StudioTalk: Wellington Web Design and Branding Blog

Don’t you hate it when you post a link or video on Facebook and it decides to show your old pictures or thinks that your newly-launched website is all about “Under Construction, coming soon!”? Well we do, and as a web-development agency, it is important to understand and resolve the quirks and tricks of working with social media networks.

There is a nifty tool known as the ‘Facebook De-linter‘, which does make sense. Effectively it shows you what your website looks like, in Facebook’s eyes. But most importantly it also updates the Facebook cache to reflect your newest page content. So if you’re having trouble getting Facebook to recognise your new web content, throw your website into the De-linter!

Visit the Facebook De-linter.

At long last, Adobe has realised the future of web-based animation! Flash is an amazing utility to achieve some mind-blowing effects and online experiences, no doubt about that. But with the debacle surrounding Apple’s iPad and iPhones lack of flash support, many questions have been raised about the future of Flash.

jQuery has been around quite some time, but with the recent uptake of HTML5 and CSS3, we can now achieve Flash-quality experiences without the dependence upon a third-party plugin. So iPad, iPhone, Android or PC – it doesn’t matter what platform you’re on, you will enjoy a web experience to rival even some of the flashiest Flash websites. This is of course if you’re sporting a CSS3/HTML5-compatible browser (Chrome, Firefox 5+, Safari 3, Internet Explorer 9).

It seems that Adobe has decided to embrace the growing popularity in such technology and has released a preview of it’s Adobe Edge application. Adobe Edge allows web designers to create slick animations and effects without knowing the code and all the guts behind the scene.

Adobe Edge uses a very AfterEffects-ey interface with the standard timeline, working space and intuitive tools. Have a play around with it with a free download of Adobe Edge Preview.

We support Joomla 1.7

Joomla! CMS has recently released an update to it’s heavy-weight CMS, and there is much debate as to which platform is the safest to develop with.

For the last few years Joomla 1.5 has been a solid option, with loads of third-party plugins, components and modules to get Joomla to work beyond it’s standard capabilities. And then in 2010 the developers of Joomla released version 1.6. This was a large-scale upgrade and much of the core functions and code was revamped. The result is a slick, well-refined CMS with power to boot.

The developers behind this popular CMS have implemented a 6-month release cycle, so every six months we will be hit with a new upgrade. While this sounds daunting, it is in the best interests of constantly changing technologies and website security. That is, of course, if our third-party developers can keep up.

Joomla! 1.7 has been released for several months now, and Joomla 1.6 reaches it’s theoretical ‘end of life’ this month, so it pays to consider an upgrade. More importantly though, we should all look to upgrade our Joomla 1.5 systems to at least 1.6 as it introduces much-needed core upgrades and a future-compatible system.

We have recently started a large-scale project in Joomla 1.7 and have been very impressed with the changes made. From multi-tiered categories and module activation within articles to interface design and a more considered menu structure, 1.7 is the way of the future.

With this new project, we also needed to develop for mobile platforms such as the iPad and iPhone, as well as the multitude of Android devices. With Joomla 1.5 all layouts were in a table structure which severely limited mobile layouts and general future compatibility. Introduced in 1.6, Joomla now uses HTML layouts allowing us to develop templates and websites with whatever structure we wish – heck, we can even develop an entire website in HTML5!

So if you’re looking at Joomla, 1.7 is a stable and confident release with a growing support from 3rd-party developers to extend your website. If you’re interested in upgrading to Joomla, then get in touch! You can also find out more about Joomla by visiting their website http://www.joomla.org/17.

Adobe CS5 Master Collection

I feel like it was just 6 months ago since the last Adobe CS release, but they’ve just launched CS5! Hot on the tails of much debate on the Flash vs Apple, CS5 promises more flash to it’s Flash. Naturally there are always going to be improvements, but I’m not quite convinced there’s a great deal more on offer than the leap from CS3 to CS4.

The interface is the same, with only minor adjustments to some of the toolbar icons and the addition of CS Live! support. CS Live! is a tool Adobe has incorporated into the entire CS5 package which is designed to harness the collaborative power of the internet. Posting work-in-progress to others to collect feedback on a project’s direction is a tool which I can imagine many users finding very useful, however to me it adds no value.

BrowserLabs Browser Compatibility Testing
Dreamweaver has a new BrowserLab (http://browserlab.adobe.com) tool (which is available as a web-based application) and it enables web developers to test web pages in an array of browsers. The idea is hardly new but other testing solutions are messy, complicated and often expensive (requiring multiple machines and OS). As a developer I can appreciate the time it takes to test bugs and variations between browser engines and I welcome a seemless way to test browser compatibility.

Initially I was very skeptical, but after further inspection it actually seems that BrowserLab is generating images of each browser’s render, in much the same way that BrowserShots (http://browsershots.org) does. This means you’re getting a realistic representation of your website in each browser. Booyah!

64-Bit Support
Again, much of the Creative Suite 5 misses out on exploiting the growing list of 64-bit operating systems (OSX Leopard, OSX Snow Leopard, Windows Vista, Windows 7). The only 64-bit-native programs are Photoshop Extended, AfterEffects and Premier. Granted, these are the most processor-intensive programs but I certainly feel that Illustrator and Flash would benefit hugely from being 64-bit-native. Then again, I’m no software programmer.

What does it cost?
For the mac-daddy Master Edition you’ll be forking out over AU$3,900 for the full package, or over AU$1,300 for the upgrade (they curiously don’t have NZ$ prices). As always, Adobe CS is always going to be expensive, and for the last CS release (CS4) it was definitely worth it. To me, CS5 doesn’t bring enough new developments to warrant spending that kind of cash.

Summary
All told, CS5 is pretty, has a few nice new tweaks, hasn’t crashed on me (yet!) and is curiously trying to strengthen it’s Flash product with better reliability and special effects. However, all nicities aside, CS5 isn’t worth the dollars you’ll need to spend to upgrade. Download the trial (sure, if you’ve got 6gb of data cap to spare) and have a play for yourself (http://www.adobe.com/ap/downloads/).