IconBuilder 8.5 for Adobe CS3/Intel

iconfactory.com: Announcing the immediate release of IconBuilder 8.5 for Mac OS X. This latest update to our professional Photoshop & Fireworks filter for creating icons on the Macintosh, now fully supports Adobe's new CS3 set of tools.



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A List Apart: The Web Design Survey, 2007

The Web Design Survey, 2007: "Designers, developers, project managers. Writers and editors. Information architects and usability specialists. People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?"

Give it a go to improve the findings, and you may even win something...

Panic Releases Coda "One-Window Web Development for Mac OS X"

Panic.com: "So, we code web sites by hand. And one day, it hit us: our web workflow was wonky. We’d have our text editor open, with Transmit open to save files to the server. We’d be previewing in Safari, running queries in Terminal, using a CSS editor, and reading references on the web. “This could be easier,” we realized. “And much cooler.”

When Panic releases an app, it's usually just perfect for the subset of users that they choose to target. So Coda has definitely caught my attention. I've only played with the trial a few moments and can say that it looks pretty interesting, especially if you don't already have Panic Transmit and/or CSSEdit. With CSS editing properties still squished in a small floater within Dreamweaver, this could be an actual threat for those more into hand-coding. As always it's beautifully Mac-like and the visual bookmarks are a sweet touch.

Here's a more in-depth review by MacApper.

Microsoft Reveals Silverlight as Adobe Flash Challenger

DailyTech: "In hopes to make a dent in the market dominance of Adobe's Flash, Microsoft unveiled at the 2007 National Association of Broadcasters conference a new cross-browser, cross-platform browser plug-in called Silverlight... Previously called Windows Presentation Foundation Everywhere (WPF/E), Silverlight works with on both Macintosh and Windows with a variety of browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari."

Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos kicks off Web 2.0 Expo

ZDNet Video: "Company's S3 surpasses 5 billion objects stored... At the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos talks to conference attendees about the company's on-demand storage service. Bezos announced that today the S3 service stores more than 5 billion objects, compared with 800,000 objects stored in July 2006."

Create an irresistible free trial for your app

thinkvitamin.com: "Free trials are a super effective way of increasing sign-ups to your service, but to reap the rewards later it’s worth following these four tips for your campaign... So what is this success formula I’m talking about? We’ve narrowed it down to four simple rules for how a free trial of an online service should work. Let’s go through them one by one."

1. Signing up for a trial account should be easy and painless
2. Do not require trial users to enter their credit card information
3. Do not cripple the trial
4. Include a "highlight bonus"

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