Discovered a new framework for creating creative and dynamic solutions a la processing via Fabio. If you're into illustration or just into to creating some very cool looking flash works of art - I'd say the HYPE actionscript framework is for you.

Dr. Woohoo --> HYPE --> AIR --> Illustrator from Joshua Davis on Vimeo.

 Fresh from the BIMA Awards win in London we arrived back to Birmingham to find an email from Microsoft waiting for us to say that the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery's http://www.preraphaelites.org website is featured on their cutting edge Live Lab's Seadragon showcase.

We'd like to thank Microsoft for all the support they are giving us - the showcase on the Silverlight site sent a whole lot of folks over to the multi-award-winning site and we are hoping that this one will create a lot more fans of Birmingham's stunning Pre-Raphaelite collection in the weeks to come.

Wow - this looks pretty awesome.

"Can you tell what it is yet?"

Not sure how long we are going to stay there but TAK! are featured on the front page of the flagship Microsoft website Silverlight.net with their Art Collection Viewer from the new Pre-Raphaelite website for Birmingham Museum and Art Galleries. 

We are extremely excited to announce that TAK! have acquired the Birmingham-based development agency Light Source Software in order to expand our development department in skills such as .NET, PHP, Java, Silverlight and all things server-side.

Pete Nelson—director and head consultant at Light Source—has joined as a director at TAK! and brings over 10 years expertise in areas such as web, Windows, web services, e-learning and content management systems.

This increases our overall digital offering to include dedicated web development via numerous platforms. Neil Kinnish, TAK!'s Technical Director explains,

"The expansion of our technical offering along with our dedicated design & usability team means we can deliver complete digital solutions. We're very excited to bring Light Source into the fold and their work can already be seen within the Pre-Rapaelite Online Resource for Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery."

We welcome the guys on board and look forward to the increased competition at our regular Digbeth-Danger Cycle races!

Google have announced that they are moving forward with an OpenID API, allowing users to login in to sites (addopting the API) with their google username and password... could be interesting, read more here.

Update: Seems like Microsoft are also doing the same... read more

I’ve had it with Firefox 3. What should be a relatively lo-fi experience of ‘browsing the internet’ seems to be the most difficult task for this browser to handle. Maybe it’s trying to do to much and forgetting that is the core Firefox role?

For the past few weeks every 30 seconds of browsing time is punctuated by an annoying 3 second pause (beachball) as the browser plays catch up with itself. This tends to happen during the funny bits in YouTube videos or crucially when I press 'Proceed' in a checkout.

Maybe it’s deliberate?

The most recent spate of issues center around the browser totally smashing my computer’s processor. The fans kick in and everything grinds to a halt. Any input in any application takes forever and is only fixed by pressing the blue button below.

What gives? Don’t get me wrong — I see the potential in the browser — I love the new bookmark tagging and plug-ins (I only run a couple btw) but if this hinders the core process of accessing the internet then sorry — but it’s time to uninstall. That has to be the drastic measure — by keeping it on my hard drive, instinct will surely make me fire it up again.

So where next? Maybe… I might give Camino a whirl. It’s by Mozilla and is pretty decent. I might also give Flock a try. It’s a social networking aware browser which seems quite interesting. Or it’s back to Safari — but for some reason it isn’t storing my passwords correctly… sheesh!

For those ready to defend Firefox — I'm running on a 2.2Ghz Core Duo Macbook with 10.5 & 4gigs of RAM — should be more than plenty!

Holy shit — I didn't even know this was even possible: play Defender inside a website’s favicon (that’s the icon in the browser bar......... that er....... we don’t have *cough*)

Best thing I've ever seen on the web lately!

Check it out...

It's been a while since my last post this is mainly due to the fact that we have been very busy over here at TAK! towers, working on both client projects as well as a few of our own.

When developing new projects we like to investigate and use various technologies that we feel are best suited to the project and so we get to play with quite a lot. Recently we have been having a good look at the forthcoming ASP.NET MVC (Currently on preview 4) follow the link for more information - in our opinion this is shaping up to be a very welcome addition to the .NET framework.

As we investigate this further we are going to start posting source code and snippets of our findings and also linking to articles which we think are useful.

Kuler, the colour sampling tool from Adobe has had a update recently and now allows you to upload an image and create a colour theme from that image. Pretty cool stuff.

Nice interface too.

And a whole lot more, like; CSS based animations, client side SQL storage and more. This fills me with excitement and should hopefully increase the number of users of this great web browser*.

I look forward to this new version with anticipation.

Read more 

* Yes — that's right Neil (before you leave a comment) I said great! I really like Safari and hope that by bringing it up to scratch with tomorrows standards the browser has a great future. For me it outperforms Firefox when it comes to speed and system resources. Not sure about how it performs on a PC. But then again, why would I want to? Ha ha ha ha!

Thermo is a new development application by Adobe for designers to assist in the build of web based projects. Heard many promises many times for applications that can do away with the developer — will be interesting how this pans out. Looks good in my initial opinion…

Thermo by Adobe 

Wow!