Firefox 3 will be released today, in about an hour from this post, and they are hoping to set the Guinness World Record for most downloads in 24 hours. So if you are a Firefox fan, head over now to pledge to do it, and be sure to download it within the next day.

As if I didn’t love my Mac enough already, I had a chance to use iMovie this weekend. I was creating a video message for my 10 year old (who is raising money for a fundraiser which he does every year…he raised almost $1,400 last year). We recorded several takes with my Sony digital camera, then easily imported the video onto my Mac with iMovie.

Once imported, its so easy to select which pieces you want and drag and drop them into your project. Adding transitions is a snap. We added a music track, and some overlay text, then exported it, and converted it to a flash movie using ffmpeg. I then used the JW FLV Media Player to embed the flash movie into my son’s WordPress blog. In all, it was surprisingly pain free.

To view our finished result, which we are quite proud of, but hope, most importantly it helps encourage more pledges, visit Brandon’s site: Brandon Walks for Life.

Last week I completed the creation of an online yearbook for our son. We homeschool him and create a portfolio or yearbook each year sampling his work and the progress he’s made. This year I decided to create the yearbook online, saving paper and storage space, and allowing us to share his work with family and friends.

I created the site statically using a combination of CSS, Javascript, HTML, and Flash. You can view the site here. I thought I would share in this post, the libraries I used and what issues I had ensuring it worked cross-browser.

Technologies/Libraries Used

First, on most pages I have a photo that is rotated with a Polaroid type effect applied to it (see photo below). I could have done this in an image editor, but choose in this case (for a low-trafficked site) to use Javascript. I used the Instant.js javascript library to accomplish this effect. It’s very easy to use and I had very few problems with it (see below).

Second, to create the photo galleries used mainly in the Art and Field Trip sections (and in the World War II Day example below), I used the PostcardViewer from Airtight Interactive. Once again, I found this very easy to use. I already use Google Picassa to manage my photos, and PostcardViewer can be downloaded as a Picassa template.

Note: I highly recommend you try Picassa if you aren’t using it already.

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