If you work with Flash at all, by now you will have heard of Papervision 3D, the open source project that has turned the Flash world on its head by introducing a 3rd dimension. I had a quick play with Papervision 3D a few months ago and found it surprising easy to pick up. It is now in public beta so I decided to dust off my old project and rewrite it in Actionscript 3.

I spent an hour yesterday sprucing up the ‘file download’ icon I use on one of my websites, and I’m putting my Photoshop file up here for you to use if you like. I’ve made it very easy to change the color scheme of the icon, or to modify the graphic on its label, so you’ll have no trouble adjusting it to suit your own needs.

Today is the first anniversary of Pixel Acres’ launch. Actually, in my time zone the auspicious event occurred yesterday, but lets not bring the international dateline into this… In any case, my first blogging anniversary seems like an occasion worth marking.

I have made another update to my FormBuilder class. Version 1.4 features a new function, emailResults, which can be used to automatically send the user-submitted form variables to any email address. A number of readers asked for this functionality, which eliminates the need to write your own form processing routine. Have fun!

In a head-to-head battle with the Apple iPhone, Opera recently announced the beta version of their Opera Mini 4 browser. For those not familiar with Opera Mini, it is a very popular free web browser for mobile devices, and works with any modern mobile phone. To help woo consumers Opera are offering a web-based simulator, which replicates exactly the functionality of the mobile browser.

After a quick play with Safari 3 beta on a Mac, I am happy to report that the infamous Safari Flash “flicker” bug has been fixed. If you are a Safari user then I’m sure you have encountered this bug before - it occurs when HTML content containing hover effects appears over Flash, such as when a dropdown menu overlaps a Flash movie embedded further down the page.

I have made a minor update to my FormBuilder PHP class. It now includes support for ‘password’ and ‘hidden’ field types.

Next up I will be adding functionality so that the submitted form variables can be emailed to any address. Stay tuned…

Web designers love to talk about our craft, but one topic we seldom touch on is web hosting. Perhaps that’s because hosting belongs to the realm of networking and hardware, whereas web design is a discipline primarily concerned with software and scripting. Be that as it may, web hosting can have a big impact on the success of a design: a site’s markup, CSS and images might be optimized for lightning fast loading speeds, but it will make little difference if the web server is lagging.

Silverlight is Microsoft’s new browser plugin for Rich Internet Applications, and since the unveiling of the latest alpha version it has been dubbed a “Flash killer” by many commentators. Silverlight is a Flash competitor to be sure, but a Flash killer? I think that may be overstating the case.

Big news from the Apple camp - Safari is now available for Windows! For Windows-based web designers this is exciting news, meaning it is now possible to test websites in Safari without needing a Mac at hand. The final version of Safari 3 will be released later this year, but you can get your hands on the beta version right now.