Although static graphics is obviously much easier to scan and therefore can be easily perceived, motion graphics brings dynamics and life into otherwise static content. Animation can help designers to convey a deeper meaning with the use of various video-techniques. It can also provide a better data visualization than the static graphics. How and where you use it in real-life situations is totally up to your talent and your abilities to express yourself.

In the next comparison, we'll consider using jQuery instead of Flash in its customization. jQuery and other JavaScript frameworks are built for easy development and customization.

Over the last months we released a variety of icon sets, tools and templates, but now we would like to release something a bit different for a change. In this post we are glad to release Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts, a PDF-file with a handy overview of most useful keyboard shortcuts available in Adobe Photoshop. The cheat sheet was created by Kenneth Setzer and released especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Choosing a good PHP frameworks can help you develop complex Rich Internet Applications quickly, with a best practices oriented approach, and saving a lot of time reusing code snippets that are already available. There are a lot of interesting PHP frameworks you can choose for your next web project. Today we will focus on one of my favorite PHP Frameworks: CodeIgniter.

Photoshop is everywhere. And while fundamentally it is the standard professional-quality image editor, it's also a cultural touchstone with a reach that extends to advertising, fashion magazines, television, film, and the news. Lighter versions like Photoshop Elements, Photoshop.com, and even Photoshop Mobile on the iPhone have distilled its power for the masses, and sites like PhotoshopDisasters.blogspot.com chronicle painful misuses for everyone to point at and giggle about. "Photoshop" the verb was even added to Webster's dictionary in 1992.

Video for Everybody is simply a chunk of HTML code that embeds a video into a website using the HTML5 element, falling back to QuickTime and Flash automatically, without the use of JavaScript or browser-sniffing. It therefore works in RSS readers (no JavaScript), on the iPhone / iPad (don't support Flash) and on many, many browsers and platforms.

Earlier this week, Microsoft gave MSDN subscribers Release Candidate downloads of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. As promised, the releases are now available to the general public via the Microsoft Download Center. For reference, you may also want to check out the Visual Studio 2010 Licensing White Paper PDF. The RC includes a go-live license for people who want to deploy in their production environment. If you're using one of the betas, make sure to uninstall them before installing this RC build.

There are plenty of reasons to use a CSS Framework to build your websites. They can speed up development, make your sites more aesthetically pleasing, and they can help eliminate all those nasty cross-browser compatibility issues (though not all of them do this, or do it well). But it can also be a steep learning curve to figure out which framework you should use (or if you should use one at all) and then how to use it.

We often turn to programmers to solve mathematical-related problems, but the concept of mathematics in programming is what powers programmers to innovate. When you think of mathematics you imagine numbers, expressions, and equations. But what about art, music, or even beautiful visuals? Those numbers and equations that we often view as mundane and overly-formulaic can generate beautiful visuals and music. This article will present dozens of examples of motion graphics and interactive visuals created with computational code, along with some useful references and resources.