This is it folks, we have witnessed another turn in this long war between well-known rivals – Flash and HTML5. Despite that entire buzz about the death of Flash, its main advocate – the world’s leading software vendor Adobe – is alive and kicking! Some days ago Adobe has released their interesting experimental software called Wallaby (in real life Wallaby is small kangaroo that lives in Australia). The main idea behind this software project is creating a tool for converting Adobe Flash Professional CS5 files (.FLA) to HTML5. Pretty impressive, don’t you think so?
How does it work?
This is an Adobe AIR application that has a simple user interface and can be easily installed to your computer. Wallaby for Macintosh will work on both OS 10.5 and 10.6. As for Wallaby for Windows it will work with Windows 7, Vista and XP (and it requires an installed Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 SP1 Redistributable Package). According to the Adobe officials, Wallaby is aimed at enabling users to avoid the usage of complex JavaScript by replacing it with CSS3 animation and SVG graphics. It is important to understand that Wallaby’s aim is to convert animated graphical content into a more web friendly form – this tool gives you files that are ready to be edited by such tools as Adobe Dreamweaver and so on. The typical output from Wallaby has three files containing HTML, CSS and JavaScript and SVG asset.
Drawbacks
To tell you the truth, this software doesn’t impress much as a software with its functionality and multiplatform features. But as a project or a concept, it does make us believe that soon Wallaby will be improved and will amaze us with excellent performance. For now it has many serious flaws, such as:
- Wallaby supports only Web-kit browsers (Safari and Chrome) and does not support FireFox and IE9 for now;
- Doesn’t support any ActionScript
- Doesn’t support 3D transforms
- Doesn’t support video embedding
- Doesn’t support gradients
Also there are some raw solutions for text implementation, very limited for now though we hope that soon these drawbacks will be improved or even eliminated. It is hard to assess the Wallaby’s functionality, but here’s a little example for you – if you convert a 20 Kb Flash banner with Wallaby, you’ll receive an output of 240 Kb. Obviously that’s not a very good result.
There is a long road ahead
The use of Flash to create web interfaces has enabled designers to develop many new ways for browsing the information. Today we’ve decided to shift the focus on long scrolling Flash web designs that currently trend towards a new interesting deployment. Long Flash websites do not lay out all Flash content in a fullscreen web page filling the screen without scaling it, but allow the scrolling of the content when the browser window is smaller than the minimum area required to display it. In other words these web designs have a scrolling component, arrayed horizontally or vertically, and customize it to suit their interfaces. As you navigate through the following web designs you’ll get more familiar with this newer type of navigation solution. So enough of introduction – go get around these captivating designs and see how brilliantly they utilize the scrolling making it not just a functional tool for navigation but also a nice-looking design solution.
Adhemas.com
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Djeco.com
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Perhaps today you expected that TemplateMonster will launch some promo, or will unveil some new templates that you’re used to. With all due respect to all that, today we’d like you to stop for a minute and think about things that are more than just templates, more than a business and more than the money. You all have heard about the devastating 8,9-mangitude earthquake and a tsunami in Japan, and we’re pretty sure you know things out there in Japan are still pretty messed up even today, several days after the disaster.
At some point we at TemplateMonster began to realize that the community around us is big enough to actually make a difference. And even though the reason that made us think about it is very sad, we are still very much proud to be a part of a community making the world a better and a kinder place for living.
Today we are announcing the start of our donations campaign aimed at helping the victims of the disaster in Japan and the families that lost their homes. There are two parts of this campaign.
- TemplateMonster will donate $1 from every sale we make during a period starting today and until March 22nd 2011.
- In addition to that, every TemplateMonster customer will be able to donate another $5 while buying any of our products. On a shopping cart page there is an “Add to order” button that you have to click in order to donate $5. And after that we will charge the template price plus the $5 donation.
On March 22nd we will transfer the amount we’ll have collected by that time to the Japan Earthquake And Tsunami Relief Fund on GlobalGiving.com (GlobalGiving.com is a famous worldwide donations and fundraising medium – that in turn will transfer the funds to the proper organizations in Japan. Of course, we will publish a detailed report about how GlobalGiving.com does all that on our blog, and on our social network pages.
If you feel donating via TemplateMonster is not the most convenient way for you, or if you do want to donate but don’t want to make a template purchase for that, we strongly encourage you to make your donation through alternate ways – for example directly through GlobalGiving.com where you can choose the amount you want to donate. Plus, there are dozens of other projects accepting donations for Japan – whichever way is more convenient for you, luckily making a difference is a matter of several minutes these days.
To make it all as transparent as it can be, we’re adding a counter of the donations you’ve made in the header of all TemplateMonster pages. The amount collected is being displayed there, in real time. On that counter we display the combined amount consisting of the $1 donations from each template purchase and the $5 donations that our customers make.
Now that the latest version of Joomla 1.6 has been released, we’re super excited to offer our customers a wide variety of solutions for your Joomla driven websites. The Joomla 1.6 compatible templates presented here and designed by TemplateMonster’s expert team have premium quality in functionality and look, plus they’re simple to customize, having a large online community with hundreds of active members. You may use our Joomla 1.6 templates as a powerful tool to promote your business and have a clean, professional, corporate web presence with ease.
With a template management having gone to a whole new level in Joomla 1.6, web developers can now as well enjoy new abilities Joomla 1.6 provides in allowing extensions to be easily built and updated, offering a new access control system, bringing unlimited depth organization models, and many more new Joomla 1.6 features which you can find in our previously featured blog entry. So if you want to build your site with Joomla 1.6 and your website needs an extra bit of graphical touch, go grab one of our newly crafted Joomla 1.6 Templates which are available for purchase, plus you may check for regular updates for new templates released daily. Also you might be interested in checking in a tutorial from Templates.com Blog – How to Install Joomla 1.6.
We have also released a line of Joomla 1.7 Templates. On our blog you can find a post containing top 20 Joomla 1.7 Templates as well as some useful resources on how install them and configure. Have a look!
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Bravo
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LagunaDesign
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WebWorks Web Agancy
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Today we’d like to announce that on TemplateMonster’s official website we’ve added a new section with Facebook Layouts product family that offers versatile solutions for a broad application of Facebook custom brand pages.
For now, the section embraces three subcategory products including our professional Facebook Flash Templates which can be edited via XML files to be subsequently displayed as fascinating Facebook custom fan pages with captivating dynamics. And apart from Facebook Flash pre-made designs, in this section you can also find our premium quality Facebook Flash CMS templates. These Facebook layouts are powered by the most feature-rich Flash content management system currently available – Moto CMS. This solution gives you a complete control to centrally manage rich content across Facebook platform and easily integrate some catching interactive displays to promote your business. TemplateMonster is also producing the newest standard Facebook HTML Templates that will help customers effortlessly redesign their existing Facebook fan page layouts having only basic coding knowledge.
And soon we will be providing you with a variety of other great Facebook layout products. Though, you can already start marveling at how you can utilize the available stunning technologies to increase your brand and product awareness in world’s biggest ever-growing Facebook social environment. Whatever your product or service is, make sure there’s a huge potential market there!
By the way, today our collection of Facebook layouts will grow even bigger with two nicely done new templates, one Facebook Flash CMS template:
and one new Facebook Flash eCommerce template:
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P.S. Pretty soon we’ll launch static Facebook templates, we know you can’t wait for them to appear, please have a little more patience. Until that time, feel free to play with a free static Facebook template we’ve launched last week.
Exquisite and unusual design can be presented by performing and mixing various styles and techniques. Hand drawn style is very popular these days and it is a perfect example of what a really exquisite design should look like. As a matter of fact we have been featuring this design approach a couple of times in our web design trends researches.
Anyways, since this whole hand-drawn approach thing is so popular, we thought that it would interesting for you to check out some elements you may use in a design of this type. We’re talking about free and really beautiful icon sets that are performed in a hand drawn style. We believe that these freebies will help you to create really elegant and stylish projects that would amaze the audience with original details and creative approach. Before you start downloading these wonderful icon sets please, read carefully their respective terms of use to make sure your website is actually allowed to use them. Rules are rules, y’know.
1. Natsu Icon Set
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2. Social Sketches
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Flash has always been the standard for displaying video online, yet with the arrival of HTML5 web developers have got more excellent possibilities to easily streamline video content. HTML5 new specifications for a video is for sure one of the most talked aspects in the range of many new notable HTML5 features developed for more dynamic web applications and interfaces. Though support for HTML5 is still evolving, a video element has clear benefits for the users who can now get browser-native video players without any third-party plugins at all.
In the current blog entry we’ve covered some of the best HTML5 media player implementations to help you get the most out of HTML5 video tag and embed video content into your web pages. This round-up is done specifically for you to decide which HTML5 video player is better for your website design project, so check out a few of the solutions that we particularly like. We invite you to rate the content, quality, and genre of these great video players and opt for the choices according to your needs.
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JW Player
What about skinable open source JW Player, this solution is all about Flash and HTML5 working together as part of a single video player. The player automatically falls back to the Flash or HTML5 mode when needed. This solution supports the major CDNs, YouTube, Adobe’s Flash Media Server, HTTP streaming, major advertising networks, analytics providers, and more. JW Player as well has a range of add-ons to extend the players functionality. By choosing the JW Embedder, it will also provide hosting solutions and mobile support for iPhone, iPad, and Android devices.
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SublimeVideo
Sublime Video is an HTML5 video player that allows you to easily embed video on web page using HTML5 with Flash Fallback. What you’ll need is just to add a single-line-of-code to run this video player. Note that this solution supports a limited number of browsers since it’s still in experimental state. Sublime Video solution is not based on any JS library and aims to provide a high quality user experience thanks to its consistent implementation of both HTML5 and Flash user interfaces. Besides, SublimeVideo supports iPhones, iPads, Android smartphones, as well as other mobile platforms. Note that it’s a player only, so you’ll have to have your own video hosting.
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Today we will talk about WordPress security which is very important topic for all whose blog has ever been hacked. Below you’ll find list of useful plugins that will help you to protect your blog from external intervention that may bring you some moral and financial damage. Of course these plugins can’t guarantee you 100% protection and maybe you’ll be lucky not to face with these problems but you know that there is nothing like being on the safe side. Please be attentive and carefully read information about each plugin to be sure that it will be compatible with your WordPress version. Now I want to wish you good luck and don’t forget about protection.
1. Secure WordPress
This multi-functional plugin offers a set of useful features including such features as removing plugin-updates and theme-updates for non-admins, hiding WordPress version in the dashboard for non-admins, removing error information (when you’ve entered wrong password at the login page) and many more.
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2. WP Security Scan
Wonderful monitoring tool that scans your WordPress installation and suggests your some possible ways to improve the security. This plugin would help you to make your passwords being more secure, to hide WordPress version at the front-end, to manage file permissions and so on.
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Hey there folks! We decided to devote our today’s post to something really useful and time-saving. So, please welcome our list of 10 online tools for CSS editing or creating ready elements that require styles. Now you can perform some styling actions with your CSS sheet using powerful and simple online helpers. Our list contains interesting services that allow you to edit, compress, format css files, create beautiful CSS buttons, generate gradients, and import and process CSS files.
Among these you’ll find some dedicated tools so please pay your attention to extremely popular CSS3 Generator – this excellent service would help you to generate codes for all of the CSS3 properties and easily paste them into your CSS sheet. We hope that this range of various tools will help you find a number of services for instant usage. Of course feel free to share your experience and let us know about your experience of working with CSS tools that are either present in this post or that we might have missed.
1. CleanCSS
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2. StyleNeat
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Hey guys! As you know it, we have already launched a number of facebook page templates for various projects and today we present you one more template, it’s going to be free, but it’s a little bit different. Our previous Facebook templates were all either Flash XML or Flash CMS, but we received plenty of requests from our customers for static Facebook templates. We have tried our best and today we present this Free Static Facebook Template – the powerful solution for your Facebook music brand page.
This freebie was created as special and useful item with your needs in mind. Its amazing design is ideal for creating the page for your music band and we hope that it will inspire you for something great and memorable.The presented here item features a music player and a JS slider. Feel free to download it, the download package of this template contains .HTML and .PSD files. Rock your fans with the new design of your facebook page!
Free Facebook Static Template:
To get the full package with all source files included visit the TemplateMonster Free Facebook Static Template download page and type an email address that you want the free template package to be delivered to (make sure to uncheck the newsletter subscription checkbox in case you’re already subscribed). Feel free to use this template for your business, but you are not allowed to resell it.
Please find all of the instruction on how to install this free template within the download package, in the readme.txt file. The process is very simple and takes only a couple of minutes. What’s also important is that these instructions are about installing the template using iFrames, not static FBML – that is according to the new Facebook standard.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: TemplateMonster does not provide support services on free templates – including this one. We only provide support for the products that are being purchased from TemplateMonster. Our free templates are produced according to the latest web standards and we’ve been trying to make the process of working with them as easy as possible, so for people with minimum web development experience it should be easy to work with them. However, if you don’t have any experience, we recommend you to refer to the tutorials or community forums on how to work with platforms that each respective template is made with, or to hire someone to do the job for you.
Download Free Facebook Static Template with PSD files (40,3MB)
Download Free Facebook Static Template without PSD (16,8MB)
One more important thing. Your feedback is very important to us. And since this is our new product, there could very well be something you would suggest to change. Your opinion matters!
We’ve also added to our website a new Facebook Layouts section where you can find Facebook Flash Templates, Facebook Flash CMS Templates, and Facebook HTML Templates – all designed and coded by TemplateMonster professionals. Check out and choose the theme you like most!
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