We kicked this week with some beautiful weather in Surrey, which in turn led me to get some incredibly painful sunburn on my shoulders (whimpers). We soon fell back into the Great British summer weather (rain) as the week pushed on and work picked up again.
Unfortunately with the shear amount of work I’ve been presented with for the next few weeks the blog won’t be updated as often as I would like. I’ll definitely be keeping up with Rawkes Weekly and I’ll try my hardest to get some other posts up when I get some free time.
In the meantime, enjoy this week’s round-up!
This week’s news
The Times newspaper has been redesigned in an effort to reflect modern culture and take advantage of it’s new full-colour printing press. I was lucky enough to have a tour around the their printing presses in London and I must say it’s an amazing place - they are really up to date with technology. I’m looking forward to seeing the new design on the stands, it’ll certainly stand out from the rest! (Via: Visual Editors)
LastFM launched a new version of their API.
They mentioned it last week, but on Tuesday Moo finally released their new business card product. I’ll definitely be getting some of these in the near future.
Javascript media viewer Shadowbox was updated to version 2.0 RC 1. I’ve used this in the past a few times and I would recommend it to anyone looking for decent modal boxes and in-line media pop-ups.
Apple released the 10.5.4 update for it’s Leopard operating system. It included a slew of minor updates, along with some security fixes and added support for RAW images on a variety of cameras.
Mozilla has confirmed that FireFox 3 successfully set the Guinness World Record for the most downloads in 24 hours! Well done everyone, this is certainly something to be proud of.
iSlayer launch Organised: an awesome little widget for OS X - It has a calendar, notes, to-do list, and events. It uses the OS X databases for these areas so you are always in sync with Mail.app and iCal. I’m really pushing myself towards some GTD goals and it looks like this will help!
37signals have announced they are going to phase out support for IE 6. I haven’t quite decided where I stand on this issue; on one side we are getting close to a point where we need to push forward and embrace modern technologies (CSS3, etc), and on the other side we should be supporting every “major browser” right until the very end. I reckon I’m ever so slightly on the pushing modern technologies side of the fence, it has a brighter future…
Google Talk released for the iPhone – Looking forward to this as I will be getting my first iPhone when it’s released next Friday!
Links of the week
- Shooing your work demons – Ways to overcome time sucking activities in your work
- Siding with HTML over XHTML – This blogger shares their reasons for moving to HTML instead of XHTML
- Three quick tips to make your PHP understandable – Some excellent tips on bettering your PHP code
- Should links open in new windows? – Smashing Magazine raise the heated issue of links opening new windows
- CSS: infoboxes and pullquotes – Making pullquotes using CSS
- The ultimate guide to designing with black – Black is notorious for being hard to design with; This guide will help you out
- Chyrp – Tumblr styling blogging platform
- 13 tools for knowing how they’re doing it – Some excellent tools for snooping on your competitor’s websites
- A handy guide to getting important things done – A nice round-up of the best productivity articles on Zen Habits
- Mapstraction – Javascript library aimed at blurring the edges of the many mapping APIs
Sites of the week
Revyver Labs
Beautiful concept with a stunning background.
DaleAnthony
It’s nice to see more UK individuals producing great websites
Lesson of the week
Sun lotion was invented for a reason (ouch!)
Track of the week
“What Is Love” by Haddaway. This track is a classic and for some reason made the worst moments of last week seem less crappy.
Predictions for next week
The buzz around the iPhone 3G launch will go into overdrive; as iPhone software developers go silent in anticipation of the App Store and queues appear outside Apple retail outlets around the world. Unfortunately I won’t be part of any, but if someone could grab me an iPhone it would be much appreciated!