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.

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.

You can pick up a standalone version of Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate 1 (RC1) at Tredosoft.

I’ve read a few articles recently where the author gives a run down of their top development or office productivity software - the “must have” tools that make you and your computer happy campers. Never one to miss a bandwagon, I’ve decided to create my own list of the web development and productivity tools that I use on a daily basis.

Recently I was discussing with my studio-mates what sort of contingency plan we have in place to prevent data loss. We all work as professional designers, and almost 100% of our work for clients is stored in digital format. A hard drive failure, fire, or theft of our computers could be catastrophic, setting us back days - possibly even weeks.