With the release of Windows 8 supposedly coming sometime in 2012, Microsoft has announced that Flash along with all other plugins will be banned from the new “Metro Style IE” browser. The Metro styled IE resembles what is currently seen on Windows 7 phones. This browser will be as HTML-only as possible which Microsoft is hoping will provide long battery life and greater performance. Read More
Enabling users to intuitively navigate a web page is one of the most important aspects of designing a great site. Users need to be able to find information quickly and with the help of the jQuery Superfish plugin, this can be easily achieved. Superfish takes a purely CSS navigational method and adds Javascript for some cool enhancements such as animations and time delays on mouseout. Plus, if for some reason a user has JavaScript disabled, the Superfish navigation will degrade to CSS without a problem. It even supports those stubborn IE6 users who refuse to update. I’ve personally used the Superfish nav bar on at least five different sites and can attest to it’s ease of use.
After spending some time recently looking for a nice animated slide show, I came across the jQuery Nivo Slider. The thing I really liked about this plug-in is the slick transitions which look very Flash-like. This is an awesome alternative to using Flash since some mobile users on iPhones and iPad’s won’t be able to see your embedded .SWF file. Nivo Slider obviously requires the latest and greatest jQuery release but all you need to do is upload your images, reference the images in the HTML and you’ll get this bad boy rocking and rolling. I highly recommend this plug-in and it’s quite flexible allowing you to customize the slide show as needed. For you WordPress developers, there are several Nivo Slider plug-ins that can be thrown on your site. On my home page, I’m currently using JJ NextGen JQuery Slider which can be downloaded here.
Channels in Photoshop are arguably a more intrigal part of the software than Layers considering Channels were around before Layers. Photoshop Channels store the color information of an image and when working in RGB mode, consist of three different Channel layers (Red, Green and Blue). Photoshop supports fifty six Channels so additional Channels can obviosly be created to blend and adjust colors as needed. Channels can store selections which are extremely useful when needing to restore a previously used selection. A really good tutorial describing how to save and load selections via Channels can be viewed below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEkce_QYZDI
With the prices of digital cameras becoming more affordable and with a lot of the mid range cameras being capable of shooting in Camera Raw, many photographers are taking the leap to this format. When you set your digital camera to one of those predefined settings such as Portrait, Action Shot, Night Scene or Macro, you are basically changing the ISO and exposure settings. You click the shutter, the camera processes the image based on whatever setting you chose, and then the image is compressed into a JPEG. When a picture is taken in the Camera RAW format, the image is captured as is with no ISO settings or compression being applied. You are essentially getting a digital photo negative and can take this file into the Camera Raw plugin for Photoshop and make adjustments non-destructively. This tutorial shows some new features in Photoshop’s Camera Raw plugin:
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/the-complete-picture-with-julieanne-kost/new-camera-raw-features-in-cs5/
