And speaking of something new from Firefox, behold Australis, the newest and most gorgeous iteration of the Firefox user interface yet.

Screenshot of Australis

In easy terms, Australis is being hailed as a modern and clean visual design iteration for the Firefox web browser. Apart from simplifying and streamlining the default Firefox UI, Australis will also include easier ways to customize your web browser. As Mozilla is describing it, ‘it’s the most beautiful and detail-obsessed iteration of Firefox’s visual design yet: modern, clean, and comfortable’.

Here’s a two minute overview and walkthrough of Australis:

While it is not yet fully ready and needs a good deal of polishing, you can play around with the Australis interactive demo here.

The post Australis: The New Look for Firefox appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Amidst such variety, it might be difficult to keep track of the best and choicest of articles and tutorials. If you too have experienced the same, you should check out ManageWP.org (brought to you by, but not to be confused with, the WordPress management service ManageWP.com).

And what is ManageWP.org all about? Basically put, it is a community project that enables you to share and vote on content that has anything to do with WordPress. Thus, you can not only share and upvote meaningful content for other members of the WordPress community, but even discover amazing articles, tutorials and videos — all related to WordPress, of course!

Based on Symfony2 and AngularJS, ManageWP.org has been inspired by the likes of Upworthy.com, Zite.com and Inbound.org.

If you are someone who uses WordPress on a regular basis, do check out ManageWP.org Plus, feel free to share and vote for the content of your choice (just be sure to read the guidelines, though).

The post ManageWP.org — Share, Explore and Vote on Everything WordPress appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Allow me to introduce you to Google Web Designer – a powerful tool that lets you easily create interactive and cross-platform HTML5-based designs and vector-style artwork using an ‘integrated visual and code interface’.

So what exactly can Google Web Designer do? Here are some of the features it offers:

• Full 3D authoring environment utilizing CSS3
• Automated and intuitive design tools to let you create animated HTML5
• Publish designed ads directly to DoubleClick Studio or AdMob
• In-built illustration tools
• Choice of either Design View or Code View

To give you a quick overview of what Google Web Designer can do, check out this video:

As of now, Google Web Designer is freely available for both Mac and PC. It is still in BETA, though that shouldn’t really deter you from giving it a spin — GMail was in BETA for a long while, wasn’t it?

You can read about the launch of Google Web Designer here, or check out related videos on YouTube.

The post Google Web Designer: Bringing Ideas To Life, Using HTML5 appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

phpMyAdmin started as a humble project with modest aspirations. Inspired by Peter Kuppelwieser’s MySQL-Webadmin, Tobias Ratschiller began work on phpMyAdmin in 1998, but later abandoned the already popular project in 2000 due to lack of time. It was eventually Olivier Müller, Marc Delisle and Loïc Chapeaux that in 2001 eventually registered phpMyAdmin at SourceForge, and development has never looked back.

Today, with over 200,000 direct downloads per month, it has evolved into a gigantic concept in its own right — the number of lines of code has risen from 13,496 to 508,761, made possible by over 650 contributors from across the globe, translated into 72 languages, and the total cost of it all coming in at the relatively cheap total of $7,485,316.

Happy Birthday phpMyAdmin. All the best for the next 15!

The post phpMyAdmin Turns 15 Years Old This Week! appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Bootstrap Version 3

While you still have access to the previous version, the new version 3 will soon be replacing its predecessor. In terms of changes, Bootstrap 3 brings many new tasty dishes to the table: there have been roughly 16,00 commits, 72,000 additions and deletions as well as nearly 300 file changes. If you are looking for the complete list of changes and a migration guide, check this out.

You can get your hands on the release candidate over here. RC1 will, most likely, be followed by an RC2, which shall then pave way for the final version. So keep your eyes and ears open, and watch out for the new ideas that Bootstrap 3 will bring to web development.

Download Bootstrap 3 →

The post Bootstrap Version 3 Has Been Released! appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

First up, just like Chrome, Firefox 22 too supports WebRTC by default, enabling you to make audio and video calls and share files without any third-party plugin. With Opera also planning a move to Blink, Internet Explorer will now probably be the only major web browser sans this feature.

Secondly, Firefox 22 comes with support for asm.js. Wondering what it is? Basically, asm.js is a subset of JavaScript which allows dynamic compilation and improves performance and speed. It is yet to gain a lot of popularity (beyond game demos), but it surely has great potential, and maybe Firefox is trying to offer a relevant alternative to Google Dart, which is supported by Chrome.

Also, with WebRTC and WebGL on board, Firefox 22 also has abilities for 3D gaming in its arsenal now. To quote Mozilla Blog:

“ Mozilla pioneered, including WebGL, Emscripten, asm.js and WebRTC, to show how you can deliver high-end 3D multiplayer games while still maintaining a fast and stunning experience.”

There is also a game demo to show you what the new browser can handle. There are several other new features too, such as:

1. Support for Flexbox CSS3 layout mode
2. New features in Developer Tools
3. Custom playspeed for audio and video playback (HTML5)
4. Display scaling options for high-resolution displays (Windows only as of now)
5. Support for HTML5 <time> and <data> elements
6. Web Notifications API
7. Pointer Lock API goes beyond just fullscreen
8. WebGL enhancements
9. Better memory usage when rendering images
10. Social services manager

There are several other minor features as well, and overall, Firefox 22 surely is looking to be one impressive web browser!

Have you tried the newest Firefox release? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

The post Firefox 22: Less Plugins, More Features! appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Where do I start by describing how annoying Bing is? There’s those awful spine-shudderingly terrible examples of product placement that have ruined TV episodes and films, like this incredibly awkward moment in Hawai Five-0:

And a terrible bit in the Amazing Spider Man where Peter Parker uses Bing as the audience gawps and goes “Why isn’t he using Google?” as if that’s more unrealistic than a man swinging through the city using cobwebs:

Image Source: earwolf.com

Google is so ingrained into our collective conscience that to see anyone use anything else seems completely unnatural, which is why it stands out a mile. It’s even in our vocabulary. “I’ll just Google it” someone might say, no matter what search engine they’re actually using. A non-technical friend of mine even called a website’s own internal search a “Google”. It’s a word that has now replaced search.

Google is the most popular search engine, and it’s still a long way ahead of Bing. But Bing is trying very hard, not only with those terrible example of product placement, but by making it the default search engine in Internet Explorer, and by making Internet Explorer the default (or only) browser on all Microsoft’s new devices.

As predicted, Microsoft’s Surface tablet would do okay, helped by some pretty good advertising that actually make it look surprisingly cool:

Also, of course there’s the new range of Windows phones, which again are helped by cool adverts where celebrities tell you how cool their new Windows phone is. This presumably really appeals to people who want to be “alternative” now everyone and their dog has an iPhone. A friend of mine who used to be the world’s biggest Apple fanboy is actually now ditching his iPhone in favour of the new Nokia Windows phone. Times are changing.

So Windows phones sales are increasing which have Internet Explorer as their default browser, and Bing as a button right there on the phone itself. So it’s no wonder we’re seeing more people use Bing, and Google’s market share dipping.

Google is still 90% market share

Okay Google is still pretty far ahead. It has roughly 90% of the search market, which is waaay far ahead of Bing. But if the current trends continue and Google continues to tumble, Bing (currently roughly 5%) will be the most popular search engine by 2016.

Ask a web developer which browser he hates the most and he’ll say Internet Explorer (probably followed by a 6, 7 or 8 if he wants to get specific). But unfortunately it comes as standard on all the devices we mentioned earlier, and it’s not even possible to change the browser on Windows mobile to the usual web developer’s favourite, Chrome or Firefox. Plus how many users will be bothered to change this? Only technical people like us will even mess around with default applications on a mobile device. Which leaves more people in the world using Internet Explorer, and therefore Bing. Great.

The post The Inevitable But Annoying Rise of Bing appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

Right from its inception, the SASS-powered Foundation Framework has taken the web by storm, and now, with the release of Foundation 4, ZURB intends to take its popularity to a new level.

They have not just added new features and tweaked the code, the codebase for the responsive front-end framework has been completely rewritten. According to ZURB, the objective behind the rewrite has been to project a “mobile-first” approach. From their blog:

“We’ve retooled Foundation from the ground up to be Mobile First. This is no hack job; we didn’t just flip some media queries and call it a day. We went through the framework and rethought how grids should work, how components should work in a mobile-first paradigm, so we could be sure the solution we deliver in Foundation 4 is smart and sturdy.”

Time and again, the Foundation Framework has proven to be a fantastic starting point for designers and developers who want to create content for the mobile web. Will the changes in Foundation 4 be well received? Well, only time can tell!

What do you think of Foundation 4 by ZURB?

The post Foundation 4 has just been released – Now taking a ‘Mobile First’ approach appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

In fact, many users are often unaware of the advantages of having an up-to-date web browser. Maybe they do not care, or simply do not know the benefits — in either case, an outdated web browser not only hinders the end users’ internet browsing experience but can also becomes a nightmare for most web developers (recall: IE 6).

What, then, is the solution for this problem? The folks at Team Geek have come up with one such idea: Browser Awareness Day – a social campaign to alert users that they need to upgrade their browsers.

Basically, the idea is to urge users to upgrade their web browsers, thereby helping them browse better and also lessening the developers’ burden.

Sounds interesting? You can generate snippets that you include in the <body> of your site that will inform your visitors if their browser is out of date. Furthermore, you can download banners and even upload your brand’s logo and details to show support for the Browser Awareness Day.

"Together, we can make the Internet better."

The post Browser Awareness Day: Encouraging Users to Upgrade Their Browsers appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

The community formed around jQuery flourished. However, with this influx of generous and talented open-source work comes many sources for those seeking plugins; resulting in a classic case of choice overload, or over-choice.

New plugins are available on their own pages and present a framework for a source code repository, previous versions, documentation, and bug tracking before being included in the registry. Additionally, developers will have to create a plugin.jquery.json manifest file for the plugin resource locations.

Given the open-source nature of sharing, the MIT-licensed source code for the repository itself is available, as part of the jQuery Foundation’s open-source goals.

The advantage of the site is not just centralization, but in its Git support, which allows developers to publish their code to not only the plugin registry but also GitHub, simultaneously.

However, there are still some bumps in the road. Issues have already spread to GitHub, highlighting has already pointed out that the site lacks a filter, ranking function, download counts, and connections to social media.

Check out the new registy here: jQuery Plugin Registry.

The post The jQuery Foundation Relaunches the jQuery Plugin Registry appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.