Feedly on Firefox

FREE Lucky Dip Draw from justcreativedesign.com

All you have to do is comment on this JCD post saying what you DO NOT like about his website and why AND/OR you could suggest something you would like to see on JCD. He’s doing this so he can improve JCD.

What can you win?

There will be one winner chosen randomly and the prize is also drawn randomly, hence the lucky dip. If the winner does not want their prize let me know and I will pass it on to another person.

You could win any one of these things:

• $100 from PayPal
• $50 from Paypal
• $20 from Paypal
• Professional Logo Design
• Blog / Website / Product Review
• Blog Header Redesign
• Go Media Vector Pack – Ultimate Vector Collection 1 – 597 Vectors royalty free. (Worth $523). You can view what’s in the packs here: Set 1 | Set 2 | Set 3 | Set 4 | Set 5
• One month 125×125 advertising on JCD.

The winner will be annouced around July 20th.

visit justcreativedesign.com

MobileMe coming on Wednesday

Announcing MobileMe

Mac Fun

A graphic I made using Apple’s built in screen capture and Photoshop. Something to make you smile today.

Tips – Open Applications Automatically on Startup

If you frequently listen to music, surf the web, get your email, or chat with friends, you may want your computer to open those applications every time you start up. On a Mac, it’s simple to do. Select System Preferences from the Apple menu, then:

1. Click Accounts (in the System row of the System Preferences window).
2. Click the Login Items tab.
3. Click the Add (+) button.
4. Scroll down and click Applications
5. Select iTunes and click the Add button.

The next time you start up your Mac, iTunes will start up, too. In addition to opening applications at Start Up, you can have Mac OS X open documents and Network drives.

iPhone 2.0

Apple announced yesterday, June 9th @ the WWDC the new iPhone 3G. With fast 3G wireless technology, GPS mapping, support for enterprise features like Microsoft Exchange, and the new App Store, iPhone 3G puts even more features at your fingertips. And like the original iPhone, it combines three products in one — a revolutionary phone, a widescreen iPod, and a breakthrough Internet device with rich HTML email and a desktop-class web browser. iPhone 3G. It redefines what a mobile phone can do — again.

Some new features that people have been waiting for:

3G, thinner, all metal buttons, black or white plastic casing, and better battery life.

(more…)

Firefox 3 RC

Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 34 months. Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 14,000 updates including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot more under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers.

More Secure
Malware Protection: malware protection warns users when they arrive at sites which are known to install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware.

Add-ons and Plugin version check: Firefox now automatically checks add-on and plugin versions and will disable older, insecure versions.

Secure add-on updates: to improve add-on update security, add-ons that provide updates in an insecure manner will be disabled.

Easier to Use
Simplified add-on installation: the add-ons whitelist has been removed making it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer clicks.

Full page zoom: from the View menu and via keyboard shortcuts, the new zooming feature lets you zoom in and out of entire pages, scaling the layout, text and images, or optionally only the text size. Your settings will be remembered whenever you return to the site.

Integration with the Mac: the new Firefox theme makes toolbars, icons, and other user interface elements look like a native OS X application. Firefox also uses OS X widgets and supports Growl for notifications of completed downloads and available updates. A combined back and forward control make it even easier to move between web pages. (more…)

Smashing Magazine Style Switchers Contest

from Smashing Magazine: June 5th, 2008

Style switchers are used to provide users with a choice of layouts, fonts, colors and views they can use to adapt the design to their personal needs. Designs with style switchers are more flexbile, more adaptive and more user-friendly as different visitors can quickly modify the design for their personal convenience.

When offering different layouts and design variations your design may better suit the preferences of your visitors. After all, it is almost impossible to make the design look nice and work properly for everybody. Style switchers are also used in web-sites which emphasize the usability and accessibility in their designs.

Style Switchers Contest

Web designers can achieve significant usability-improvements by adding a simple style switcher to their designs. Style switchers are useful and powerful as they give users a better control of site presentation. However, this technique is almost never used and are sometimes considered to be unnecessary and useless which is simply not true. We would like to change it.

Our goal
We want to motivate you to figure out how style switchers work and how you can use them to improve your designs.

Your task
We’d like you to create beautiful, functional and user-friendly style switchers for your own web-sites. We’ll collect the most creative, usable and elegant solutions and review them in one of our next posts.

Award
The award is Apple Cinema 20 Flat Panel Display with 16.7 million colors, 400:1 contrast ratio, 0.258 mm dot pitch, 16 ms response time and 170-degree viewing angles (see the image below). The winner will be chosen randomly among participants of our contest.

For full contest rules please visit Smashing Magazine.