If you plan on designing a kick ass AJAX application then you better make sure you’ve got a kick ass load indicator. That way your visitors will know that stuff is happening while you weave your AJAX magic behind the scenes.

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.

Swift is a new PC web browser based on Webkit, the open-source HTML rendering engine under the hood of Apple’s Safari browser. For web developers this opens up the possibility of testing websites in a decent approximation of Safari, without requiring a Mac on hand.

Podcasts, they’re so darn addictive. I’m even willing to forgive the misleading name (I’m sure I’m not the only podcast listener who isn’t an apple fanboy). But quality web and graphic design podcasts are few and far between, so I thought I’d share a few of my favourite shows with you. Because I’m a geek I’m going to throw my favourite technology podcasts into the mix too.

I recently tried Google Sitemaps, and found it to be a great way to see your website through Google’s eyes. The core purpose of Google Sitemaps is for website owners to feed Googlebot an XML sitemap listing URLs for all pages on their site (including those that may be otherwise inaccessible to robots), but there are many other features that web developers will appreciate.

I recently stumbled upon an archive of podcasts from the 2006 South by Southwest web design conference. There are like a gazillion of them, and they’re a lot cheaper than an international airfare and a conference ticket. In fact they’re free. Enjoy.

If you’re a web developer who is using Beta 1 or Beta 2 of Internet Explorer 7 for testing purposes, I recommend taking the time to upgrade to IE7 Beta3.

I was listening to a recent episode of one of my favourite podcasts, Boagworld, when Paul Boag asked a question that made me pause for thought: Now that Microsoft have dropped support for Windows 98, is it time to stop testing websites in IE5?

If you’ve not already done so, it’s time to ditch pixels as a unit for sizing fonts. Sizing fonts for the web using ems and relative dimensions is easy and accurate. No really, it is.

Since adopting a standards based approach to web design, I have wasted numerous development hours struggling with inconsistencies in the way web browsers implement the CSS spec. Sure, you can use CSS hacks to serve different CSS rules to different browsers, based on their own quirky interpretation of CSS, but that is a dangerous path to tread.