“Adobe Systems France announced at Adobe Live that the development of GoLive and FreeHand will be phased out. Adobe representative Robert Raiola stated that Dreamweaver will get a new interface and replace GoLive as the Web development application in the Creative Suite 3 package, due out in spring 2007.” (UPDATE from MacNN: “German Mac site Macnews.de says that Freehand will remain a standalone product and that the company has scheduled a maintenance release of the product for later this year.”)

“Reviews of photography books and photo book news… Find reviews of photography books, new releases, rare out of print photo books, and monographs by photographers both obscure and famous.” (Thanks MetaFilter Projects!)

“I believe that before web applications can truly make the desktop obsolete, we need to solve two important problems. Both might seem a bit surprising at first. Even though Javascript is a mess, neither of these points concerns building better AJAX UIs or frameworks to write them… One of my pet problems is engineering, not science; the second is science, not engineering: 1. Offline Access; 2. Encrypted, searchable storage.”

“Microsoft’s new Windows Media Photo image format specification is finally seeing the light of day. The software company began lobbying for WMPhoto to replace the JPEG image format this week at WindowsHEC in Seattle. Microsoft has taken the image compression spec out of development and has labeled it as a final release. There is also word that MS is keeping the standard totally free, but licensing details are still being worked out.”

“The Spry framework for Ajax is a JavaScript library for web designers that provides functionality that allows designers to build pages that provide a richer experience for their users. It is designed to bring Ajax to the web design community who can benefit from Ajax, but are not well served by other frameworks.”

“We’ll be heading back to Washington D.C. with more sessions and more speakers than ever, including special guest presenters Steven Johnson, Michael Bierut, Jeff Veen, Jared Spool, Nate Bolt, Dan Brown along with members of Adaptive Path. We’re developing all new curriculum for this year’s User Experience Week. And we’re presenting sessions in two tracks that will offer practitioner skills development as well as product management strategy and business value methods.”

“Swarm shows you what websites people are visiting, right now. Swarm is a graphical map of hundreds of websites, all connecting to each other. It updates itself every second with where people are going and coming from. As sites become more popular, they move towards the center of the swarm and grow larger. Conversely, sites that lose traffic move away from the center and grow smaller.”

“The cat’s out of the bag. I made the announcement here in New Zealand at Webstock, so I’ll confirm that, yes, the rumors are not just rumors. After a bit of negotiation and a lot of internal debate, I recently accepted an offer to join Google as Visual Design Lead, a position that did not previously exist there. I’m charged with helping the company establish a common visual language across all their collaborative and communication products.”

“…our goal is to promote more effective use of small, shoe-mount flashes. Larger strobes have their place, but they tend to spend a lot of time in trunks and stuffed under beds. But the small, everyday strobe is always in the waistpack ready to go…”

“Coders and designers, we’re from different tribes. Name any issue and we’ll neatly divide into sides: form and function, information and experience, oil and water. Of course, no good website happens without both. So it’s worth noting when we find a piece of common ground on our own.”

“Kristi asked yesterday about good graphic novels for book groups. In response, here’s a list of comics that I think nearly any adult would find entertaining and interesting. Note the absence of superheroes.”

“What to watch out for when picking photos for your marketing materials… #7: The United Colors of Megacorp: Does outsourcing to India count as being diverse?”

“8 1/2 x 11 inches. I’ve been avoiding this format all my life. At my first job in New York, we used European-sized stationery. It caused no end of complications, but my (European-born) boss was dedicated to it. ‘Don’t you see?’ he asked. ‘It’s so much more elegant.’ And logical, too: the ISO system is modular, all based on consistent ratios, the square root of two, the Golden Section. Our 8 1/2 x 11 size is based on…well, what, exactly?”

“I chose a completely random goal from the 43Things home page: ‘download episodes of ‘Lost’.’ Then I looked through the list of 539 people who are interested in that goal. Of those 539, just 9 of them (about 2%) had changed the default profile picture to a personalized picture. On the analogous Flickr group, ‘LOST - the series,’ I looked through the list of 128 group members, and found that 120 of them (about 94%) had replaced the default profile picture with a personalized picture.”

“In addition to my webdesigning workflow articles , I was encouraged by pnts to show an example of how I handle the photoshopping steps. Don’t read this article as a tutorial from idea to final product, but start by reading these two articles, and you will find out that the mockuping is only a phase in the designing process… The technique used can differ a lot, especially between fluid and fixed designs. To show an example I have taken some screenshots from a project I am currently working on. I won’t write a lot of text, but focus on showing the process through pictures.”