The world lost a great man today.

As quoted on Apple’s website tonight.

“Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being, Those of us who have been fortunate enough to know and work with Steve have lost a dear friend and an inspiring mentor. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.”

Our prayers are with his family.  I’d like to thank you Steve for changing our lives, inspiring us, and giving us products above and beyond what your competitors have ever done. You will truly be missed.  I know your legacy will live forever in Apple.

Rest in peace Steve.

Optimizing images for the web is a daunting task even for us professionals. It is never fun or easy, but rather time consuming. I frequently get asked how do I reduce images for uploading to the website. We realize most if not all of clients don’t use tools like Photoshop as we do for these types of things, so after digging around I found a couple of really helpful and easy to use sites that do just that.

The biggest question is why should we optimize or make images smaller in size?

There are several reasons why you should, optimized images use less bandwidth and keeps the server load down which will be cheaper in the long run, especially those who have bandwidth plans/limits on their hosting accounts.

The main reason is load times, we are all aware by now that Google “penalises� slower loading sites so that alone is enough to talk you into optimising you images, also many users have slower connections and use smartphones and other mobile devices on 3G and image rendering times on slower connections can be time consuming and irritating for the user. Make sense?

Below are are 3 really great tools. Enjoy.

JPEGMINI

JPEGmini is a tool I have recently starting trying out, the results in my opinion equal the results from Smush.it and Shrink-O-Matic and has a very easy to use interface which I feel will be an attraction to its users.
Visit: JPEGmini

SHRINK-O-MATIC

Shrink-O-Matic is an Adobe Air application which you use locally from your machine, you can drop in multiple images and it even supports transparent PNG images, this is my favorite tool as you don’t require an internet connection to use the application.
Visit: Shrink-O-Matic

SMUSH.IT

Smush.it is a well know tool by the good folks at Yahoo! Again it offers high quality image optimisation and is used in browser, whats great about Smush.it is it also has a very useful and FREE WordPress plugin.
Visit: Smush.it

Having seen a sneak peek at Google Plus… All I can say is it’s ABOUT TIME!!! Never really been a fan of facebook and find it cumber-sum, boring and to be honest rather ridiculous. The fact I can’t seem to easily separate friends from family and being being able to only share with everyone is silly really. From what I have seen Google Plus will blow facebook out of the water! Find out for yourself. Can’t wait…. Finally a better experience than facebook! BYE BYE Facebook.

In a letter to all employees of Apple, this is what Tim Cook said…

Team:

I am looking forward to the amazing opportunity of serving as CEO of the most innovative company in the world. Joining Apple was the best decision I’ve ever made and it’s been the privilege of a lifetime to work for Apple and Steve for over 13 years. I share Steve’s optimism for Apple’s bright future.

Steve has been an incredible leader and mentor to me, as well as to the entire executive team and our amazing employees. We are really looking forward to Steve’s ongoing guidance and inspiration as our Chairman.

I want you to be confident that Apple is not going to change. I cherish and celebrate Apple’s unique principles and values. Steve built a company and culture that is unlike any other in the world and we are going to stay true to that – it is in our DNA. We are going to continue to make the best products in the world that delight our customers and make our employees incredibly proud of what they do.

I love Apple and I am looking forward to diving into my new role. All of the incredible support from the Board, the executive team and many of you has been inspiring. I am confident our best years lie ahead of us and that together we will continue to make Apple the magical place that it is.

Tim.

All I can say, is we’re going to miss Steve, his creativity, his passion and his achievements. Thank you Steve. I too am confident that the course has been set for Apple, I doubt this will impact the Company and it’s products and services. I too believe the best years are ahead as I am sure much planning for the future has been done. I think as Steve Jobs has said so many times over… “There’s just one more thing”

We all knew this day would come, some of us felt it would never arrive and hoped Steve would be at helm of Apple forever. He’s achieved so much and to think this company was once… a short almost 10 years ago on the verge of bankruptcy. Today, he announced he would step down as CEO and allow Tim Cook to take over.  As I am writing this, I can’t help but wonder what would have become of Apple if Steve did not return about 10 years ago. Watching as all of you have as well and seeing Apple reach the heights and achieve the almost impossible has been a thrill for me personally.  Apple has given us so many new and exciting products and has pretty much set the stage for even more new and innovative ways we compute, communicate and interact with media. So, on that note – Our friends at Appleinsider.com posted a great article as I am sure many online sources have posted by now.

The silentblast blog has gone mobile!
Yes, it’s true, you can now read our blog on our mobile phone.
Well that is if you have an iPhone, Blackberry or Google Android Phone.

Let us know what you think.

If you’re looking for a mobile website, or mobile version of your blog, give us a call today.

416-900-0869

Apple announced on Monday that Mac OS X 10.7 Lion will be available only in the Mac App Store, and the operating system upgrade will be available for just $29.99.

“The Mac has outpaced the PC industry every quarter for five years running and with OS X Lion we plan to keep extending our lead,” Schiller said. “The best version of OS X yet, Lion is packed with innovative features such as new Multi-Touch gestures, system-wide support for full screen apps, and Mission Control for instantly accessing everything running on your Mac.”

Being Mac users ourselves here at Silentblast I can only tell you, it’s been a great day…Can’t wait to see the new operating system in action.

On another note, Apple is also revamping it’s web browser Safari, more on that in another post. Now, it’s back to work we go.

The much anticipated news about Apple’s newest IOS 5 and it’s newly revamped iCloud service which will replace the existing mobile me service by next year is official. More can be read obviously on Apple’s website. No need to mention the URL right?

Microsoft has provided a look at how it plans to bring Windows to more mobile devices in the future, leveraging ARM processors and using HTML5 as the basis of a new app platform.

As demonstrated at the D9 conference, Windows 8 will deliver a touch-centric new interface for apps built using HTML5 and JavaScript that runs on top of the existing, conventional Windows platform.