There’s a fresh Firefox extension out called Aardvark. This small tool is made for web development and CSS analysis. It can be seen as an addition to Firebug because it gives you some more features like colorizing blocks, removing elements live on a page, isolating elements from a page, viewing the source of a selected element and many more commands. Just take a look at it.

Make sure to check out the latest release of TextPattern: version 4.0.7. The new version of the best blogging CMS comes with some fresh features like a new tag parser (unlimited nested tags), WYSIWYG preview for all articles, a XML-RPC server (for desktop blogging) and an optional expiry timestamp.
TextPattern is a fast and lightweight content management system that is optimized for blogging but of course you can use it for every purpose. I’m using to run this blog. You should definitely give it a try!

Short and nice: the CS4 trials are finally available for download. Go get one to get an impression of the new creative suite!

In order to optimize the usability of your web project you may use the famous “To top”-link – a link at the bottom (or at the end of an article) of your page that scrolls to the very top of the website. To the very top? Usually, the top link jumps to the anchor position but this can’t be placed at the very top of your website. There will always be a header/logo above your top link anchor. But with a small trick, it’s quite easy to make the link jump the topmost position of your website.

I’ve just figured out a small trick that may help you when dealing with many layers and layer groups. As you know, the layer order is an important thing when creating/editing website layouts because you usually have many different layer kinds like text, graphics, dummy content and so on. Normally, I’m duplicating layers by pressing CTRL-J and then I’m moving the duplicated layer to the right position in the layer window by dragging it to the desired position. These two steps can be combined in one step. Here’s the trick:
Select the desired layer in the layer window and hold down CTRL and ALT. Now, drag the layer to the new destination in the layer window (not the layer in your workspace). Release the mousebutton (and the keys) and the layer will be duplicated and positioned in the right position in your layer window.

Another useful trick is the following:
Hold down the CTRL-key when creating a new layer via the “Create new layer”-button in the layer window to create a new layer below the selected layer.

This may speed up your work with layers a bit.

When designing websites in Photoshop, you’re mostly working with pixel accurate boxes and distances. A small “feature” in Photoshop that may get annoying is the subpixel calculation when creating/resizing vector shapes in a zoomed state. For example, if you create a vector shape with the retangle tool at 300% zoom, you may get something like this:

In most of the cases, this calculated subpixel is not wanted because you want a clean, sharp edge. The current workaround is adjusting the anchorpoints with your mouse or your the arrow keys on your keyboard. Both methods aren’t that quick and may get annoying if you have many shapes.
So there’s no real solution for this but a better workaround. It’s very simple if you know about it.
To get a sharp, pixel accurate vector shape, you’ll just have to create/edit it at a 100% view. In this view, Photoshop won’t calculate subpixels so you’ll get a sharp edge on your vector shape. Take a look at the screenshot for a better understanding:

That’s all. With this trick in mind, you may work faster and more accurate. You just need to check your changes in a zoomed view once again.

Don’t forget to watch the special CS4 web broadcast which starts today (September, 23rd) at 11am.
Also check out John Nack's CS4 feature blog post where he names some more details of the upcoming Photoshop CS4. There are some nice features, especially that Layer masks will finally stay linked to Smart Objects.

As you may have noticed the CS4 special web broadcast, which will introduce the upcoming version 4 of the Creative Suite, there has also been released a keynote of Photoshop CS4 (“CS NEXT”) on the Photoshop World 2008 in Orlando. Terry White provides the download (MP4-video) of the keynote on his blog. You should definitely check this keynote out because John Nack and Johnny L from Adobe show up some of the upcoming features of the new Photoshop. It’s just impressive what Photoshop will be able to do. Some feautres:
• realtime 3D-painting abilities
• 64-Bit/GPU-powered image transformations
• Spherical remapping of stitched panorama photos
• the ability to rotate the canvas
• Seam Carving (shrink/enlarge an image disproportionally without stretching it)
• a new zoom tool
• Hydra Filters (you can write your own or download free filters)
• Adobe AIR application that allows you to create your own floating windows with custom buttons/functions

If you watch the video, you’ll be bedazzled of the new Photoshop. It works very fast and looks quite awesome. I can’t hardly wait to upgrade.

It’s nothing new but I found that this may be something useful for you. The software and web designers from Pentacom (Eiji Nishidai / Yuko Washizu) have developed a very easy but impressive pixel font tool called BitFontMaker . The web application can be run in three versions (Canvas, Director and XBM) and reminds of an icon editor: there’s a grid where you can easily paint/erase black squares which complete a character. There’s also the feature of a glyphs map where you can create every needed character for your font. Characters can be copied/pasted so that you have some basis for the other characters. You can view your font with a specified sample text (“Text Drive”) and check how it looks finally. The editor is very easy to use and it has everything you need (because it’s made for simple pixel fonts). Finally, you can save your created font as TTF-file to your local harddrive where you can use it in your graphics software. This is just an awesome feature which works very well! There’s also a great communities which has created tons of stunning pixel fonts which can be viewed and downloaded in the
BitFont Museum. The fonts which are available there are high quality so you should definitely check this site out.

In Firefox (Version 2 and 3), you may have come across a bug (it may be caused by an extension) when you’re writing/editing text in textareas (e.g. in forums, comment fields, CMS-backend-areas and so on): sometimes the copy/paste-operations won’t work (neither with keyboard-shortcuts nor via the context menu). You can select text in a textarea but you can’t copy or paste it (e.g. into the clipboard). Additionally, the arrow-keys and some other keys are also bugged so that they won’t work anymore. This is a very annoying effect because you’ll have to restart Firefox to make it work again!
I’ve figured out that there’s a better (still provisorily) solution for this small problem: When the bug appears, just open Notepad (the standard text editor under Windows 95/98/2000/
XP/Vista) and close it. After doing that, the copy/paste-operations will work again if you switch back to Firefox! If you’re using a nice shortcut-tool like Clavier+, it’s a very quick task opening/closing Notepad.