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After weeks of pixel-by-pixel tweaking in Photoshop, perfecting CSS in Smultron, and refreshing browsers (Safari, IE, and Firefox), I’m pleased to announce the launch of the new Wallsaver 2.0 website at www.wallsaverapp.com.

This new website is a much needed update to the text-and-random-image based version currently hosted on the NWW Network website (which will have its own update soon). There’s plenty of AJAXy goodness and rounded corners for everyone. Everything was custom designed from the ground up, and is (mostly) standards compliant and looks great in pretty much any browser.

There are some issues with the way Internet Explorer 6.0 and lower handles transparent PNGs and CSS padding, so in order to preserve the viewing experience the entire site is disabled to users browsing via IE. The images below show the warning message and just how bad IE6 is with standards compliance.

I had initially given up and pushed the project off to my “Stuff to do when really bored” folder (yes I have one) after not being able to find a header/footer image that went with the Wallsaver theme. I considered having them be screen shots of screen savers, but as you can see above, the background was already a rotating screen shot.

Last night, while browsing the Apple Design Awards winners’ websites, I found a better solution. Instead of having the background rotate screen saver images, the header could do it. This way the page would load faster, and scale properly. The image-as-background method resulted in a 200 kb - 300 kb PNG image being loaded, not to mention users with wide-screen high resolution monitors would see black space and an abruptly ended image.

While working on a new design for NWW Network, I decided it was time to dedicate a domain to Wallsaver. I’m planning on releasing Wallsaver v2 alongside the release of NWW Network v10.

In the meantime, a (quite salivating, if you ask me) teaser image (just a full screen version of the one above) has been set up at Wallsaver’s new website www.wallsaverapp.com.

I’ve been working on a new layout/design/theme (v10) for the NWW Network website over the past few weeks and I’ve finally gotten to a point where I feel comfortable releasing a little preview of what it’s going to look like.

Although I migrated the same header image over from the old design (v9), everything else (except the logo, of course) is completely redesigned.

The new design is semi-Web 2.0, is much cleaner on the back end, finally standards complaint, iPhone/iPod touch compatible, and should be ready to launch very soon.