This is just a little note about the unexpected downtime some of you may have noticed this past week. We have had to move our website to a new host and everything is up and running again for most part.This does mean that if you emailed us or used the contact form we did not get your message. So if you haven’t heard from us please do get in touch again. Apologies for the inconvience and happy surfing!

The MacBook Air is the latest laptop from Apple, and one that has caused a division of opinion from customers and experts alike. There is a lot of praise for this product and a lot of favorable reviews. There has also been a lot of negative opinion on the forums and blogs around the web. Who is right? Is the Air a worthy addition to the strong Mac lineup? (Click to read more)

It would appear that Microsoft had second doubts about their unwillingness to adopt Standards Compliancy in their forth-coming IE8 browser. On their IE Blog the new announcement apparently follows Microsoft’s new Interoperability Principles;

"We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can."

Wired.com were inclined to think otherwise and instead the reason may have just as well been due to "the widespread criticism from the design community — condemning IE 8 for not defaulting to standards mode — coupled with lawsuits from the likes of Opera and the EU, played a large part in the decision."

No matter the real reason behind the new decision to enable the Standards Compliant mode as the default option. It will mean that Web Designers can at last hope for an IE browser that renders their web sites in similar or identical fashion to Firefox, Safari and other modern browsers which have been compliant all along.

In the long run It should mean a faster development cycle and more time spent on designing sites as opposed to writing alternative stylesheets to fix bugs and quirks in IE.

Remember that the end user of a well designed and functional web-site is the one who really benefits here.

Just stumbled on a very interesting project from PoolieStudios called Iconize (which in turn was inspired by this post from Ask the CSS Guy). The concept is simple: CSS code that would add little context sensitive icons next to your normal text links. If the link points to a PDF file, then add a little PDF icon next to it, if it’s an MP3 file, add a little sound icon, and so on.

What a great idea and a great implementation of CSS functionality that is seldom utilized. PoolieStudios are putting together a large collection of icons and are writing the CSS code to go along with them — you can grab the latest version here.

Recently, I’ve started noticing an interesting design change in Apple’s user interfaces, mainly on their site, but also a lot on the iPhone. The design item is an inverted shadow—that is, a shadow falling above, rather than below the text. Here’s an example from their website’s navigation (Click to read more)

We’re pleased to announce that our Pixelshell site design was voted #49 in “Top 100 CSS Designs of 2007″ by NerdBusiness.com. You can check out our site among the other 100 designs here. We’re honored to have been selected and look forward to bringing you more great designs in 2008. Happy New Year!

If you’re new to web design and wondered how to make your content a little bit more attractive—how to create a simple, yet elegant, frame to put your content in—then I’ve got a little tutorial for you. This tutorial uses Photoshop to create the image, but I assume no prior experience with it so anyone can attempt this simple illustrated guide. Without further wait, here’s my tutorial on making a smooth, rounded content frame.

Many new electronics products and software have a bucket-load of new features. They try to incite you to make the purchase by flooding you with their extensive functionality and a million of things they can do. In the end however, the list of the functions would be capped, in some cases cut at a surprisingly low number — for example, if a product has 100 fancy features, they may actually be capped at 30. “Capped?!” you ask? If a product has 100 features, how can you possibly cap them? Let me tell you how… (Click to read more)

Now, I’m sorry to disappoint you if you thought that I’d be talking about a real time travel machine, that unfortunately hasn’t been invented yet as far as I’m aware—however, I am going to give you my perspective on Apple’s application called “Time Machine”, which was released recently with the Macintosh operating system, OS X Leopard.

Time Machine is an automated file back-up application—it backs up everything, quite literally…everything. Of course, back-up software has existed for years in many forms and shapes. The latest release of the Windows operating system, Windows Vista, has its own automated back-up solution called Shadow Copy. Time Machine, is just another back-up application then, right? Not quite… (Click to read more)

Last Friday, Apple has unleashed their latest operating system, OS X Leopard, and from the general reactions and first reviews it appears to have been very well received. I’ve made the upgrade and would like to now share my own thoughts and experiences I’ve had with this new system, and whether I would recommend current OS X users to part with their hard earned $129 to get the latest and greatest offering from Apple. (Click to read more)