This years tablet boom has started to revolutionize the way we read digital content with devices such as the iPad making digital magazines popular. Adobe announced this week that it is working on new creative software for publishers of such content.

After the success of WIRED Magazine’s digital edition using InDesign CS5 with “additional publishing technologies” Adobe pushed to get the software a mainstream release. To make it easy for publishers the software is a supplement to InDesign CS5 so that no extra training is required for designers.

The new software will become part of the Creative Suite collection and will be downloadable from Adobe Labs later this summer. The goal of this software is to simplify the process of creating tablet magazine layouts and incorporate more mobile hardware-specific needs including pinch/swipe gestural navigation for panning and zooming as well as 360-degree image rotation.

Other features include the ability to export in the new .issue format, a compressed file format that contains vertical and horizontal magazine layouts, metadata, code to enable interactivity, and associated assets (images, video, etc.).

Adobe is expected to continue their software developments with tools for magazine workflow including adding advanced interactivity and bundling content.

Haven’t heard of FlipBoard yet? Well, if you own an iPad this could be the most addictive new app around. It’s a free app with one basic function: to turn your Facebook and Twitter networks into social “magazines”. This means your friend’s favorite links, photos and videos fill its pages. The attractive layout makes each link posted into a “page”, stripping the original webpage of content and reformatting it into a magazine format. (Wired.com asked the question today if this process is legal.)

It’s the slick look of this app that has made FlipBoard so popular and currently overloaded. The first 24 hours of availability brought some users back to iTunes to complain about slowness, failure to load some pages correctly and crashing. Many users trying to use the app received this message: “Flipboard is currently over capacity. Please try adding your Twitter account later.”

Despite these issues FlipBoard still accomplishes what Mike McCue, FlipBoard’s CEO, set out to do “…make social media less noisy, more visually compelling and ultimately more mainstream.” And overall most users agree. Those users that could fill in their account info before overload were pleased with the feed of information and the sleek look.

What makes FlipBoard so great? Let’s start with the company itself that has investors such as Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebook’s Dustin Moskovitz and Ashton Kutcher (you might have heard of him). On the back-end expect the semantic data-analysis technology from the startup Ellerdale to soon be integrated into the app. This means the ability to better determine the relevance of the information and updates from your various social networking connections.

The new Photoshop CS5 is soon to be released and after having seen the preview on Youtube I gotta say that it’s looking pretty cool. Shadows and objects are easily removed (no need to do this manually anymore) but the most impressive feature is that you can extend your images. Sounds complicated or just plain out incomprehensive? Just take a look at the video and you’ll understand what I’m talking about. VERY impressive and don’t forget to look at the entire video. The object removal/grass thingy in the beginning is cool and all but it’s when he’s extending the images that it gets really interesting.

What is this great WordPress plugin you ask? It shows statistics of what your hosting server is doing. You can find out if your host is really as great as it should be. This WordPress plugin is light and versatile and can be fitted to a sidebar on the homepage only or just on one page you choose. The Server Info Plugin, or as I call it Great Geek Plugin, is also user friendly because it fits in nicely with well built themes and is not bulky. Features can be adjusted in your WordPress control panel, under Settings.

Oh, we should mention that after you upload the plugin, you will have to activate BOTH plugin types on the control panel of WordPress. It is weird, but do that and everything will work fine.

Here is some of the information you can find out about your server:
System Vital Information:
Kernel Version
Distribution name
Uptime

Hardware Information:
Processors
CPU speed
BUS speed

Memory usage:
Physical Memory
Free
Used
Total

You can pick and choose what fields you want to show to visitors and where you want to place it on your blog or website. Check out the Server Info Plugin out and if you have comments or questions, post a comment here.

More info on System Information Plugin and you can download it there.

WordPress Page info and also where you can download the plugin: here

It is happy times for web designers at the moment; the technique is easy and things are constantly evolving making it very interesting. With the help of CSS you will get quick results as well as being able to create beautiful websites that have every possibility of getting positive remarks by its visitors. The basic idea with CSS is very simple; separate the appearance from the content. This way you will get a very flexible website that is easy to adapt to new platforms.

When you are designing websites is it important that you constantly check that they look good on various platforms. Setting up an easy and good environment when creating your design, is truly of the essence. The basics can be:

• Local web server – Mamp (Apache, MySql and PHP5) is easy and good for Mac if you never have staged a server before. The name for Windows is Wampserver. IIS is a good alternative if you wish to run a Dotnet environment. Most web servers today are very easy to stage – Mamp is for example installed and up and running in just a few clicks.
• Both Mac and PC environment –It is extremely important to check your design in both a Mac and PC web-browser. If you do not have two separate computers you can, via Parallels Desktop, install Windows XP or Vista on your Mac.
• A set of web-browsers; Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Chrome and Opera – all of these will get you far. A tip is to check out Browsershots.org that renders your design in a diverse set of browsers and platforms. If you want to run Google Chrome on your Mac you will have to wait or install Crossover Chromium, which is a translated version of Chrome for Mac OSX. Remember though that it is only in a test version and you should not entirely rely on its stability.

I recently found myself having a, according to me, great idea for a website but not nearly enough fundings to hire a local web agency. Of course I requested proposals from a dozen of them and to little suprise got back figures that could buy entire countries. So I started looking for an alternative and cheaper web design and web development. After Googling till my fingers were bleeding, I found it. The cure to the thousands of lost souls who register hosting account only to realize they can’t afford to make their website dream come true.

The source for Cheap Web Design & Programming

A place where thousands of freelancing web designer and developers offer their services. An internaional dashboard for any skills that is connected to the web. Web design, programming, writing, distributing. You name it! The web service I am talking about is called Elance.com. Like myself, you will be able to create projects and invite providers that offer what you need. Within hours you will have proposals in your inbox, not exceeding more than couple of hundreds of dollars. I am currently using Elance to hire a team of Wordpress designers and developers in India, with excellent customer-ratings, that has agreed to mark-up my web design and implement it to the Wordpress CMS, for a mere $280 dollars. Any local agency would probably charge you $2000-$3000 for it.

The reason why these freelancers charge so little is the same reason multi-corporations outsource their factories. The cheapest online freelancing web designers and programmer can be found in India, the Ukraine and Rumania. And perhaps there is a moral dilemma here whether or not to use their services? But that is for another blog post. For know, visit Elance.com and you’ll find cheap web design and site development, finally being able to realize your website ambitions.

Chris Spooner- He is a web designer and the blogger behind blog.spoongraphics.co.uk. He writes everything and anything related to web designing. And just recently he started his own website, Chris Spooner.  Love the clouds dude.

Chris Coyier- He is the blogger behind CSS-Tricks, which is, as you guessed, about CSS. Frustrated with something in your CSS code or want to add something nifty? Check out his site then.

Barrie North- There is a lot we can say about Barrie. He is part of Joomlashack, Compass Design, and most recently, SimplWeb. If you have any questions relating to Joomla, you will have to check out his sites.

David Walsh – Programmer and all in one man, he knows PHP, MySQL, Mootools, Java. Want to learn to program? Stop by his blog and start geeking out.

Well put Eva. If you are a freelancer or own a small company, definitely get in touch with us. You can drop a comment below. =)

And number two on the list: interviews. We started interviewing some very famous CSS blog owners, Chris Coyier, David Walsh, and a few others. An internationally famous illustrator has also agreed and two PHP developers. We are very excited to hear what they say.

With that, happy Friday and a great weekend.

If you know someone we should interview, post here. And maybe add why you think they are cool to be interviewed.

On that note, happy Friday to all. Be safe and find your designated driver when partying. =)

-P