Read the Top 100 Requests on Dear Adobe and see if you agree.

Adobe has a lot of work to do to please their customers. This is a site that has been set up for us poor developers, designers, animators, and general creatives to vent our anger at Adobe - the company, the products, and their pricing. If Adobe ignores this site, and sees it as a small number of angered individuals determined to destroy Adobe's reputation they will be much mistaken. This site has comments from some of the most loyal users of Adobe products, from the people that genuinely care about their business, and these are also the most vocal - they are the core users that matter most to Adobe.

They are telling Adobe, directly, and in crystal clear English, exactly what is wrong with their current business. They're even telling them how to put it right.

Dear Adobe, Ignore this site at your peril.

Parallax is a really cool, powerful use of javascript from Stephen Band. Think of looking through a camera and having layers of objects at various distances moving around. Parallax achieves that effect using a combination static images, one for each layer.

"Parallax [is a jQuery library that] turns a selected element into a 'window', or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport. These layers move in response to the mouse, and, depending on their dimensions (and options for layer initialisation), they move by different amounts, in a parallaxy kind of way."

The Future of Web Apps (FOWA) Expo is back in London for October 8th-10th at the London ExCel Center and boy, it's going to be one hell of a show!

Speakers include Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Kevin Rose (Digg), Blane Cook (Twitter) plus many more from the likes of Google, Salesforce, AOL, and Mahalo. Also attending (and speaking) are the guys from 280North, creators of 280Slides and Cappuccino that we wrote about a while ago.

We are very excited as we were unable to attend last year's FOWA and will be there on October 10th ready to chat, share, learn, and party!

Kevin and Alex are also going to be there shooting a live diggnation from the main stage at 7:30pm on October 10th where Google will be providing the (alcoholic) refreshments. After which, the wrap party will get started with Facebook and Digg kicking things off. (I've heard that Facebook are going to be sponsoring an open bar.)

The celebrations are going to be epic. We hope to see you all there and look forward to meeting a wealth of interesting people that are changing the web as we know it. There will ofcourse be free wifi for all (probably provided by the Cloud) so you can keep those posts coming even while you're having lunch.

Get your passes for all 3 days of the event over at Carsonified's FOWA site.

See you there!

Quite a useful update to the UI of the iPhone Capacity meter in iTunes. Before, Apps showed up as "Other".

Also, in case you hadn't heard, the iPhone 2.1 Update is out, which promises to fix all those annoying little (and large) bugs that have been driving us crazy for a while.

Do you remember earlier this year a web application called 280Slides?

Let's refresh our memory a little bit - 280Slides was a stunning piece of work both on the beautiful UI that felt like a native OS X app, right through to the core that was an entirely new framework that promised to make developing web applications just the same as building desktop ones. Well today that framework has been launched to the public (with a suitably beautiful icon) as open source, and it's called Cappuccino.

There's not much I can say about Cappuccino right now that isn't on their site, other than give my full support for this truly advanced framework. What sets it apart from other javascript frameworks such as MooTools (which we love and use extensively by the way), script.aculo.us, and jquery is that Cappuccino is built specifically for developing full blow web applications, not just sprucing up existing web pages and adding a little dynamism. Cappuccino, in fact, is so far removed from existing ways* of building web applications that they claim you won't need to know very much about web development at all:

"With Cappuccino, you don't need to know HTML. You'll never write a line of CSS. You don't ever have to interact with DOM. We only ask developers to learn one technology, Objective-J, and one set of APIs."

This is a massive step in the right direction for existing desktop application developers (especially those already developing for OS X) as they can relatively easily start building similar applications "for the cloud" and harness the power of the web to push the boundaries of their application design.

We are really looking forward to having a play around with Cappuccino, and we highly recommend you popping over to their site simply to check it out and learn more.

* Sprout Core also takes a similar view to building web applications (rather than adding AJAX to HTML pages), but it's a different framework that still requires you to learn web based languages. Sprout Core was covered extensively (around the same time as 280Slides) when Apple released MobileMe which is built using Sprout Core.

Being in London, this year we haven't been lucky enough to attend the Apple World Wide Developer Conference at Moscone West in San Francisco. We'll be following Twitter along with the rest of the world's Apple fans, but just in case Twitter goes down (not that that's ever happened before... oh wait) we'll be keeping you posted on developments throughout the day.

Follow WWDC in style, updated every 30 seconds: http://wwdc.twistori.com/#apple

Updates

Apple homepage and iPhone pages updated.

Apple Store already back online

iPhone 3G Specs from online Apple Store:

Same camera 2MegaPixels - ouch.
Same screen.
GPS - wooooo.
3G - wooooo.
Price - woooooo from $199 for 8GB.

Read the rest of this entry »

So the new iPhone is only days away, and there are tons of rumours flying around all over the place. Let's have a look at what's being said, and what could be said at WWDC...

I've been thinking about how the keynote could go, and here's a little idea of how the show could pan out:

< -- Begin thinking like Steve -- >

Intro

iPhone

* A few slides about how iPhone market share has been growing (conveniently ignoring the last few months where it's been falling).

Yes, it's true. Today, we're introducing the new iPhone. And yes, it's 3G.

New iPhone, runs iPhone 2.0 firmware from the box.

Read the rest of this entry »

Relating back to our posts on the Dream Browser, we found a great demo of a much improved technique for scrolling windows at Thorwil's Blog.

The concept of scrolling using scroll bars in a GUI has not altered for over a decade, and an improvement like this makes a lot of sense. It may not aesthetically be the most attractive solution right now, but as time goes by it's highly likely this could end up in desktop software and operating systems.

It's going to be interesting seeing how this concept develops and whether it will make it into the wider world of mainstream software.

Fellow readers of liquidicity, we are surprised. Genuinely surprised.

People print our posts.

We never realised that many of our readers actually like to have a real, physical copy of some of our posts to (I guess) stick on their wall, put in their scrapbook, hand out in the street, or do anything else with.

In all honesty, we never designed liquidicity for printing, and only rarely print posts off ourselves. So today, we decided to see just how bad liquidicity looked on paper - horrendous! The navigation bar showed up as an unordered, un-styled, empty list. The sidebar showed below the content, running over several pages. The default font was, gasp, Times New Roman, and the rest was just bad.

Worst of all, for even short posts at least 3 sheets of A4 paper needed to be printed due to the unordered layout spiralling off down the page. What a waste of ink and paper.

We immediately got to work on a new printable style sheet. Now whenever you print a post on liquidicity, your discerning eyes will be met with a centred, red, bold title, a well sized font, a focus on content, organised comments, and nothing else. No sidebar, no category links, no "digg this" - nothing that isn't needed on a piece of paper. All in a lovely paper friendly font: Helvetica.

So, all we can say is... find your favourite post and hit "Print"! But not too many times, because we really do like trees.

Many thanks to Stass for pointing out that people actually print stuff off once in a while.

Only a small post, but I just signed in to Google Mail and received a loading bar progress indicator.

No need to stop the press, but it's a whole lot more useful than the old "Loading..." message.

I hope they do the same with file attachment uploads as well. Progress indicators are a much more user friendly display of loading times than just a spinning icon, or as previously on Google Mail, writing "Loading...".

Hint: Always aim to explain to your users the progress of whatever operation they are waiting for. Progress bars are a simple and efficient way of doing so.