WordPress 3.2 Released with a nice admin refresh

This morning the latest release of WorkPress (3.2) was made available. The new release features a nice refresh of the admin area and a number or nice new features for administrators and authors.

I’m definitely loving the new fullscreen mode when writing posts which gets rid of all distractions and lets you get on with Just Writing.

Check out the post on wordpress.org/news for more details of the updates and release.

As always you can download the latest version of WordPress
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Super sexy drop down controls with DropKick.js

DropKick removes the tedium and lets you focus on making s@#t look good.

via Antonio Lupetti – @Woork

This awesome little app works in most modern browser and incredible useful when using sprites.
Seeing is believing so have a look at the example they have up on their site.

some people are saying that I’m responsible for the broad visual refresh now rolling out across Google, which couldn’t be further from the truth – in fact, I’m not even sure I like it.

Interesting post on Google+ about Hertzfeld involvement with the design of Plus and his non-involvement in the rest of the design refresh being pushed around Google’s products and applications.

You could forget this anyway, i’m more interesting in the Google+ mention feature with the +Someone. Pretty cool!

So this is kind of typical. As you can see in the last link i have a little bit of a dig at Google for lacking in the design area and failing to take real care of the detail in designing beautiful user interfaces. And then what do they go and do… go and deploy a well crafted, uniform interface across all of it’s major products and apps.
After the introduction of Google+ they started to roll out a few updates but you can see the clear initiative here is to create a uniform and standard interface covering all major products. To be honest I think it’s all great. Today we started using the new Gmail and Calendar themes which are great. For us using Google Apps For Business it creates a more professional looking application and creates a confidence with our users that web applications like Gmail are as good if not better that traditional desktop applications. There’s been plenty of great stuff coming out of Google this week. I’m just looking forward to getting stuck into Google+.

A nice piece from @AuthenticJobs on how details make a product.

If the mantra of real estate is location, the equivalent of design is arguably details.

This follows a similar ethos to that of Apple and they shows some sexy examples of good design details in action. If only Google would take this kind of approach with products like Gmail and other apps which currently lack that added care for detail in design.

Judging from Facebook’s recent acquisition of Sofa they’re clearly seeing details details details a core factor in the evolution of they service.

This website and its sample code creates a template of sorts, absent of design or layout, that will help you avoid some of the major rendering problems with the most common email clients out there — Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo Mail, etc.

from @SeanPowell

Brands and corporations will soon be allowed to register websites with custom domain extensions.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) voted overwhelmingly in favour of the proposal at a meeting in Singapore despite fears that opening up new suffixes could cause some confusion.

So soon we could see websites like http://itunes.apple or http://mail.google. But it’s aint going to be cheep though.

According to Mashable

The application fee alone is $185,000, and the annual fee is $25,000.

It’s definatley an interesting twist.