On the past few weeks I’ve been working on a new venture centered around the iPhone. The process of building our app has been quite an adventure and we’ve experimented with several technologies that were new to us before reaching our current technology stack.
As we’ve finally got our stuff together and made an initial release to a group of testers I thought I’d share some of the technology choices we’ve made and the reasons behind them.

First some information about the team

…because technology choices are affected by the team’s technical skillset.

• We’re 3 developers (Yosi, Udi and myself) and one designer (the awesome Naor Suki).
• We’ve allocated two developers for the iPhone and one for the backend APIs & website.
• We’re all veteran developers with experience mostly on Microsoft’s Development stack. This project meant going out of our comfort zone to a whole new set of technologies. Experience does make a difference easing the learning curve…

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Google is widely known as the Internet’s best search engine. Everybody with access to the internet uses Google at some point to find something (or many things) on the web for a particular web page, or a certain piece of information.

However, Google has several built in functions that will help you make your searches more successful, and to enable you to spend less time searching. I have written a post about some tricks that will help you with your image search and that will ‘give you the power’ to Find Images by Exact Dimensions, File Type or From Specific Website. That should make your search for new wallpapers that perfectly fit to your screen resolution as easy as walk in a park.

But today I’ve decided to expand that post and to tell you about a list of 5 functions that you did not know before (I think), all accessible from the main Google search box (frontpage), which will help you find every piece of information you are looking for.

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Google is the most powerful search engine available, but when it comes to searching for something specific, Google may churn out general results for some. For instance, a search for a song in Google may return the singer, the lyrics and even fan sites – depending on the keywords you entered.

This is when niche-specific search engines comes into the picture. These search engines allows you to search for the things you’re looking for, and because they are more focused, their results tend to be more accurate.

E-books & PDF files, audio & music, videos, etc. are probably the most commonly searched items everyday and with this list, you’ll be able to locate them easily from now on. Enjoy!

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MS Word 2010 has a good number of new features, including the single click graphical enhancements to images, in-built screen capture tool and Paste Preview options. One of the newly added features is the Navigation Pane and advanced search included within this pane. You no longer have to scroll through paragraphs of text to copy and paste sections manually within a document. The Navigation Pane gives an easy way to navigate through your document and a simple to use drag and drop functionality to move sections.

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CSS is a technology that web designers use everyday, but yet it is something that most struggle with as well. Whether it’s keeping stylesheets for large sites manageable, or creating image effects that are cross browser compatible, there are plenty of things to cause frustration. This article is an attempt to provide you with a few resources that might help you with your CSS woes or introduce you to a few tricks you didn’t know about.

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WordPress has become the most popular blogging platform for a while now, and you’re probably using it if you write on a self-hosted blog. One of the key reasons of WordPress success is its templating system. In fact, thousands of free WordPress themes are available on the Internet. However, if you want a truly unique theme, you’ll need to create your own. This article will give you a basic understanding of a WordPress theme’s structure.

The basics

WordPress themes are the standard layout system that define your blog’s appearance. It consists of template files, functions, template tags and images. To install a WordPress theme, you just need to upload it and activate it in your WordPress admin.

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If you’ve got an idea (or concept) but find it hard to present on your artwork because the drawings just don’t add up, try Photoshop Brushes. Brushes are designers best friend, particularly web designers who don’t illustrate graphics much.

Adobe Photoshop does comes with a basic package of brushes but it has not been updated by folks at Adobe for quite some time. Thanks to the great community of designers out there who constantly distributing and sharing their brushes, you can almost find brushes of any patterns these days. Whether you are working on a nature-related artwork looking for floral and wood graphics, or merely adding some torn, burned and cracked effects to your artwork – there’s a free brush pack out there and all you need to do is Google.

In today’s post, we attempt to present you some of the high quality and good ones, those we thought would be generally useful in many occasion and definitely worth checking out and bookmark. Here’s our hand-picked of 50 Free and High Quality Photoshop Brush Sets You Should Bookmark. Full list after jump.

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Web 2.0 Logos? Sometimes its nice to learn from others, build up the basic skills and start your own creativity from there. In this Photoshop tutorial, I’m going to reveal you some of the nice Web 2.0 logos, how you can draw their logo exactly the same (well, not really 100% though) with Photoshop.

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reworks was originally created as an image editing and web design application by Macromedia, for quick web mock-ups, and optimizing images for the Web. It has since been transformed into a powerful environment for designing and prototyping applications that integrates easily with Dreamweaver, Flash and Photoshop &ndash making it, perhaps, the most powerful (that’s controversial) and versatile graphic editor.

Fireworks has always had the reputation of being Adobe Photoshop’s little brother and a graphic editor for amateurs. The truth is, some Photoshop users have underappreciated the power of Fireworks, misunderstood its purpose, and seem to be reluctant to move their design workflow to Fireworks.

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Author: Jeremy Reis

Coding Toolbar

In Code and Split views, the Coding toolbar is displayed by default (if it’s hidden, you can show it by opening the View menu and selecting Toolbars and then Coding—but note that the toolbar isn’t available in Design view). This toolbar contains tools for working with the source code for the active page:

Open Documents – Opens a pop-up menu of documents currently open, allowing you to switch between them.

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Author: Jeremy Reis

Dreamweaver’s interface makes it easy to design and manage both simple and complex web sites by providing a point-and-click interface that simplifies most tasks. Designers can drag and drop page elements in Design view, while developers can work directly with the page’s code, making use of the various tools Dreamweaver provides for ensuring correct syntax.

As in previous versions of Dreamweaver, the Property Inspector lets you specify attributes for the text and objects you insert, but includes an additional view for working with CSS. Commands are available in the Dreamweaver menus, as well as the panel groups, which can be expanded, collapsed, floated and hidden as necessary.

Dreamweaver Workspaces

Dreamweaver CS4 makes it easy to customize the workspace for your particular workflow. It includes eight predefined workspace layouts targeted for application developers, coders and web designers, as well as the ability to create and save new workspaces. You can switch quickly between workspaces using the pop-up menu in the upper right-hand

portion of the screen:

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