Every Monday through Friday-ish, we post a new Monkey Bite on our frontdoor for your edification. This could be a little news item, a link to a useful site, a handy coding tip, or just some random piece of information we think might be of interest to Web developers. Expired Monkey Bites are stored right here, growing tastier and more sophisticated with each passing day.
This month's Monkey Bites:
05/30/02
The Macromedia MX invasion began in earnest today: Flash MX, out on point since March, has been joined by Dreamweaver MX, ColdFusion MX, Fireworks MX, and Studio MX. Now the gang's all here, ready to really MX things up.
05/28/02
HyperScore (available for free over at
Toy Symphony) lets you compose music by drawing lines — no demisemiquavers, semibreves, or minims to keep track of, no treble clefs to confuse with bass clefs, no time signatures to fall out of step with. Neat! (But does this mean kids're going to stop learning to read music just like they can't read time unless the clock's digital? Uh oh.)
05/24/02
Hear ye, hear ye! From this point forward, Webmonkey will only answer to its secret Hobbit name,
"Peony Bulge of Hobbiton," its genuine Star Wars name, "Monwe Wisan," or its pirate name, "Mad James Bonney." Pass it on!
05/22/02
So it appears the <<yawn>> browser wars are reheating up again. Certainly the Netscape 7.0 PR1 (public release, version 1) is worth a looksee for the tabbed browsing alone — who cares if it crashes sporadically?
05/21/02
Good news and bad news on the Google front. Good news: Google Labs is knocking our Monkey socks off. Bad news: Whilst it remains the undisputed champ of engines that search, it appears that it still
scares easily.
05/20/02
Spring has sprung, and you know what that means: Time to find a mate! And nothing attracts the opposite sex like pen spinning. The 360 Degree Normal might be enough cheese for your trap, but for those of you in pursuit of particularly hard nuts, the dazzling Sonic Reverse is almost guaranteed to do the trick.
05/16/02
If you're running Internet Explorer 5.01, 5.5, or 6 on a PC, then yellow alert, yellow alert, etc.!
There's a hole in your browser and it needs a patch, lickety quick!
05/15/02
Apple's new Xserve "lets you stack 42 high-performance units in an industry-standard 8-foot-tall rack with up to 630 gigaflops [Gigaflops!] of processing power." It also makes us think fondly of Whoopie's "big silver box" in her seminal film, Jumping Jack Flash. Whoopie!
05/14/02
If you've built an itty, bitty, spiffy site (we're talking less-than-or-equal-to 5KB, and no server-side shenanigans!), you could just win yourself US$51.20 in this year's 5K "Anything Goes" Competition. Submissions are being entertained from now until June 16, so hop to it.
05/13/02
Heads up, Java developers. Today Macromedia announced the
latest release of its Java application server, JRun 4 (US$899 per processor, $499 for upgrades). Not only is it a
place to let your stable of J2EE applications run free, but it's also built
for Flash MX front-end connectivity, Java Server Pages, and all the cutest Java APIs.
05/10/02
Chocolat may have been a sweet little date movie, but its font handling was truly tasteless — I mean, ITC Benguiat in 1950s provincial France? Hi? More of the same can be found in
"Typcasting," an article from the toothsome Mark Simonson Studio (of "The Scourge of Arial" fame).
05/09/02
Macromedia is now using something it calls the blog strategy" to get the word out about recent product developments. Is this sneaky, creepy marketing, or just another bunch of
innocent blogs? Both?
05/07/02
Atomic Media (tagline: "Let's get small!") makes cute, semi-affordable pixel fonts that are specially designed not to look blurry in Flash.
Not even sure what kind of font you're looking for? Nadav's Web Typography Tutorial will teach you how to mind your p's and q's.
05/06/02
A PDA, a mobile phone, and a Web browser were sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G, and Handspring's Treo 180 (finally in stores this week) is the resulting baby in the baby carriage. But will that baby come crashing to earth, cradle and all, once Danger's wireless wonder, hiptop, hits stores this Summer? Hm.
The nominees for the 2002 Webby Awards have been announced. (Eyebrow raised over Webby sponsor Google's nomination for an award? Conflict of interest? Maybe! Or maybe not.) The big event's on June 18, but you can only cast your vote in the People's Voice Awards until June 7 — do the hustle!
