Reading mashable last night and being a new iPhone 4 owner I found one of their latest posts most useful!

Using your iPhone keypad while typing tap and hold the '.?123' button, then slide your finger to the required key and let go! Instant update without having to tap to switch screens!

I found this incredibly useful with punctuation, tapping away for my message then sliding my finger for a comma, job done!

* So much so this has all been typed from my iphone :)

mashable.com

For many designers and front-end developers, another hot topic of conversation is the @font-face CSS declarations which now allow us to use any font we like in our websites as if it was installed on the users computer.

Before we were restricted in which fonts we could use, relying solely on the fonts which most users would have installed on their computers; Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman, Courier New – to name just a few.

Now we can upload the required font files to our server, reference them in our CSS and we are all set.

I bet I know what you are thinking – what about browser support? It goes without saying that everything we do is affected in someway or another by the browser support of the features we want to use. The good news is that @font-face is currently supported by all major browsers: Firefox 3.5+, Chrome 4+, Safari 3.2+, Opera 10.1+, even Internet Explorer 6+.

But hang on, isn't Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) over 10 years old? Yes it is, and even though @font-face is officially a new declaration within CSS3, it was originally planned for CSS2 and therefore was implemented by IE6 – when it came to @font-face being removed from the spec (for reasons I am not quite sure of), support was never removed from IE6.

For more information on the code required and how to create a bulletproof @font-face declaration which is cross-browser, check out Paul Irish's article on 'Bulletproof @font-face syntax'.

However, though in theory @font-face allows us to use any font we like – we are restricted by the font's licenses whether font embedding or sharing is permitted. This is mainly down to the fact that if we are linking to a font file in our code, it means anybody can just download the font and then is it on their computer.

Therefore, it is important to check if the font you want to use is permitted to be used on the web.

Alternatively, there are a few resources which I have come across and found extremely useful in getting @font-face fonts and making sure they are permitted to be used.

• Font Squirrel

  The Font Squirrel website lists 'hundreds of @font-face font kits' which are 100% free for commercial use. The kits provide all the necessary fonts and code needed to be implemented.

• Fontspring

  If you wish to have even more of a selection of font, and have a more unique feel to your website - Fontspring provides purchasable fonts along with @font-face licenses, all very reasonable prices.

• FontDeck

  Whereas the last 2 services allowed you to select individual fonts, and in the case of FontSpring, purchase @font-face licenses, FontDeck allows you to pay a subscription and have full access to their library of fonts to use on your website. Great alternative if you want to use a lot of fonts, or as a freelancer you love to use unique fonts for all your clients' websites.

• TypeKit

  Like FontDeck, TypeKit allows you to pay a monthly subscription allowing access to their library of fonts and use them on your website. The higher level your account type is, the more fonts you can use and the more website domains you can use the fonts on.

So when you are next designing a website, or even as a client looking to have a website designed, look into the possibility of using more custom fonts to get more aesthetics and edge on the web. Stand out, be at the forefront of new technologies and trends.

It's the question on everyone's lips ATM. Answers at: http://www.isitxmasyet.com/

Listen to our June Podcast. Download

This weekend is the street fighter tournament! Grab your favourite controllers, your favourite sticks and get button bashing!!
I'll be taking my camera to document the days events, who know's I might even compete! I'll definately be giving the casual gamers a run for their money!

Click here to read more about it!

Here's this weeks links:

http://www.myinkblog.com/2009/05/16/a-showcase-of-popular-web-design-trends/

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/05/21/web-design-industry-jargon-glossary-and-resources

If Street Fighter 2 was released in 1981 - http://vimeo.com/4504861

Cranfield School of Management makes a nice little apperance on one of the top design/developer blogs Smashing Magazine.

The Sub-Navigation for Cranfield consists of a rollover cookie trail which allows users more control over exploring the site, this enhances the user experience and quickens the web journey from point a to b. Smashing Magazine has picked up on our little cookie trail and placed Cranfield under 'Breadcrumbs with Sub-Navigation'.

Thanks Smashing Magazine for including us in your posts and to all of the hard work Creative Jar put in to create this stunning site.

Peace ^_^

The creative room has undergone a few changes in the past few weeks, as you may of noticed from the smell of paint and white spirit!
The creative team have worked hard to achieve a room we're all proud of, well we can't be letting the technical team have a better room than us can we?

So I bought a nice A5 graphics tablet off of one of our developers Ben the other day and after the novelty of writing my name over and over again in photoshop finally wore off I decided to see what it could really do and think about how it could improve our work flow.

To kick things off I got myself a trial copy of Autodesk’s Sketchbook Pro and started to have a play around. SBP is a basic program for sketching and although it isn't nearly as advanced as photoshop, it is very simple and easy to use and it makes it incredibly easy to just start sketching using your tablet and produces some nice results. I drew the Koi Fish in about 2 minutes, and best of all I didn't have to scan it in and use PS Levels to get it looking alright!

This got me thinking about possible uses for this technology in the studio. At CJ when we get animations in we do storyboards to illustrate how the animation will play out and what will happen. When we do these storyboards they are done by hand, normally by Greg and then scanned in and e-mailed over to the client.

This led me on to thinking if we did use this technology for storyboards, perhaps eliminating the need for scanning would encourage us to do a lot more sketching, and in my view this is no bad thing, as someone from Tricky Business once said at a user group, it's a lot easier to change a sketch than it is to change a photoshop file!

So I figure if we were all to do far more sketching at the early stages of a project and get everything laid out on paper (so to speak) before we even start designing then we could save ourselves a lot of back and forth between us and the clients and save ourselves a lot of time spent tweaking PS files here and there.

My thoughts - Get ya tablets on and start sketching!