Home
Soak is one year old, and what a year it’s been! We’ve grown from a core team of six to eleven full-time employees, plus a network of freelancers that we work with. Our client base has also grown dramatically and it was decided that it was time to refresh the Soak brand and website, in order to reflect how far we’ve come in such a short time.
Archive for April, 2010
Adobe CS5 Launch
14.04.2010 By: alanofford Under: Creative, Industry News Comments: none
As the dust settles after Monday’s much anticipated online launch of Adobe’s latest version of it’s creative suite, CS5, it’s left us here wondering just what all the fuss has been about. The live webcast itself was a pretty bizarre event, which thanks in part to leaks like this YouTube video, created quite a buzz on Twitter. The actual presentation however was more teasing than illuminating, with 5 minutes segments being given by a series of increasingly off the wall Adobe ‘evangelists’, who were nearly in a frenzy over CS5′s “wicked-cool capabilities”.
New tool: regular expressions generator
08.04.2010 By: ronansprake Under: Technical, Tools Comments: none
Regular expressions are brilliantly powerful but tend to cause a dull pain between the ears. We can’t offer you a free head massage, so here’s the next best thing: a really handy tool for generating regular expressions, in a load of different languages. Check it out:
IE8: background image jump on click of input type=”submit”
07.04.2010 By: ronansprake Under: Technical Comments: none
I do a lot of styled submit buttons. An awful lot. In fact, I tend to earmark an entire day on any sizeable project for sorting out the button styles. I’m not talking about a bit of padding and border colour, but full-blown background image with rollover (and sometimes hover) styles, for maybe one hundred different submit and anchor elements across a site.
Using background images for anchor elements is bulletproof across all browsers, the same used to be true for submit inputs, before IE8 came along.
Resources for optimising page load speed
01.04.2010 By: ronansprake Under: Technical, Tools Comments: none
As the Yahoo! performance team have been saying for some time, when looking to improve loading times on your website, you should “optimize front-end performance first, that’s where 80% or more of the end-user response time is spent”. Poor hosting and slow back-end content management systems aside, the front-end is where you can make some quick wins and see real improvements in the user experience.
