter would (because you use a brush). I haven’t actually had the chance to try this one out yet, but I am definitely putting it on my list of things to do this week (more likely – weekend), whenever I find a few extra minutes to just sit down with my tablet and stylus.

Other than this fifth step, the rest of the tutorial is still pretty useful. It really runs with the watercolour theme, building it in through a variety of different elements, and is a prime example of how you can really maintain a strong theme throughout a design. Still, I think that the History Brush technique is what makes this tutorial really rock!

Website – BlankMag

Horizontal websites (where you scroll left to right rather than up and down) are certainly becoming more popular, but by and large, they remain the rare exception when it comes to website design. As such, a well achieved horizontal design – like BlankMag’s site – can really stand out from the crowd.

BlankMag

As a magazine that is touts itself as being about global trends and pop culture, nothing less than a unique and trendy website would be appropriate for this magazine. They achieve this quite nicely, with a really minimalistic design. A plain white background dominates, accompanied by a simple typographic menu and an equally simple drop-down selection box for navigating through various issues of the magazine.

Added visual interest is achieved primarily through pages from the magazine, which are ordered in two page spreads, stacked horizontally across the screen. For me, this is the coolest part about this particular site. I mean, really, what better way is there to showcase the quality of your magazine than with the kind of extensive collection of sample pages that appear on this site (which are reduced enough to make the content all but impossible to read)? The horizontal scrolling also makes for a unique user experience, and I really dig the way in which the sample pages are templated in order to look like open magazines.

Overall, the design is simple, elegant and very chic, all of which works exceptionally well for a magazine of this type. Great site design.

Well that’s it for this week’s Echoes. Which ones were your favoirtes? As always, if you know of any designs, tutorials or art that merits being included in a future post, feel free to let me know about it!

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Be sure to add your own wish list for this holiday in the comments if they’re not on here!

Gear and Gadgets

1. iPhone ($99 – $299)

The iPhone will probably be the most requested gift of the season, but there’s a chance your designer or developer already has one because of its popularity in the industry, so make sure to check before you get one.

2. The Smashing Book (~$30)

The Smashing Book will be one of the most influential web design and development books to hit the market and will be a wonderful book to add to any designer or developer’s book collection.

3. Macbook Pro (starts at $1,199)

Apple’s new Macbook Pro is leaps and bounds above any other laptop in the market and is a favorite amongst the web professional crowd. It comes in three sizes: 13inch, 15inch, and 17inch.

4. Kindle 2 ($259)

The Kindle 2 lets you read e-books on its digital screen. It conveniently carries around your favorite books so that you can access them anytime and anywhere.

5. Notebooks: Moleskine (~$12) or Field Notes (~$10)

These fanatically followed high-quality notebooks are popular gifts for creatives and can be used for numerous purposes such as sketches, idea gathering, and task management. They come in a variety of formats: lined, grid/graph paper, and lined.

6. A Wacom Tablet (starts at ~$200)

The Wacom tablet, a computer input device that features a pen and a drawing surface for digital illustration, is far superior to the traditional mouse when it comes to complex designs.

7. Magic Mouse ($69)

Apple’s revolutionary new multi-touch mouse is a great present for Mac users that will satisfy their functional and aesthetical demands.

8. USB coffee heater (~$9)

Designers and developers often love caffeinated hot drinks such as coffee and tea, and what better way to keep their drink warm than a portable USB-powered liquid warmer that plugs into their computer.

9. Paper Email (~$4)

Geeks who love writing on paper can find appreciation in this "old school" notebook that’s creatively designed as an email message.

10. App Pillows ($15)

These unique pillows are modeled after the icons of popular designer/developer desktop applications such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Illustrator.

11. G-drive (starts at $179)

G-technology makes outstanding external hard drives that are good-looking to boot, designers and developers can always use the extra hard drive space.

12. Typophile T-shirts (starts at $15)

Let your designers express their love for fonts and typography by giving them these trendy t-shirts.

13. IronKey (starts at $79)

IronKeys are secure portable USB drives that have a metallic-like, slick surface. They’re great for people who work intimately with computers.

14. Staple Free Stapler (~$10)

These staplers require no staples, and can be cool and environmentally friendly way of attaching paper together (such as invoices, sketches, wireframes, etc.).

15. Bose QuietComfort (~$300)

These headphones are truly high-end; they’re great for tuning out background noise when working in a noisy environment, and amazing for listening to music.

Subscriptions

16. Lynda.com subscription ($375 a year)

Lynda.com is one of the best online resources available, with video lessons and how-to’s for popular web technologies and desktop applications.

17. .NET Magazine (~$113 for 13 issues)

.NET Magazine is the premier top-selling magazine for web designers and developers. Each issue comes with a CD that contains useful resources to supplement the issue’s topics.

18. Layers (~$50 for two years)

Layers is a magazine that focuses on how-to’s for the popular Adobe Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, etc.).

19. Digital Arts (~$195 a year)

Digital Arts is another top-notch magazine for digital creatives, featuring tips, inspiration, and relevant reviews. Each issue comes with a CD containing demos and freebies (stock photos, vectors, fonts, etc.) to keep your designer fully stocked with digital art resources.

20. Threadless monthly t-shirt ($200)

Threadless is a popular online retailer that sells creative and trendy t-shirts such gaming tees, which is a pastime common among designers and developers. The subscription will send your designer or developer a shirt every month for a year.

21. iStockphoto.com subscription (starts at ~$970)

iStockphoto.com is a place to get stock photos, something designers can’t get enough of. This gift is on the higher end, but will be very useful for work-related purposes.

Software

22. CSSEdit 2 (~$45)

By far one of the favorite CSS editors among designers and developers who use Apple computers, this application will give them great control over how their websites look.

23. Textmate (~$59)

Textmate is a simple clean text editor that is supported by multiple languages for Mac users. It’s handy and amazing as a source code editor, supporting languages such as HTML, CSS, and PHP.

24. Coda ($99)

Coda is a great integrated development environment for Mac users that’s intuitive to use for developing/designing websites; if your designer/developer doesn’t have it yet, this would be a wonderful present to give.

25. Things ($~50)

This Mac app will keep your designer/developer organized so they can be at the family reunion on time. It also has a gorgeously simplistic user interface.

Got more gift ideas for designers and developers? Share them in the comments!

Related Content

• 20 Useful Web Design Books Worthy of Your Collection
• 10 Useful Gadgets for Mobile Computing
• 10 Ways to Cut Down Web Development Time
• Related categories: Resources and Tools

About the Author

Shane Jeffers is a Web Developer from Virginia Beach, VA. He has a unique passion for design trends and tutorials. He runs Three Styles, a blog that brings tutorials and information to web developers and designers. Connect with him via Twitter.

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• Related Blogs on 25 Awesome Gift Ideas for Designers & Developers

And with so many ways to promote your work and your business, it can be hard to focus your efforts. Let us help by rounding up the top applications for displaying what it is that you do — your work.

(Header image by margolove)

Raveal

A site that we’ve looked at in the past, Raveal is the efforts of the team at Flowz. It’s designed to meet all your self-promotional needs: it includes a resume, and portfolio and your social voice. This voice is a combination of all your online presences — twitter feed, blogs and wherever else you’re involved.

If you want one tool to represent you, Raveal is the tool for the job.

Krop

Krop is a combination of an online job board and portfolio management tool. It allows employers to look for potential employees and vice versa. This service can be used for absolutely free with no advertisements.

There is also a paid plan that allows for the storage of more images and access to more page styles. If you want to shop yourself around where people are also hiring, Krop is a great option.

Carbonmade

A service I reviewed last week, Carbonmade has grown in leaps and bounds this past year. And for good reason.

There is no resume service here. This app was designed to give you a blank canvas on which to display the most important aspect to selling yourself: your work. Talk is cheap — Carbonmade gives you the ability to prove your skills by your actions, not by fancied up text.

Good Portfolio

This service is aimed more at creative types who do not have skills in the area of web design: photographers and illustrators for example. It’s focused more on being your portfolio rather than a resume.

The site is simplistic in its look, but that may be the purpose in order to accentuate your work.

Haystack

Recently launched, Haystack is the work of 37signals. The concept behind the service is similar to Krop — it’s a place for designers to list their services, while at the same time allowing companies to seek out designers to hire.

But spend a little time on the site, and it appears to have quickly been populated with listings for design agencies. Agencies that charge a lot more than the more common designer working on his/her own. The service may be more useful to larger teams than to freelancers.

CargoCollective

This is a new entry in this space and is still in beta. But it has gotten a lot of attention from the design community.

It bills itself as a CMS on the front page, but also includes the following description:

Cargo evolved out of the system that runs the SpaceCollective community. We found it remarkably successful and efficient in creating visual content on the web, placing a strong emphasis on design, layout, image quality and typography. Our goal is to dramatically increase the accessibility and exposure of creative individuals on the Internet, while aspiring to build a networked context that will contribute to the culture as a whole.

Almost a community focused service, CargoCollective looks like it could be a strong player in this space in the near future.

CeeVee

In a different direction from the other services listed here, CeeVee focuses completely on resumes. There is no uploading of thumbnails here — other than an avatar, it’s text only.

For those who are not graphically skilled at all and looking for work in other sectors (writers, project managers etc.), give CeeVee a look. It’s 100% free after all.

Make the Best Choice

These apps are all well thought out and do much to show off who you are and what you can do. Make the choice that best suits your medium and then prepare yourself for new business.

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While the language itself is almost fully baked, HTML5 won’t fully arrive for at least another two years, according to one of the men charged with its design.

“I don’t expect to see full implementation of HTML5 across all the major browsers until the end of 2011 at least,” says Philippe Le Hegaret, interaction domain leader for the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), who oversees the development of HTML5.

He tells Webmonkey the specification outlining the long-promised rewrite of the web’s underlying language will be ready towards the end of 2010, but because of varying levels of support across different browsers, especially in the areas of video and animation, we’re in for a longer wait.

Most web pages are currently written in HTML version HTML 4.01, which has been around since the late 1990s. The web was mostly made up of static pages when HTML was born, and it has grown by leaps and bounds since then. Now, we favor complex web applications written in JavaScript like Gmail and Facebook, we stream videos in high-definition, we consume news in real-time feeds and generally push our browsers as far as they’ll go. These developments have left HTML drastically outdated, and web authors have resorted to using a variety of hacks and plug-ins to make everything work properly.

HTML5 — which is actually a combination of languages, APIs and other technologies to make scripted applications more powerful — promises to solve many of the problems of its predecessor, and do so without the hacks and plug-ins.

We’re already close. All the major browsers are providing some level of support for HTML5.

“There’s strong support already in Firefox and Safari. Even Microsoft IE8 has some partial support,” says Le Hegaret, referring to some code within HTML5 that enables the browser to pass information between pages.

Browser makers are approaching support incrementally, adding features little by little with every subsequent release. Some, like Mozilla, can build new features into the next release in a matter of months. For others, like Microsoft, it takes much longer.

Google Chrome is maturing extremely quickly and already supports most of HTML5. This is mostly because Google didn’t start from scratch — the company chose to use the open source Webkit rendering engine, the same one used by Safari. Still, this doesn’t mean both browsers support HTML5 equally.

“Video support between Safari and Chrome, despite the fact that they are both using the same underlying engine, is totally different because video support is not part of the Webkit project at the moment,” says Le Hegaret.

It’s actually this very issue — support for playing videos inside the browser — that continues to be one of main factors blocking the broad adoption of HTML5.

The way the specification is written now, website authors will have the ability to link to a video file as simply as an image file. The video plays in the browser without using a plug-in, and the author can create a player wrapper with controls.

But browser vendors are stuck arguing over which video format to support. Mozilla, Google and Opera are interested in the open source Ogg Theora video format. Apple has substantial investments in its Quicktime technology, so it’s pushing for the Quicktime-backed H.264 format. Microsoft wants people to use its Silverlight plug-in, so Internet Explorer isn’t supporting native video playback in the browser at all.

Google has voiced support for Ogg, but it has also recently made a bid to purchase On2, a company that makes a competing video technology. Rumor has it Google might release On2’s video technology under an open source license once the sale is complete.

Until these issues are sorted out, consumers and content providers alike are forced to rely on plug-ins. Le Hegaret says that while these plug-ins have certainly helped the web arrive where it is today, they continue to be a burden on the user.

Setting up any browser to support both H.264 and Ogg Theora requires at least one plug in, which harms the user experience.

“It’s hard today to ask people to install a plug-in unless the payoff is huge,” he says. “What’s driving the most successful plug-in, which is Flash, is video support. If you can’t see YouTube, your life on the web is pretty miserable. You’re missing a lot.”

Plug-ins aren’t just harder on web users, but they’re hard on web developers, too.

“Building with Flash or Silverlight in a way that lets you share information between the content appearing inside the plug-in and the rest of the page presents some challenges,” says Le Hegaret.

Unlike its predecessor, HTML5 has been designed with web applications in mind. The current HTML5 specification includes a media API that makes it easier to connect animations or video and audio elements — things traditionally presented within a Flash player — with the rest of the content on the page.

“You get a smoother application if you use HTML5. You’re not crossing a software layer. It’s all part of the same application.”

Unfortunately, the YouTubes of the world aren’t going to make a baseline switch from Flash to HTML5 unless they know there’s strong support for it in the browsers.

But they are testing the waters: Wikipedia is experimenting with HTML5 video support by serving Ogg Theora video to browsers that can handle it, and Flash to everyone else. YouTube and the video site Dailymotion have also set up special demo pages using this technique.

Le Hegaret says we’ll be in this period of transition — a dual-experience web where content sites serve HTML5 video along with a Flash fall-back — for a while.

“Web developers will continue to have to understand that not everyone is using the latest generation web browser, and that’s OK in the short term.”

As far as being able to make the switch to a pure HTML5 web altogether, Le Hegaret says that’s only possible once browser vendors sort out their differences.

Once that day arrives, the final switch to HTML5 will be in the hands of the content providers. It’s up to them to begin coding for HTML5 standards and ditching support for old browsers.

“There are still a significant amount of people out there using IE6,” says Le Hegaret. “As a developer right now, you can’t really ignore it. Hopefully, in two or three years, you will be able to start ignoring IE6.”

See Also:

• Tim Berners-Lee Sees Promise, Challenges in HTML5
• W3C Drops Audio and Video Codec Requirements From HTML 5
• Adobe Fights Off HTML5 Threat With New Flash Player 10.1
• Mozilla Pushes the Web Forward With Firefox 3.5

The great promise of HTML5 is that it will turn the web into a full-fledged computing platform awash with video, animation and real-time interactions, yet free of the hacks and plug-ins common today.

While the language itself is almost fully baked, HTML5 won’t fully arrive for at least another two years, according to one of the men charged with its design.

“I don’t expect to see full implementation of HTML5 across all the major browsers until the end of 2011 at least,” says Philippe Le Hegaret, interaction domain leader for the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), who oversees the development of HTML5.

He tells Webmonkey the specification outlining the long-promised rewrite of the web’s underlying language will be ready towards the end of 2010, but because of varying levels of support across different browsers, especially in the areas of video and animation, we’re in for a longer wait.

Most web pages are currently written in HTML version HTML 4.01, which has been around since the late 1990s. The web was mostly made up of static pages when HTML was born, and it has grown by leaps and bounds since then. Now, we favor complex web applications written in JavaScript like Gmail and Facebook, we stream videos in high-definition, we consume news in real-time feeds and generally push our browsers as far as they’ll go. These developments have left HTML drastically outdated, and web authors have resorted to using a variety of hacks and plug-ins to make everything work properly.

HTML5 — which is actually a combination of languages, APIs and other technologies to make scripted applications more powerful — promises to solve many of the problems of its predecessor, and do so without the hacks and plug-ins.

We’re already close. All the major browsers are providing some level of support for HTML5.

“There’s strong support already in Firefox and Safari. Even Microsoft IE8 has some partial support,” says Le Hegaret, referring to some code within HTML5 that enables the browser to pass information between pages.

Browser makers are approaching support incrementally, adding features little by little with every subsequent release. Some, like Mozilla, can build new features into the next release in a matter of months. For others, like Microsoft, it takes much longer.

Google Chrome is maturing extremely quickly and already supports most of HTML5. This is mostly because Google didn’t start from scratch — the company chose to use the open source Webkit rendering engine, the same one used by Safari. Still, this doesn’t mean both browsers support HTML5 equally.

“Video support between Safari and Chrome, despite the fact that they are both using the same underlying engine, is totally different because video support is not part of the Webkit project at the moment,” says Le Hegaret.

It’s actually this very issue — support for playing videos inside the browser — that continues to be one of main factors blocking the broad adoption of HTML5.

The way the specification is written now, website authors will have the ability to link to a video file as simply as an image file. The video plays in the browser without using a plug-in, and the author can create a player wrapper with controls.

But browser vendors are stuck arguing over which video format to support. Mozilla, Google and Opera are interested in the open source Ogg Theora video format. Apple has substantial investments in its Quicktime technology, so it’s pushing for the Quicktime-backed H.264 format. Microsoft wants people to use its Silverlight plug-in, so Internet Explorer isn’t supporting native video playback in the browser at all.

Google has voiced support for Ogg, but it has also recently made a bid to purchase On2, a company that makes a competing video technology. Rumor has it Google might release On2’s video technology under an open source license once the sale is complete.

Until these issues are sorted out, consumers and content providers alike are forced to rely on plug-ins. Le Hegaret says that while these plug-ins have certainly helped the web arrive where it is today, they continue to be a burden on the user.

Setting up any browser to support both H.264 and Ogg Theora requires at least one plug in, which harms the user experience.

“It’s hard today to ask people to install a plug-in unless the payoff is huge,” he says. “What’s driving the most successful plug-in, which is Flash, is video support. If you can’t see YouTube, your life on the web is pretty miserable. You’re missing a lot.”

Plug-ins aren’t just harder on web users, but they’re hard on web developers, too.

“Building with Flash or Silverlight in a way that lets you share information between the content appearing inside the plug-in and the rest of the page presents some challenges,” says Le Hegaret.

Unlike its predecessor, HTML5 has been designed with web applications in mind. The current HTML5 specification includes a media API that makes it easier to connect animations or video and audio elements — things traditionally presented within a Flash player — with the rest of the content on the page.

“You get a smoother application if you use HTML5. You’re not crossing a software layer. It’s all part of the same application.”

Unfortunately, the YouTubes of the world aren’t going to make a baseline switch from Flash to HTML5 unless they know there’s strong support for it in the browsers.

But they are testing the waters: Wikipedia is experimenting with HTML5 video support by serving Ogg Theora video to browsers that can handle it, and Flash to everyone else. YouTube and the video site Dailymotion have also set up special demo pages using this technique.

Le Hegaret says we’ll be in this period of transition — a dual-experience web where content sites serve HTML5 video along with a Flash fall-back — for a while.

“Web developers will continue to have to understand that not everyone is using the latest generation web browser, and that’s OK in the short term.”

As far as being able to make the switch to a pure HTML5 web altogether, Le Hegaret says that’s only possible once browser vendors sort out their differences.

Once that day arrives, the final switch to HTML5 will be in the hands of the content providers. It’s up to them to begin coding for HTML5 standards and ditching support for old browsers.

“There are still a significant amount of people out there using IE6,” says Le Hegaret. “As a developer right now, you can’t really ignore it. Hopefully, in two or three years, you will be able to start ignoring IE6.”

See Also:

• Tim Berners-Lee Sees Promise, Challenges in HTML5
• W3C Drops Audio and Video Codec Requirements From HTML 5
• Adobe Fights Off HTML5 Threat With New Flash Player 10.1
• Mozilla Pushes the Web Forward With Firefox 3.5

Go to Source

It’s been an incredible journey so far… and I’ve enjoyed it immensely, and still am.

I started WDD out of my curiosity for blogging and my passion for design. I wanted to put my mark out there by pouring my design vision into the world.

Since WDD began, the blog has been visited by over 10 million people and that number is growing in leaps and bounds month after month.

Today, I’d like to share a few interesting details about myself and WDD, and I also have some very special birthday surprises in store…

Interesting (and not so interesting) facts

I normally don’t get too personal or share much of the behind the scenes going on here, but today’s a special day so let’s do something different… just for fun!

Here are some fun facts about myself and WDD that you may find amusing or completely irrelevant…

• WDD is run by myself, Walter Apai, out of beautiful Vancouver, British Columbia
• There are almost 250 articles published on the blog to date and over 16,000 comments
• WDD has been visited by over 10 million people in the past year
• The most popular post to date is: How To Choose The Right CMS
• The most linked to post to date is: Operating System Interface Design
• The most controversial post to date is: How Not to Design a Logo
• WDD has over 80k Twitter followers and almost 40k RSS subscribers
• The most difficult decision for WDD’s design was choosing the right background color
• In the past year I’ve received and sent over 20,000 emails
• Steve Jobs himself once sent me an email, too
• WDD has a mobile version available
• Most used software: Mail, Firefox, Tweetie, Skype, HootSuite, Photoshop, Transmit, Preview, iTunes and Stickies
• WDD has been redesigned multiple times, but the design changes have always been very subtle and gradual
• About 30% of articles written, approved and paid for, never get to be published
• The most traffic on a single day: 170k visitors
• Each week’s content is scheduled 1 or 2 weeks in advance
• I’m mostly criticized for not sticking to only ‘web’ design, yet web design is an extension of ‘design’.
• 55% of visitors use Firefox, 17% are on Safari
• 35% of visitors come from the USA, followed by the UK, Canada, Brazil and Germany
• WDD is published from a 24′ iMac and a 24′ Cinema Display
• Fortune 500 companies read WDD
• WDD articles are often used for teaching web design courses
• WDD is a Scorpio (and I’m a Pisces)

I’d like to thank the Academy…

Ehem, well, sort of…  Firstly, I’d like to thank all of you, the awesome readers who have supported the site throughout. Thanks for leaving those comments!  I mean, the nice comments, of course  :)

A second thank you goes to all the writers who have helped build the site up, as well as our chief editor, Andrew Lobo, who makes sure our articles are up to standard and that we don’t screw up by making horrendous spelling/grammar mistakes.

Last, but certainly not least, thanks to all the advertisers that have supported the site for the past 12 months and especially, a big thanks goes to Todd Garland from BuySellAds.com for getting great companies to advertise on WDD.

Ok, so that’s it for today…  well almost…. just ‘one more thing’…

One more thing…

We have some fantastic giveaways lined up for you as a thank you for your support. Here are some wonderful companies that are extending incredible prizes to celebrate WDD’s first year on the Web.

For a chance to win any of these prizes, simply leave a comment below about WDD (e.g. a general comment or what you have learned from WDD, how the blog influenced your design, your career, etc).

The winners and their prizes will be drawn at random and announced on November 18th, just one short week from today, so go ahead and leave a comment below (one per person only).

Woo Themes

Prize: 5 Developer Package themes
About: WOO Themes offers Premium WordPress Themes for all types of web publishers, providing top notch customer service.
Website: WooThemes

Flashloaded

About: Flashloaded provides top notch Flash components for Adobe Flash with outstanding customer service.
Prize: 5 Copies of 3D Wall
Website: Flashloaded

Smashing Magazine

Prize: 5 copies of the upcoming Smashing Book
About: Smashing Magazine is a great blog that has been delivering useful and innovative information to Web designers and developers since 2006.
Website: Smashing Magazine

Envato

Prize: 5 cash prizes of $100 to be used on any of the Envato marketplaces
About: The Envato Network has a number of awesome design blogs and runs many successful marketplaces for web designers, such as ActiveDen and Graphic River
Website: Envato

SitePoint

About: SitePoint is a fast growing online media company and information provider targeting the Web professional market, specifically Web Developers and Designers.
Prize: 2 copies of the book Principles of Project Management and 2 copies of The Art & Science of JavaScript
Website: SitePoint

Graphic Leftovers

About: A marketplace for designers, illustrators and other creative souls to sell their “leftover” artwork on the web.
Prize: 3 vouchers of $100 each
Website: GraphicLeftovers

Moo

About: MOO is a printing company. We print beautiful products, using images you’ve uploaded directly, or designs from our designer galleries.
Prize: 3 sets of cards
Website: Moo

Icon Dock

About: Icon Dock is brough by Nick La from N. Design Studios and Web Designer Wall. The site offers stock icons in vector and pixel format.
Prize: 5 Icon Sets
Website: IconDock

VPS

About: VPS Cloud Hosting – The Next Generation of Web Hosting. Build, test and deploy your website on the VPS.NET cloud in minutes and access limitless resources with instant scalability.
Prize: 3 Free VPS accounts for 6 months to the winners. For all WDD readers, 25% off first month with coupon “WDD25″
Website: VPS.net

Jeremy Tuber

About: Jeremy Tuber is the author of two great books for designers and freelancers
Prize: 2 copies of Being a Starving Graphic Artist Sucks and 2 copies of Verbal Kung Fu for Freelancers
Website: Being a Starving Graphic Artist

Once again, to participate in this giveaway, simply leave a comment below about WDD (e.g. a general comment or what you learned from WDD, how the blog influenced your design, your career, etc).

Thanks again for your continued support and here’s to another great year ahead!!!

If you find an exclusive RSS freebie on this feed or on the live WDD website, please use the following code to download it: k1sT2B

Go to Source

Web applications have made huge leaps and bounds in improving user experience thanks to a lot of recently developed Ajax technology. This post is made up of the best 20 PHP + jQuery Components and Tutorials that you will likely need in many of your projects, they are all of the highest quality and more or less easy to configure.

Web applications have made huge leaps and bounds in improving user experience thanks to a lot of recently developed Ajax technology. When you combine some neat functionality courtesy of PHP with the cleverness of jQuery you can produce some pretty neat effects. In an effort to help you take it up a notch, we’d like to share some methods for helping your site anticipate a user’s next move.

The post below is made up of the best 20 PHP + jQuery Components and Tutorials that you will likely need in many of your projects, they are all of the highest quality and more or less easy to configure. Give them a try.

1. Directory Trees With PHP And jQuery

A simple way to keep track of many files is to use a directory tree. A directory tree lists out files and directories so that it’s easy to find what you’re looking for. In this tutorial, you will learn how to create a directory tree using PHP and jQuery.

Check out the Demo Here

2. Create a Photo Admin Site Using PHP and jQuery

A sceencast tutorial for creating a photo site using PHP, jQuery, and AJAX. You will learn how to retrieve images from a database, create a simple login form with authentication, and then allow for the database to be asynchronously updated.

3. Asynchronous Comments with PHP, jQuery, and JSON

In this article, learn how to create a simple but effective means of capturing and displaying visitor comments using a blend of jQuery, PHP and JSON. In the public forum that is the blogosphere, the ability to capture and display visitor comments on your blogs can give you instant feedback and opinions from the people that matter most – those that read your blog.

Check out the Demo Here

4. PHP ajax login form using Jquery

Create a new PHP ajax login functionality using Jquery. You can easliy switch the data source between database and PHP array, login authentication can be using username or email, or even both of ‘em by changing the config, automattic redirection could be done within the javascript config.

Check out the Demo Here

5. PHP + jQuery Todo List Part 1, part2

This is part 1 of a 2 part series on making a Todo List with PHP and enhancing it with jQuery’s AJAX and manipulation capabilities.

Check out the Demo Here

6. Newsletter module

A PHP, jQuery and AJAX module, which should be great for any newsletter management needs. You just need to copy one file onto your site, and you’re ready to send and archive all newsletters, manage e-mail addresses and categories, and configure a template for your e-mails. Also have an ability of optional password protection. All options can be easily configured at the top of included .php file.

Check out the Demo Here

7. From PHP to XML to jQuery and Ajax

This tutorial will focus on getting data from a database using PHP, converting that to an XML document, and reading that XML in through jQuery via Ajax calls. Seems complex, but is in fact, very easy.

Check out the Demo Here

8. How to Validate Forms in both sides using PHP and jQuery

We are going to learn how to validate your forms using PHP and jQuery in both sides: client side (using javascript with jQuery) and server side (using PHP). It will be interesting to see how to use regular expressions to validate different kind of e-mails, passwords and more.

Check out the Demo Here

9. Create a shoutbox using PHP and AJAX

We will learn how to create a dynamic ajax based shoutbox with jQuery from scratch. It will be very interesting to know how to use the ajax function of jQuery and how it can be used to insert and recover data from a MySQL database via PHP in a way asynchronous.

Check out the Demo Here

10. HOWTO: PHP and jQuery upload progress bar

With the controllable jQuery Progress Bar, writing a form upload progress bar seems like a piece of cake now. Hypothetically, all we need is to create the bar, poll for the progress of the file upload, drive the new progress bar value (in percentage) and set it using PHP.

Check out the Demo Here

11. Auto-Complete Field with jQuery, JSON & PHP

Using jQuery with PHP to create auto complete field, beside the auto-complete code we need the jQuery library along with its Dimensions plug-in.

12. A fancy Apple.com-style search suggestion

Learn how to recreate the effect from Apple website by creating a fancy apple.com-style search suggestion. This example makes use of several techniques: MySQL (for the database), HTML/CSS for styling, PHP for retrieving the data and jQuery for the AJAX request.

Check out the Demo Here

13. PHP & jQuery image upload and crop v1.2

Create a PHP and jQuery image upload and crop tool using PHP, jQuery, PHP GD Library and Image Area Select.

Check out the Demo Here

14. FlickrScrollr

FlickrScrollr is a combination of PHP and jQuery that parses a Flickr RSS feed and creates an animated thumbnail display.

Check out the Demo Here

15. Reddit-style Voting With PHP, MySQL And jQuery

If you are a regular at Reddit, you must have noticed the way people vote there. You can either vote up or vote down. This tutorial will show you how to create such a voting system with jQuery, PHP and MySQL.

Check out the Demo Here

16. SMTP Feedback Mail class with jQuery Slide Effect

This post is about feedback mail with nice slide effect using php SMTP class and jQuery. It’s very useful to add contact/feedback page to your php websites.

Check out the Demo Here

17. Ajax Add a Record with Button Status Change using jQuery

If you like Facebook and Twitter API method of clicking follow, add a friend button. Where you click the button, the button status changed to ‘You following’ and ‘Remove’ at the same time request inserted into database. This tutorial will show you how to do it.

Check out the Demo Here

18. Refreshing an element at a set time interval using jQuery and a sprinkle of Ajax

Now lets say that you a web page that has a big Block of “something” and inside this “something” you would like to have some information change at a set time interval. Well with Jquery, some PHP and a sprinkle of Ajax, you can get this done quick fast and in a hurry.

Check out the Demo Here

19. CakePHP Ajax “Quick Save” with jQuery

When you are in an administration panel, sometimes you want a “quick save” feature that allows you to save without leaving the page. Here is how to accomplish this with CakePHP and jQuery.

20. PHP / jQuery Image Replacement

This is a tiny plugin that, in combination with a separate server-side script, dynamically replaces the text of an element with an image, generated using fonts you specify. This allows you to use beautiful text in headings without having to manually produce images in Photoshop, GIMP, or similar.

Check out examples here

Google’s email service Gmail was launched to the public five years ago this week. Back then, the service turned the web email industry on its ear by offering an entire gigabyte of storage to users who were lucky enough to receive an invite. Small potatoes now, but that was a nice chunk of storage from an email service back then.

For some of us, it was also a chance to get a really good address with our real names in them. I chose a simple first name/last name approach. It had a nice ring to it after previous addresses with other services that I had to explain to people who still found them hard to remember. All of the good ones had already been taken at that point on all the other big-name services.

The Present

Gmail has grown by leaps and bounds since that time, and has gone through a ton of changes, and somehow still sits in beta. Who knows if that will ever change? I read an Ars Technica interview with Gmail’s product manager Todd Jackson the other day in which he discussed the reason behind the beta label.

"We have very, very high standards for the product," Jaskson said. "as we do for all Google products. But we are not ready to come out of beta yet. There are a few things that we’re working on, and once we meet a couple more of those criteria, we would love to come out of beta."

AT: Jackson said it is obviously stable enough for everyone to use—even stable enough for the business and Enterprise markets that Google is chasing with Google Apps. But the decision to drop Gmail’s beta badge hinges on a few internal criteria (or, perhaps more accurately, feature requirements) that his team feels are still lacking.

He goes on to note that some requirements like a mobile site, POP, and IMAP services have already been checked off. But does anyone really care if Gmail’s still in Beta? Many users have been happily using it for years and have no intention of leaving it behind despite an outage issue here and there. Even though it gets a whole lot of attention when it does happen, it really doesn’t happen very often.

Gmail is constantly adding new labs, making the service more customizable and useful in many respects. They are referred to as experiments, but they might as well be considered user preferences. I can’t recall ever having been affected by one of these labs not working properly. I’m sure it’s happened, but it’s not an issue that is exactly plaguing the service.

The Future

Google says it expects the changes over the next five years to be even more radical than over the past five. It’s hard to tell just what will be in store. Google has been pretty tight-lipped about future plans for the service.

Hitwise recently reported that Gmail visits had surpassed visits to YouTube. That’s pretty significant (especially since YouTube is the 2nd biggest search engine). They say that social networks are eclipsing email in popularity, and Google hasn’t exactly been known for their social media attempts. I have a theory though that Gmail has kind of been Google’s social network all along.  Granted, it’s a private social network, but with it, you can:

- send messages to friends

- keep conversations with multiple friends together

- embed videos/rich media in emails/chat messages

- send messages to people beyond the Gmail wall

- use search operators to bring up all photos /other media from any past messages

- Account holders have profile pages with their picture

- Creating a Google account essentially gives you an account to a much broader range of products in Google itself that allow for sharing things with friends (such as Docs, Reader, and Bookmarks)

The Gmail account holder has access to a lot of social elements, yet it is not really considered a social network. It only makes sense that upcoming changes would highlight and expand upon such elements. And what if Google bought Twitter like so many have predicted?

No, Gmail’s not exactly like Facebook. But Facebook’s not exactly like MySpace, and Twitter’s not exactly like Digg, and so on. Whether you agree with me or not, Gmail is here to stay, and I can’t see a scenario that doesn’t involve getting more social when every other property on the web seems to be doing just that. Luckily for Gmail (like email in general), it’s been social since it’s inception. Imagine what it could be with a few design changes.

What do you think about Gmail after five years? Tell us.

How about as a social network? Your thoughts…