Well if you work in healthcare, or require high levels of infection control then a washable keyboard with ‘silver ion antimicrobial protection’ is for you! It’s also a pretty cool g33k office accessory! According to the BBC the average keyboard contains over 400 times as many germ microbes than lavatories, so having the option of cleaning it could be most appealing to the millions of office bound working around the world.

The Keyboard Company, a UK based company, have developed the world’s first antimicrobial washable keyboard called Silver Seal™ keyboard.

It keeps itself clean!

Silver, if you didn’t already know, is known as one of the oldest antimicrobial agents. Silver ions are thought to inhibit bacterial enzymes and bind to DNA. Humans have known about silver and its natural antimicrobial properties for thousands of years.

The ancient Phoenicians, who flourished around 1200BC, stored their water in silver bottles to prevent spoiling.

Hippocrates, the father of modern medicine, noted in the 4th century BC that silver had beneficial healing and anti-disease properties.

Before the rise of antibiotics, during the first World War, silver compounds were used to prevent infection. Today, silver is widely used in water filters and in water tanks. In health care it is used in wound dressings and catheters…and now keyboards!

So…it’s up to the job Silver ion antibacterial technology rocks!

Get it bought lad

The Silver Seal keyboard retails at £29.00 ex. VAT so would make a great gift for a colleague of a self purchase. I personally would use it in the bath, or outside in the rain, just because, though I was never the smartest cookie in the jar…is that even a metaphor?

A designer friend of mine claims to be a ‘novice’ when it comes to typography, stating there are other much more experienced and knowledgeable typographers out there. We completely disagreed, especially when we discovered he had created a ‘Fonz‘ character out of the Garamond type family!

Welcome Fontzarelli – monday, Tuesday… Fonty Days!

Well it’s been a whole week since we launched FrogsThemes.com, and we’ve been blown away with the popularity, both through direct feedback and the levels of traffic. We celebrated the launch by giving away FolioGrid, WordPress portfolio theme, and have been amazed to find that the theme has already been downloaded over 500 times.

The snowball effect

CSSMania.com started the hype by featuring FrogsThemes.com in their showcase. What followed that was a snowball effect where dozens of sites in different niches blogged about us. Giving away FolioGrid for free really has excited people. Many WordPress theme directories have also added FolioGrid and generated dozens of downloads each.

A few stats

Just to emphasise the impact for giving something of quality away for free, here are some quick stats.

FolioGrid Portfolios

We’ve already seen a few portfolios popup using FolioGrid. Creatives have demonstrated FolioGrid is a versatile portfolio template by molding it around their work. We’ve seen portfolios showcasing logo design, photography, digital art and even pottery, with the artist adding Paypal options and turning FolioGrid into an online shop.

A summary of gains

It’s amazing to think that a new site could become so immediately popular so quickly. Without doubt the catalyst for success has originated from the giveaway of FolioGrid. Besides from the traffic and download levels, FrogsThemes has benefited from over 200 confirmed newsletter subscriptions in the first week, more than the total gained in the entire first year of this blog. By going viral through social media, blogs and even word of mouth, FrogsThemes.com now has an awareness that far outreaches our initial estimates. The life blood of any site is the links it gains. By choosing to give FolioGrid away we inadvertently created a linkbait campaign that has helped us gain much needed authority from much bigger and established domains. Over time we also expect to see benefit in having a link back from every FolioGrid portfolio, which was part of the CC licence. Now if there was ever an argument against giving away things then this is surely a case study for!

In summary

An amazing first week for FrogsThemes.com, fingers crossed the success continues…

Google is massive, let’s face it. Soon they’ll be running the number 10 bus through your village and sponsoring the local school sports day but the question is ‘How big is Google?’. Pingdom have answered this by creating this massive infographic on Google’s facts and figures.

Infographic copyright Pingdom.

The boys and girls over at ohnodoom.com have created a concept pair of jeans with a big ass pocket at the back designed to hold your iPad.

iGotaBigAssPocket Concept

At this time it’s simply a concept with an amusing message, focusing on a product created by a company whom we respect to the utmost.

We currently have no plans to produce the iBap apparel line for any market. Our intention was to bring our idea to life and send a message about the future of mobile devices and their portability. We enjoy fashion with function, but can it go too far? What will unite our technology and couture as we
creep into the next generation of moibile devices? Just some questions we’ve asked ourselves, and now we ask you.

We hope you enjoy the concept, stay tuned for the newest addition to the bigasspocket… a bigasswallet! <3

On a semi serious note we think these jeans look awesome. It’s true that once you sit down you’ll break the iPad with your big old arse but at some point all great inventions needed to be revised, we just wonder what the iBap’s would be. Building on from the iBap, you could put these big ass pockets on anything big enough. An inside pocket in your jacket, pocket in your shirt or how about, crazy as it may sound, in a bag!

Designers rejoice and huddle together for the unveiling of our latest addition to the Floating Frog family. We’re extremely proud and excited to announce the arrival of FrogsThemes.com, a new website dedicated to providing all a creative needs to create their online portfolio. FrogsThemes.com will primarily be focusing on creating professional looking Portfolio WordPress Themes and HTML templates. We’ll also be showcasing the best portfolio templates on the web and bringing them into the limelight on FrogsThemes.com. We’ll also be offering helpful articles, how-to guides, best practices and tutorials to those creatives wishing to create their own portfolio from scratch.

The grand launch and opening giveaway!

To celebrate all the hard work that’s been put into FrogsThemes.com, we’re giving away (some say foolishly) an amazingly designed WordPress Portfolio Theme called FolioGrid. Designed specific to fit purpose, FolioGrid is a new breed of WordPress Theme. 3 colour schemes and packaged with advanced automatic features, FolioGrid aims to be a dynamic blank canvas for any creative to build upon. Painters can showcase their artwork, install a ecommerce plugin and sell online. A web designer may want to reskin FolioGrid but use the sophisticated grid based jQuery layout and automatic thumb generation to create their own unique online portfolio and finally Joe doe, with no programming or WordPress experience may just want to use as is. Anything is possible with FolioGrid and we’re over the moon to be in a position where we can give it away, into the online creative community and lift the professional bar on online portfolios.

Welcome FrogsThemes.com

The new place to be seen and heard.

FolioGrid: Grab it while it’s hot!

A FREE WordPress Portfolio Theme

Summary: WordPress Portfolio Theme, 3 colour schemes, built with love.

Features at a glance:

• Fluid jQuery grid-based dynamic layout and transitions
• Auto sizing thumbs
• Comment avatar enabled
• Multiple page templates
• Widget enabled
• SEO friendly
• Pure CSS based layout
• Easy to reskin, all three themes contain no template images, all styling is done through the CSS file
• No complicated and restrictive custom fields to handle
• Low file size, ultra quick loading
• Cross browser tested, even IE6 displays a neat looking portfolio
• Ideal for all types of portfolio, FolioGrid is a creatives blank canvas

More information on FolioGrid

FREE download

Licence: Free to use with a link back to Frogsthemes.com. Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

Feedback

Let us know what you think! Over the coming weeks FrogsThemes.com will be launching a Hall of Fame where users of FolioGrid can show off their portfolio of work and theme customisations.

Whether you’re an SEO, a developer, or just a bit of a geek, you’ve probably accumulated half a dozen firefox plugins over the years that slowed your browser down to a crawl. If like me you switched to Chrome, you’ve replaced some of these plugins with a pile of bookmarks instead – the browser stays fast but actually using it for work is a hassle. Quix, unleashed by Yoast last week, is a solution to these problems – an extensible bookmarklet that gives you toolbar/bookmark functionality with just keyboard commands.

What does that mean?

Well, say you’re using Chrome and you’ve got no toolbars, but you want to see the number of backlinks according to Yahoo! Just open Quix, type in the relevant keyboard shortcut (yl), and hey presto – you’re taken to a Site Explorer results page.

Time saving? Easy to use? When you spend half your day exploring the innards of the web this can only be a good thing. Not only that, but it’s extensible (i.e., if you’re a smartypants you can create your own commands) – if Quix doesn’t do something you need, you can improve it yourself

Final thoughts

So, I’m giving Quix a go in my working day and so far it’s a neat little app. I always thought when Chrome came out that I’d miss toolbars, but that kinda seems like the old way of doing things now. Typing commands into the Chrome address bar and using shortcuts to perform operations with Quix puts an impressive arsenal at your fingertips. It’s an intuitive way of working, it’s faster, and it feels like the future

Amazon has release a Kindle iPhone app that allows users to read their Kindle books on their hand held device. The app is free to download from the Apple app store and connects iPhone and iPod users with over 400,000 Kindle books. Now with the announcement of the new Apple iPad, launching later in the year the question is “Could the iPad be a competitor to the Kindle as an e-book reader?”

Industry opinion

Everyjoe.com

So people are saying that the iPhone Kindle app, which more or less provides the same ebook reading functionality on Apple’s smartphone, will kill the Kindle. Makes sense actually. After all, why spend $360 on a gadget that can only do one thing, when you can spend roughly the same for a smartphone that multi-tasks? This argument appeals especially to die-hard fans of the Apple “experience”.

At the same time however, I can tell you that reading text on a backlit display strains the eyes. The e-ink of Amazon’s Kindle, on the other hand, is easy on the optics. That’s still why a lot of us still prefer reading printed words on dead trees, even if literally all books ever written are available through the web browser; no tiring light shines from them.

Future Kindles will definitely display color, free from the limits of grays. And you can bet that development will make Amazon’s reader more attractive; who wouldn’t artificially generated color pages that are easy to read? Amazon has the luxury of concentrating on ebook research, unlike supposed future competitors like Apple who are taking a more broad research towards R&D. What do you think?

Okay so in theory the iPhone is too small to really compete with a Kindle and the screen sucks but how about the iPad. The screen is still an issue but it’s around the size of the larger Kindle DX plus is does so much more. The Kindle does just one thing though people argue it does it well and has been designed specifically for the job.

Apple app for iPhone and iPod (and iPad?)

Here’s some quick features of the app:

• No Kindle required
• Get the best reading experience available on your iPhone or iPod touch
• Access your Kindle books even if you don’t have your Kindle with you
• Automatically synchronizes your last page read between devices with Amazon Whispersync
• Adjust the text size, add bookmarks, and view the annotations you created on your Kindle
• Read in portrait or landscape mode
• Select alternate background and text colors to improve reading comfort in low light conditions
• Tap on either side of the screen or flick to turn pages
• Pinch to zoom images in books
• Tap and hold on a word to create a note or highlight
• Whispersync will back up and synchronize annotations with your other Kindle devices

Kindle Book Readers

I find the syncing feature a great asset of the app. It also opens the door to Kindle books so in theory the only difference between the iPad and the Kindle is the user experience and the screen.

Comparison

Price wise the the Apple iPad and equivalent Kindle DX are both competitively priced. The cheapest iPad without 3G is on paper at the moment $10 more than the top spec Kindle.

Final thoughts

If we were to analyse this battle solely on the premise they are both e-readers and are sold as such with no other features then surely the Kindle would be the wise choice. The kindle is brilliant at what it does and price wise is competitive with the iPad and it’s competitors. The iPad costs more and hasn’t got an ideal screen for long periods of reading. So in our opinion, as an e-reader, the Kindle is a clear winner. However this isn’t an e-reader face off, the iPad isn’t an e-reader, but can be used as one. In fact, what exactly is it? Who is it aimed at? Is it trying to be a Jack of all trades? What is it’s USP? Soooo many questions…

We’re sure with time the iPad will fit within a niche it’s ment to be in. It has the potential to be amazing primarily due to it’s vesitility, just not as a users primary e-reader.

Thanks to Amazons Whispersync technology we see handheld devices like the iPhone and BlackBerry being perfect accompliments to the Kindle. These devices are unlikely to become a users primary e-reader but there is certainly room to support the technology on other devices.

Reviews elsewhere

Amazon Kindle DX versus Apple iPad
The iPad Vs. The Kindle: How Should Amazon Respond?
iPad vs Kindle DX – The Definitive Comparison

Instant Blueprint allows you to quickly create a web project framework with valid HTML/XHTML and CSS in only a matter of seconds, allowing you to get your project up and running faster!

If you’re after saving time by setting up the generic website framework of your next project then this could save you time. Personally I’d like to see a few more options like including the options to setup a specific CSS Framework.

Read the rest of this entry »

A new dawn for The Floating Frog

I thought I’d take this opportunity to announce the pending arrival of some WordPress themes I’ve been working on. Over the coming days, weeks, months, The Floating Frog will be shifting dramatically from it’s current position, from a leading UK based digital design blog to a portal where designers can drop in and access the tools they need designed specifically for them. I will tell more at a later date once things are in motion but until then I’d like to put a flavour of this out there now.

Calling all designers

It’s fair to say most designers aren’t developers and building their own website can be some what restricting. The design I’m sure is brilliant but to convert that into a website with full CMS capabilities will either cost them money, time, headaches or even all three. Using an open source CMS like WordPress is an ideal way of tackling the management side of the site but this doesn’t answer the frontend dilemma. Unfortunately I haven’t found any WordPress Portfolio Themes that I think are good enough to use to showcase my work. They never seem to tick all my boxes. Also with it running on WordPress, theme developers feel it necessary to add in all the features WordPress offers. The portfolio part of the theme can be buried within the navigation on it’s own section with maybe a homepage show reel demoing the latest work. The rest of the homepage is filled with blog rolls, blog articles, navigation, twitter feeds and so on. This is why I decided to design and develop a WordPress Portfolio Theme specifically targeted at showcasing the work of the creative community.

A WordPress theme for creatives

Coming soon is a theme called FolioGrid, a WordPress theme designed for creatives to showcase their work in a grid/gallery based format. The theme will be completely fluid, allowing every part of a browsers screen to be filled with their work. The beauty of the layout is that the emphasis is on the work, not the design of the theme. No fancy background images or rotating banners, just a clean content focused canvas for the work to flow on. Several colour variations will be made available, for example a white theme, a dark theme, a yellow theme and so on.

Feedback wanted

It would be great to hear your thoughts on this, does it sound right for you? How much would you be willing to pay for a ready to use online portfolio with full CMS? Any other thoughts…