AlphaBetty’s ABC’s is a wonderfully illustrated educational App. Not only does this App have great little illustrations, it also has a “how to draw” section on the site which includes free instructional videos. You can check it out at the itunes store, or on the Milkshake Jake site.

Finally – Neil McInnes has a site up for his film Automoto. This short stop-motion film has won many awards in the last few years. I had the pleasure of working with Neil on some of the animation that went into this film. I also got to do a bit of set construction which was quite fun. The story here is quite inspiring for artists and film makers alike.

There has been so much debate over Flash. Is it here to stay or will it be replaced? With the constant back and forth between Apple and Adobe, this is hard to say. While there are things I like about flash, I think it could use improvement. Mobile devices are becoming increasingly important in the market today. I see some competition coming out for flash, and that can’t be a bad thing. Soon you’ll be able to export CSS3 directly from flash so I can’t see it going away completely. Sencha is another option though – although I don’t see a lot of interactivity here, just animation. There are so many new things you can do just with HTML5 and CSS3. It will be interesting to see which programs come out on top. I’ve just downloaded Sencha Touch and Sencha Animator. I’ll be testing these out to see how they compare but they’re free to use and open source, so you can also download them and see for yourself.

This is a great article to read for any designer, web or print. Whether you’re a teacher, student, designer or are running a studio – or even if you’re a client. You should know how best to give and receive critisism in a constructive way. It not only opens lines of communication about your work but also enables you to continue to grow and improve your design skills.

This is the number one tool that I would recommend for anyone who wants to really learn how to code. I teach quite a bit of Dreamweaver and also use Coda in my classes, but this plugin is so handy for everyone, whether you are a beginner or a more advanced developer. It’s free and easy to install onto Firefox.

You can use firebug to take a look at how the CSS effects the different divs and layout elements on the page. Turning things on and off in firebug in the CSS panel (or HTML) will show you how each line of code will affect the layout, widths, heights, fonts and colours of the page design.

If you are a more advanced developer and are trying to troubleshoot a problem in your code this is very helpful to tweak the design of your site as it will also give you the exact line of code that you need to edit, as well as the document file name. That’s a huge time saver and instead of hunting for where your h3 tag is defined in your CSS sheet you can go directly to that line of code and edit your style quickly and efficiently.

MacKeeper is software for Mac, with lots of useful utilities. If you need an online backup, or need to recover lost data this may be for you. Nobody should need to lose data in this day and age. I just had a student email me today that his hard drive had crashed and he’d lost all his files. This is something that is completely preventable. The anti-theft and Geeks on demand are both great little features as well. As much as I love my external hard drive, I don’t know how many more times I can drop it without it falling apart. Online backups are getting more and more appealing to me! I love being able to access my files from anywhere. Using Dropbox is also great for this, but they give you such limited space. With this you can create a backup schedule and don’t even have to think about it.

I’ll be covering a few ways to add fonts to your website in my classes over the next few days but here is one method from Paul Irish that works well. Keep in mind you will also need to use Font Squirrel to generate fonts with @font-face. Here is his example CSS:

@font-face {
font-family: ‘Graublau Web’;
src: url(‘GraublauWeb.eot’);
src: local(‘☺’),
url(‘GraublauWeb.woff’) format(‘woff’), url(‘GraublauWeb.ttf’) format(‘truetype’);
}

On another note Paul has been developing a few other nifty things. I enjoyed his CSS3 please site and am looking into the HTML5 boilerplate. The CSS3 site has some nice tips and tricks for things like rotation that are new to CSS.

One of the things I have done quite a bit of as a wordpress designer and developer is giving clients hours and hours of tutorials on how to use, manage and update their wordpress website. I just stumbled on this plugin for wordpress – and this is one of the best things I’ve seen online for awhile in regards to getting clients up to speed on using their wordpress as a CMS. It includes not only videos that show how to edit and do all the things you’d need to do to manage your site but also is a plugin and has a manual with useful information.

If you are a student in my new media course this semester you may also want to check this out for some extra information on building and editing your wordpress site. The videos are very easy to follow and I would recommend this to anyone who is just starting out with using wordpress, either as a blogging tool, for designing and developing websites, or for your clients.

I just stumbled across this tutorial yesterday for mobile wordpress theming development on the mobile tuts plus site.
To create a wordpress theme that is accessible through a mobile device you may want to go through this tutorial. There are a few steps to it and a few things to sign up for and download – but it’s worth it!

First you need to be registered as an apple developer. This is free and easy enough to do. With this you’ll be able to download the software that you need to test this all out. It’s free once you’ve registered and is very useful.

JQtouch is a JQuery plugin for mobile web development on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and other new devices. You can download the zip for the plugin here or from their site .

Big rock beer is having another design competition this year. I must say the $10,000 prize for the best video ad is tempting me! Check out some of the last year’s winners on their site for some funny beer ads.