Du Vien Trang is a Freelance Web Designer / Developer based in Scotland. This is his portfolio, blog and his digital playground.

Don’t they say good things come in threes? Well, regardless, we’ve heard from multiple sources that Google will launch a new product on Monday called “Friend Connect,” which will be a set of APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites.

MySpace launched Data Availability on Thursday, a competing product. Yesterday, in a suspiciously timed pre-release announcement, we heard about Facebook Connect, another similar product (with a nearly identical name to Google’s Friend Connect).  read more »

PHP's next edition, V6, includes new features and syntax improvements that will make it easier to use from an object-oriented standpoint. Other important features, such as Unicode support in many of the core functions, mean that PHP V6 is positioned for better international support and robustness.

IBM has written an interesting article on this.

Dan from Inigo has kindly emailed me a link for a Drupal alternative admin panel called Rootcandy by Sotak. It is a customisable admin template that tries to tackle usability issues by rearranging the admin panel interface. Latest version now integrates with colour module (as used on the Garland theme) so users can change the colour of the admin panel to whatever suits them.  read more »

It has been almost three years since the release of OpenOffice.org 2.0. During that time we've seen community fragmentation and frustration resulting from Sun's heavy involvement with the office suite's development, and even a third-party online version that provides editing and collaboration features. Now, the open-source office suite is back with a new 3.0 beta release, ushering in a handful of major enhancements, broader file format support, and a solid batch of evolutionary new features. Ars Technica takes the new beta for a spin to see if our productivity increases.

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