Remember the Max Headroom pilot, in which hyper-fast subliminal advertisements called ‘blip-verts’ caused viewers’ heads to explode? Well, that’s how I feel after absorbing 5000 web 2.0 logos in 333 seconds. Anyone get the feeling the world might have enough web apps already?

There’s an interview with me over at designinterviews.com where I answer questions about my background, the challenges of freelancing, and my client work. The site also features interviews with luminaries like Andy Clarke and Mark Boulton, which are definitely worth reading.

Almost exactly a year ago I was musing about the possibility of dropping support for Internet Explorer 5 when testing websites. Time marches on, and now we are seeing calls to ditch support for IE6 too.

Like many web designers, Photoshop is my tool of preference when it comes to doing website mockups. As such, I spend a decent chunk of my time working with the program, and have picked up a number of techniques that speed up my workflow. I’m not talking about creating shiny image reflections, or beveled starbursts, but rather simple tricks that shave a few minutes off your working day so you can go home earlier.

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.