Aside from a number of fixes, the most notable features of this version are:

• Sketch Effects – Sketch Effects enable you to give your wireframes a more sketchy, grayscale look and feel to allow the audience to focus on the information architecture, interactions, and functions of the prototype more than the “finished” look
• New Wireframing Tools – wireframes are now faster to build and easier to maintain by adding Global and Page Guides, a Location and Size tooltip, Format Painter, ability to Copy and Paste. Annotations, and a new Custom Style engine where custom styles can be applied to rollovers.
• Improved Text Editing – Axure RP was upgraded to use WPF in the Microsoft .Net Framework 4.0.  The new text engine allows information architects to add text editing at zoomed levels, line spacing, and Open Type Fonts. There is also some text padding in shape widgets.
• Page Styles – you can finally center pages, apply background colours and background images without having to do it manually!
• Richer Prototypes – Axure RP6 now has animations for moving and fading, Math and String functions, Drag and Drop interactions, and new Dynamic Panel Events to respond to moving, changes in visibility, and changes in state.
• More Specification Control – You are now able to organize the content, optionally include headers, filter widget tables by annotation values, generate a master usage report, generate all of the widget text, configure column widths for two column layout, and configure the screenshot size. And you can also format the page notes and annotate master instances.
• AxShare integration – You can now manage an account of up to 10 active prototypes. It supports RP files (up to 10 MB) created in version 6 or earlier and all generated prototypes will have the version 6 skin. You now also have access to a new Discuss tab next to the sitemap in the prototype (which you can disable), as well as a page for viewing the discussion topics in your AxShare account.

Axure RP 6 is available for both PC and MAC here.

Good times!

This is a security update and it is therefore highly recommended to update the WordPress installation immediately (you should be seeing the “Please update now” ribbon on top of the screen when you log into your wordpress blog.

Download WordPress 2.8.3 from here.

Aside from the usual bug fixes, this update addresses a security issue where admin pages created by certain plugins could be viewed by unprivileged users. In other notes, the update reduces the memory usage of the dashboard (always welcome!), improves the automatic upgrade process (no longer will the upgrade accidentally delete files from a failed upgrade), fixes glitches in styling in the plugin editor and auto-save errors in IE as well as a fix to the rich-text-editor not loading properly due to compression issues.

For a full list of changes, head over to the official WordPress blog, and download WordPress 2.8.1 from here.

The most notable changes in FireFox 3.5

Aside from a new version of the Gecko engine, these are the most notable features of FF3.5:

• Support for the new Theora encoder: FF3.5 now supports the open video codec Theora (which is said to rival H.264 quality)
• Suport for <video> and <audio> HTML5 tags
• Private browsing (aka “the porn mode”): once enabled the browser will not retain visited pages, form and search bar entries, passwords, download list entries, cookies or Web cache files
• Faster and better web application performance using the new Javascript engine Tracemonkey
• Support for new web technologies such as downloadable fonts, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, and more!

You can download FireFox 3.5. from here, and read more about all features for developers at Mozilla’s developer center here.

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Incidentally, why not also download:

• FireFox extensions for usability, accessibility and SEO experts
• The best FireFox extensions of February

• New drag-and-drop widgets admin interface and new widgets API
• Syntax highlighting and function lookup built into plugin and theme editors
• Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns
• Allow configuring the number of items to show on management pages with an option in Screen Options
• Improved database performance
• Support IIS 7.0 URL Rewrite Module
• Faster loading of admin pages via script compression and concatenation
• Improvements to the script loader: allows plugins to queue scripts for the front end head and footer, adds hooks for server side caching of compressed scripts, adds support for ENFORCE_GZIP constant (deflate is used by default since it’s faster)
• Load the minified versions of the scripts by default, define(‘SCRIPT_DEBUG’, true); can be used to load the development versions
• And many more!

For a list of all features, please have a look here.

You can download WordPress 2.8 here.

Just over a year ago, Google stopped supporting urchin in favour of their own ga.js tracking code, recommending everyone to switch over to the new tracking code…

The end of urchin

The new tracking code went live in December 2007, with the belief that Google would stop supporting the old script within a year after the release. Google’s statement says that here are ” no immediate plans to decommission urchin.js”, however once switched off, urchin will return a 404 error and consequently cease to register traffic.

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Why GA.js?

If you used urchin.js up until now, this is what you might have been missing out on:

• The new tracking code has a faster, smaller source file
• Automatic detection of HTTPS
• Increased namespace safety
• More convenient set up for tracking ecommerce transactions
• More customizable code for interactive Ajax-based sites
• Enjoying new features and reports as they roll out

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How to upgrade

Migrating to the new tracking code is relatively easy, a concise guide can be found directly at Google Analytics’ help pages here.

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Related links:

• Pingdom.com’s survey results
• Upgrading urchin.js to ga.js
• Selling SEO effectively – a quick guide