APNG, animate your PNG like a GIF

Animated gifs are a bit old and often only use as a replacement in big box ads when someone does not have flash. Still it is fun to know that there is an alternative when it comes to transparency. With this little software you can build a nice little animated png.

That said, it seems this is not working on IE, which defeats a bit the purpose.

Anyway it is worth a look.

Firefox 3.5 is live

A big day for Mozilla, I tested the beta version but can’t wait to use this goodness everyday.

Do I need to tell you to upgrade, now?

Update: Live download stats with canvas http://downloadstats.mozilla.com/

Friday video: What’s New in Firefox 3.5?

Mike Beltzner from Mozilla gives a quick preview of what’s new and exciting in Firefox 3.5, and a weird video about the fastest banjo player, because Firefox is fast fast fast, in bonus.

fixoutlook.org : Microsoft to use Word engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010.

Microsoft seems to still do not understand that they should be ahead of standards instead of lagging behind it.The word recently gone out that Outlook 2010 will use Microsoft Word engine for HTML rendering (insert someone having a heart attack here).

This means you can pretty much forgot coding emails without tables or use CSS for another 5 years. This is very bad news for every front-end developers out there, but hey it’s a good news for every secretary out there, anyway this is what Microsoft is trying to tell the world. While I understand why Microsoft wants to keep accessible table HTML design for every non-developer out there, could they have implemented a second mode with the “Email Standards Project”? Yes, they could have, but…

“Copyright ©” the most 2 useless words on the web?

You see these words everywhere, you know what they mean, but do you really care? When you start a new website this line is always on your footer design, proving to anyone the content in this website cannot be copied or terrible consequences will ensue.

The World Wide Web is the most open platform ever done, you can copy text, images, css, html, javascript, with a simple command or right click. We live with a platform that makes it really easy to copy and take whatever you want. This is why resources should be as open as it’s platform, and this is why Position Absolute is my first website to not have those words. It means you can use, copy, clone whatever you want. I prefer…

Beta browsers memory usage.

Quite a bit of information about browsers memory usage can be found here. From what I can gather, Firefox is leading the gang and Chrome has really strange peaks, going to 1 GB of ram usage at times.

Have a look, this is a really interesting article!

Friday video : Opera Unite hands-on

A good hands-on of Opera Unite from TechCrunch, it seems they liked Unite.

Microsoft is on fire this week, a non-biased browsers chart

I would like to start with a quote from Microsoft on web standards browsers comparison:
It’s a tie. Internet Explorer 8 passes more of the World Wide Web Consortium’s CSS 2.1 test cases than any other browser

Now that’s just a start, Microsoft has put online a nice chart comparison proving that Microsoft has a better browser than anyone else. IE8 is a step up, but they are really going a very, very, very long stretch with this.

See it by yourself right there.

jQuery “flash like” menu

I was looking at a flash website last night and saw some nice menu effects. I was pretty sure this was easy to re-create in jQuery, so I started coding, and about 2 or 3 hours later, there it was, a nice little jQuery plugin. I know this will not be useful in most website as it take a huge chunk of space, but it is still pretty cool to know you could use this in a more experimental jQuery website.

When you rollover one item of your menu, the font-size expand to 225%, the color fade to yellow and the other items are giving more space to the hovered item, when you roll out it will take its place back in the menu.

View demo

Get this…

Microsoft launches a new contest that insults your browser

Microsoft Australia launched a new contest with the grand prize of 10,000 dollars. You have to find clues around the web of where the cash is hidden, but of course, to find the cash you need IE8. Not only you need IE (like this wasn’t enough), but depending on the browser your using the ad will insult you. Stuff like boring Safari, tarnished Chrome and old Firefox will appear.

I should point out that they use some states of the art Photoshop effects (lots of bevel).

See by yourself, or check the screenshots below.

Update: Seems like they’ve taken out the contest, some users can’t see the page anymore.