Fresh Click Media

I’m an avid reader of Smashing Magazine, and welcome their wide variety of blog posts on all aspects of website design and development. I was pleasantly surprised when they announced Color Steam a couple of days ago. The free app is like a version of Adobe Kuler, allowing you to create colour schemes from scratch or from snaps using your iPhone camera. I found it easy to use, and quite fun too. The only downside is that it requires iOS4, so some older iPhone users will be excluded from the experience.

You can download the Color Steam application from the usual place.

I’ve just created a (very) short screencast over at screenr.com showing you how to create a colour swatch from an image in Adobe Kuler and export the swatch to Adobe Illustrator. Check it out:

Apple continues to ignore Flash support for the iPhone, and perhaps because of this, it’s pushing ahead with new features based on HTML and CSS. The iPhone has supported proprietary CSS on its Webkit-based browser, but things are now starting to take off on the desktop, as demonstrated by this YouTube video showing CSS on a Snow Leopard OS nightly build version of Safari:

Apparently, the effects on show have been proposed for standard adoption, and if approved, we’ll be seeing this sort of thing on other browsers. Certainly impressive, and it reminds me of Firefox plugin Cooliris. If you haven’t already seen Cooliris doing its stuff, you should check it out. It’s amazing to think that this sort of effect may soon be widely supported by our browsers.

The little icons associated with a web page or site, favicons, have been around for a while now, and most sites (including this one) have one associated with them.

Now the iPhone is with us, and Apple has introduced a similar concept with its ‘webclip’ icon, a little icon that is shown on your the iPhone’s screen allowing quick and easy access to your site.

In this brief tutorial, I’ll explain how you can create your own webclip icon and have it on your iPhone in minutes.

I had an 80s flashback today as I fired up image editing freebie Paint.NET and accidentally discovered the Mandelbrot Fractal render effect. It took me back to the days of waiting for each row of pixels to be generated on my Atari ST. I began to experiment with a few images.