Soak blog

Adobe CS5 Launch

14.04.2010 By: alanofford Under: Creative, Industry News Comments: none

alanofford

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 leaksĀ  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”.

Read More

New tool: regular expressions generator

08.04.2010 By: ronansprake Under: Technical, Tools Comments: none

ronansprake

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:

http://www.txt2re.com/

Read More

IE8: background image jump on click of input type=”submit”

07.04.2010 By: ronansprake Under: Technical Comments: none

ronansprake

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.

Read More

Resources for optimising page load speed

01.04.2010 By: ronansprake Under: Technical, Tools Comments: none

ronansprake

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.

Read More

How hungry is your console?

31.03.2010 By: ronansprake Under: Just for fun Comments: none

ronansprake

A recent article on confused.com is a really interesting overview of how much power the big three consoles consume while you’re commanding orc minions.

Read More

IE9: Microsoft continues to improve Internet Explorer

30.03.2010 By: ronansprake Under: Technical Comments: 1

ronansprake

New browser versions are hotly anticipated in the client-side region of the Soak studio.

Read More

Firefox 2, IE6 and Inline Block

12.03.2010 By: adamcollison Under: Uncategorized Comments: 1

adamcollison

I recently stumbled across yet another random bug in FireFox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 6 where the CSS declaration “display: inline-block” is not supported. There are a few ways to fix this. This is how we fix the issue, in our opinion this is the most stable and correct way of getting the browsers to render elements correctly.

Read More

Resizing Youtube Embed Video using PHP preg_replace

11.03.2010 By: leenewell Under: Uncategorized Comments: 2

leenewell

Below is a PHP function that takes in youtube embed code, a desired width and height. It returns the embed code with width and height resized to the desired dimensions.

Read More

Desktop Lunch

08.02.2010 By: alanofford Under: Just for fun Comments: none

alanofford

Eating lunch at your desk; we’re all guilty of it. It saves time, it’s convenient for checking up on your social life, or the footy news, or the latest Failblog. It’s also apparently bad for your health, with issues ranging from fears of infected keyboards to the horrors of weight-gain and rising stress levels yet we seem unable to break our addiction to desktop lunches.

Read More

The three parts of a well written title tag

05.02.2010 By: leenewell Under: Search Marketing Comments: none

leenewell

Making the most of the 68 characters that Google displays in its search results (other search engines display about the same) can be a difficult task.These are the three things I believe a good tile tag should achieve:

Read More