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.

“Microsoft” and “design” are not two words you normally expect to hear in the same sentence. The image of PCs - and by implication Microsoft - as boring, corporate and unimaginative is well entrenched in the public imagination. It’s a stereotype that Apple has cleverly exploited for the popular “I’m a Mac / I’m a PC” television campaign, which personify a Windows PC as a dowdy paper pusher. It is interesting then to observe Microsoft’s recent efforts to reinvent themselves as a design oriented company, with user experience taking center stage in their new philosophy.

In the client-designer relationship it is usually the client who does the hiring and firing. Occasionally however the roles are reversed, and the designer finds themselves forced to give a client the heave-ho. It may seem to contradict the wisdom that “the customer is always right”, but sometimes the relationship you have with a client does more harm than good, and severing ties can help to restore balance to your business.

Back in October MTV redesigned their flagship site mtv.com using Flash. Last week they redesigned the site again, abandoning the Flash experiment and reverting to an HTML design. On the MTV Labs blog MTV cite user dissatisfaction with the Flash version as being the primary reason for the switch. Alexa traffic stats show that the site had its lowest usership ever during the 8 months the Flash site was running.

For the next week I will be a guest blogger over at Notes on Design, a blog for design students operated by Sessions School of Design. I’ll be writing about 5 posts on the topic of web design, aimed towards a student audience. My first post is an introduction to APIs, so pop on over to Notes on Design and check it out.