March 12, 2012 — Designing apps for children is extremely hard. Not only is quality, age-appropriate content hard to create, but designing the flow and interaction of these apps is made more difficult. Read more…

March 10, 2012 — Around the end of October last year, Vitaly Friedman of Smashing Magazine asked me if I would be interested in contributing to the new Smashing Book #3. Read more…

March 9, 2012 — The creative process is not a linear one. As artists and designers, we often set off in one direction only to decide that the proper solution lies somewhere else completely. Unfortunately, many of the creative software packages we use (Photoshop in particular) can be pretty unforgiving when in comes to making changes late in the game. Read more…

March 8, 2012 — In 2011 we saw the rise in popularity of two relatively new trends: responsive Web design and the use of HTML’s canvas. While some websites had experimented with both, in the last 12 months we’ve seen these trends move from the fringes firmly into the mainstream. Read more…

March 8, 2012 — Recently, we discussed “How Commercial Plugin Developers Are Using The WordPress Repository.” This article provided a solid explanation of the plugin repository, how to use it, how not to abuse it, and how to leverage it for success, even with premium plugins. Now is a great time to be working as a WordPress developer: the community is active and growing, the platform has a solid API and the platform is under constant development. Despite these advantages, many developers have a hard time getting started building premium products. Read more…

March 7, 2012 — Finally some good news from the media industry: digital subscriptions are growing. We see positive reports from newspapers like The New York Times and magazine publishers like Conde Nast: announcements about increases in their digital content sales and paywall members. Read more…

March 7, 2012 — When my WordPress plugin had only three users, it didn’t matter much if I broke it. By the time I reached 100,000 downloads, every new update made my palms sweat. Read more…

March 6, 2012 — As a Japanese person living in Europe, I’m sometimes asked: “Japanese is a difficult language, isn’t it?”. Those asking are often surprised when my answer is a simple: “No, actually, it’s not.”. Read more…

March 1, 2012 — The WordPress Admin Bar, first introduced in version 3.1, debuted to mixed reactions. A Google search for “wordpress admin bar” returns multiple articles about how to disable or remove it. Version 3.2 of WordPress introduced new features and functionality, and version 3.3 has not only further enhanced it but integrated the header of the admin section into the bar itself. Read more…

March 1, 2012 — A lot of community extensions (or modules) are available for the feature-rich open-source e-commerce solution Magento but what if they don’t quite work as you want them to? What if you could understand the structure of a Magento module a little better, to the point that you could modify it to suit your needs or, better yet, write your own module from scratch? Read more…