PDF Prototypes: Mistakenly Disregarded and Underutilized

PDF Prototypes: Mistakenly Disregarded and Underutilized: „Creating a clickable PDF to prototype a new design is not a new concept, but it is a valuable tool that is often overlooked and underutilized. While working over the years with other designers, information architects and usability professionals, I’ve noticed that many of my colleagues believe the same fallacies about the limitations of PDFs. Contrary to popular belief, you can do more than just create links and interactive forms with PDFs; you can also add dynamic elements such as rollovers and drop-down menus, embed audio and video files, validate form data, perform calculations and respond to user actions. PDF prototypes have the ability to replicate most interactive design elements without investing a lot of time and effort.“

(Via Boxes and Arrows.)

Schnellere Websites mit Firebug und YSlow

Mit YSlow ist eine Firefox-Extension erschienen, die den Ladeprozess von Webseiten analysiert und so möglichen Performancebremsen auf den Grund geht.

Bei der von Yahoo veröffentlichten Software handelt es sich um eine Erweiterung der für Webdesigner unumgänglichen Extension Firebug. YSlow liefert Informationen über Ladezeiten einzelner Elemente wie Bilder, CSS- und JavaScript-Dateien sowie die Anzahl der zum Aufbau der Seite nötigen Requests – auf Wunsch auch unter Berücksichtigung des Cache.

Basierend auf den Ergebnissen wird die Seite nach verschiedenen Kriterien bewertet, so dass sofort zu erkennen ist, wo ihre Schwächen liegen. Dieses Prinzip ist bereits von Online-Tools wie dem Web Page Analyzer von WebsiteOptimization.com bekannt und stellt besonders für unerfahrene Nutzer eine große Hilfe dar.

(Via t3n.yeebase.com.)

YAML 3.0 geht an den Start

YAML 3.0 geht an den Start: „Wie es der Versionssprung von 2.5.2 auf 3.0 bereits vermuten lässt, bringt die neue Version zahlreiche Verbesserungen und auch einige Veränderungen mit sich. Der wohl wichtigste Punkt ist die vollständig überarbeitete, zweisprachige Dokumentation (deutsch/englisch) des Frameworks. Daneben bietet YAML 3 eine deutlich übersichtlichere Dateistruktur, verbesserte Robustheit und Barrierefreiheit der CSS-Bausteine, optimierte CSS-Bausteine für den produktiven Einsatz sowie zahlreiche neue Layoutbeispiele.

Eine detaillierte Übersicht aller neuen Funktionen und Änderungen der neuen Version liefert das Changelog.“

(Via YAML News.)

Zend Framework 1.0.0 production release

Zend Framework 1.0.0 production release: „

I am very proud to announce availability of the first production release of Zend Framework. Many thanks to the scores of PHP developers who have worked for many months to make this product milestone possible. Zend Framework has followed a mission to provide classes that are extremely simple, yet powerful and extensible. Zend Framework is now the best class library available for PHP 5 web application development.“

(Via Zend Developer Zone.)

Yet another one more thing… a new Web Inspector!

Yet another one more thing… a new Web Inspector!:

„As some of you saw last week at WWDC, we have a brand new version of the Web Inspector. We know that a lot people have found the current Web Inspector useful, and we have gotten a lot of feedback and sugestions about how to make it even better. And boy have we been listening! We have taken the current Web Inspector and have added a bunch of new features that you will find invaluable for web development:

  • Completely redesigned interface, no longer a transparent panel
  • Works with any WebView inside third-party applications, not just Safari
  • Supports docking to the inspected page
  • Shows all resources included by the page, sorted into categories
  • Global search through all text-based resources
  • Console to show errors and warnings with live JavaScript evaluation
  • Network panel showing resource load timeline along with HTTP request and response headers
  • Resource size and load time summary graph in the Network panel
  • Syntax highlighted HTML source
  • Inline JavaScript and HTML error reporting

We will be telling you in more detail about all of the great new features in future blog posts.

We have been working on this for a long time, but now we want to get the whole WebKit community involved with making this the best web development tool available. So show up in #webkit or on the mailing list and suggest new ideas or implement them yourself (remember everything is HTML, JavaScript and CSS)!

And there is one more thing… all of this new inspector goodness also works on Windows.

The new inspector is available in the Mac and Windows nightly builds.

New Web Inspector

(Via Surfin‘ Safari.)

WordPress 2.2.1

WordPress 2.2.1: „

WordPress 2.2.1 is now available. 2.2.1 is a bug fix release for the 2.2 series. Since 2.2 was released a month ago, the WordPress community has been improving fit-and-finish by identifying and fixing those little bugs that can be so annoying and by fine-tuning some small details. The result is a nicely polished 2.2.1 release. The full list of bugs fixed in 2.2.1 is available here. Here are some highlights.

Unfortunately, 2.2.1 is not just a bug fix release. Some security issues came to light during 2.2.1 development, making 2.2.1 a required upgrade. 2.2.1 addresses the following vulnerabilities:

Special thanks to Alexander Concha for his continued assistance in making WordPress more secure. Special thanks also to Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software for his improvements to our XML-RPC implementation.

(Via WordPress Development Blog.)