The games available for free download from February 3 – 10 include Jewel Quest 2, The Scruffs, and Built A Lot.

Beyond that free offer, Amazon’s beta site provides a catalog of over 600 games, all available for free on a trial basis and at $9.99 or less for purchase.

Amazon acquired Reflexive in late October for an unspecified sum. In addition to its own Web portal, Reflexive has been known for selling Windows, Mac, and online games from outside developers on hundreds of GameCenterSolution Affiliate Web sites. Reflexive has developed its own games, too, including Xbox Live Arcade title Wik & The Fable Of Souls, and the Ricochet series.

Title screen from Jewel Quest II”At Reflexive we have always prided ourselves on maintaining good relationships with everyone in the industry, and are excited that Amazon shares that philosophy. We intend to provide the best distribution platform anywhere, and to continue working openly with all the participants of the casual games space. Together it is our priority to continue this inclusive attitude going forward,” wrote Reflexive CEO Lars Brubaker, in a blog post in October.

“What this means for all you developers is that it’s time to get excited about your future with Reflexive,” he said. “It means we’ll be able to expand our distribution network to include Amazon’s amazing distribution channel. With Amazon we will bring a huge new group of customers into play.”

With Amazon opening its beta site yesterday, Reflexive’s Web site remained open for business today. A search of Reflexive’s arcade by Betanews showed that the Reflexive site still offers dozens of games for free download, including the three Amazon currently offers.

However, Reflexive’s “top ten” game entries on the PC side are each priced at either $9.99 or $19.99, with the exception of Totem Tribe — a game that Reflexive is offering for free on a trial basis but at $9.99 for purchase.

Reflexive’s GameCenterSolution site for developers remained online today, too, continuing to offer developers 40% of the net receipts for sales of their games on the Reflexive Arcade and GameCenterSolution partner sites.

I’m pleased to announce immediate release of new WordPress theme based on famous Kubrick and inspired by new Scoble theme – VIP Mate (actually theme css was ripped from it)

Benefits: Fast, Light, Middle size fonts, Easy reading, ideal for MFA Blogs or regular blogs. Has embedded Adsense Sidebar Widget – all you need is to enter your Publisher ID.

Later i’m going to release some other similar themes with other colors. Feel free to use and distribute it but please retian my credits in footer.

Demo Website: Home Repair & Improvement Blog

Download VIP Mate

At the beginning of each year, the factory R.S. Owens & Company initiates a particularly important manufacturing order – the American Film Academy Award statuettes “Oscar”. 75 tin statues covered 24 – carat gold. Six weeks of work. 15 stages of production.

© Scanpix

The Pixel Awards announced their 2007 nominees today. The sophomore year of the web awards competition saw a nice increase in quality website submissions.

The Top 5 nominees were named in each award category, including Agency, Commerce, Green and Non-Profit. Along with an array of personal websites, many agencies participated in this year’s call for entries ** Big Spaceship, Cuban Council, Digital Pulp, PUSH, Red Interactive Agency, RDA International, RESN Design Studio, ROKKAN, The Vacuum Design and WHITTMANHART, to name a few.

A full list of nominees and categories can be found at The Pixel Awards website (www.pixelawards.com).

Remember, voting for the People’s Champ will be open from September 17 through October 19. This is your chance to vote for your favorite nominee. You get to vote once a day for 33 days so be sure to cast a vote everyday. Winners will be announced in November.

Special thanks to our unparalleled sponsors — Go Media, Harvest, LuckyOliver, MailChimp and MediaTemple.

About The Pixel Awards
Established in 2006, The Pixel Awards take a fresh look at the best on the web. The Pixel Awards are the pre-eminent website award, annually honoring 20 compelling sites that have shown excellence in web design and development. Sites are submitted in 20 diverse categories, including the unique Geek and Green categories. Any site can enter. Only 20 exceptional sites will win.

here is the tiny interesting article i’ve found this morning:

When you are into online business, a website is essential for online presence. One major marketing issue in the design of website is the color of the website. The color should be chosen in such a way to match the general mood of your visitors and the theme of your website. So, it becomes essentials to know the psychology of colors and use them in your website.< ?xml:namespace prefix ="" o />

• RED is associated with love, passion, danger, warning, excitement, food, impulse, action, adventure.
• BLUE is associated with trustworthiness, success, seriousness, calmness, power, professionalism.
• GREEN is associated with money, nature, animals, health, healing, life, harmony.
• < ?xml:namespace prefix ="" st1 />ORANGE is associated with comfort, creativity, celebration, fun, youth, affordability.
• PURPLE is associated with royalty, justice, ambiguity, uncertainty, luxury, fantasy, dreams.
• WHITE is associated with innocence, purity, cleanliness, simplicity.
• YELLOW is associated with curiosity, playfulness, cheerfulness, amusement.
• PINK is associated with softness, sweetness, innocence, youthfulness, tenderness.
• BROWN is associated with earth, nature, tribal, primitive, simplicity.
• GREY is associated with neutrality, indifference, reserved.
• BLACK is associated with seriousness, darkness, mystery, secrecy.

When choosing colors for your site it is important to employ contrasting or sympathetic and complementary color schemes. It is important to identify your market and ensure the psychological message you are trying to get across with the rest of your site design, words and images is complemented and enhanced by the appropriate color scheme.

Source

We’ve proud to share Arthur de Pins link to you – very much interesting and picant illustrations. 

Awesome table coding!

The S500 in mysterious green

Sony Ericsson released three new cell phones that aim to capture on the still hot thin handset craze. Two of the new handsets should make it to North American shores while one model features two dazzling colors rarely seen in the mobile world.

The S500 in spring yellow

The Sony Ericsson S500 features a 2-megapixel camera with a 4x zoom, a media player (though not Walkman-branded), a speakerphone, a memory card slot and stereo Bluetooth. The S500 features a slider design that is 0.55 inches thick and is available in the very unique hues of mysterious green and spring yellow. We’re not sure what’s mysterious about the green but it is quite lovely from what we can tell. Also look for color themes and illuminations that change to reflect the passing seasons and the change from night to day. The quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900) phone should be out in North America by the third quarter of this year.

The T650 in midnight blue

Somewhat related to the S500 is the Sony Ericsson T650. Sporting a more common candy bar design the T650 is 0.55 inches thick as well but comes in midnight blue and a shade called growing green. I guess the latter isn’t mysterious as the green on the S500. Features include a 3.2 megapixel camera with a 3x zoom, a media player, a memory card slot and stereo Bluetooth. It’s also a 3G phone but it supports only the 2100 UMTS network that’s not used in the United States. The triband (GSM 900/1800/1900) handset also should see the light of day by the third of this year.

Finally, the Sony Ericsson T250 is low-end camera phone that offers a VGA camera, a speakerphone, text and multimedia messaging, an FM radio and basic organizer applications. The simple candy bar form factor is 0.51 inches thick and sports a metal skin that comes in black or silver. Two dualband versions will be available (GSM 900/1900 and GSM 850/1900) and it should debut in Europe and North American the second half of this year.

The company also introduced the P1 smart phone and a new Bluetooth headset, the HBH-DS970.

Source: ExtraTech

• Keep it simple. Keep your markup as simple as possible, which is often simpler than you may think at first.
• No layout tables. This is obvious to anyone who has not been living in a cave for the last several years. Unfortunately, the caves seem full of Web developers. Tables are meant for marking up tabular data, not creating layouts. Use CSS instead.
• Avoid classitis. Does every element you want to style with CSS have a class attribute? They almost certainly do not need to. Use descendant selectors instead.
• Structure and meaning first, presentation later. Focus on semantics and document structure while you are writing markup. Save the presentational thinking for when you are writing your CSS.
• Know all HTML elements and attributes. Go through the Index of Elements and the Index of Attributes in the HTML 4.01 Specification. You will probably make some new acquaintances. Read up on them and learn when to use them.
• Validate, validate, validate. The markup validator is your friend, not your enemy. Anybody can make typos or mistakes. The validator will help you catch them and improve your markup.

What would your most important guidelines for writing better markup be?

[via 456 Berea Street]

Below you may find 8 valuable colour resources on the Web. By motives of inspiration bit

1. Palette Grabber
   This is a very useful Firefox Add-on. It installs a Palette Grabber icon in Firefox status bar. Once you click on this icon it grabs the colours from the website in your browser window and you can export the site’s colour palette to Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, or Flash
2. Color Palette Generator
   This is an indispensable resource if you want to come up with a website colour palette that matches a key image that you want to use on that site. All you need to do is enter the URL of that image and it will generate a colour palette that matches the image – on fly. As an extra bonus you get two palettes – “dull” and “vibrant”, 5 colours each, in hexadecimal colour codes.
3. Color Schemer Gallery
   This website alone contains several practical resources:
   • Scheme Gallery – full of beautiful colour schemes (unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to browse the gallery by Categories);
   • Colour Forums where you can participate in interesting colour-related discussions and learn from experts;
   • Colour Schemer Blog
   • If you’re a Mac user, then you can install a great Widget for your Mac’s Dashboard: ColourSchemer Galleria. I’ve installed it on my Mac – and absolutely love it.
4. ColorBlender.com
   This online tool allows you to choose a colour using an online colour picker (in RGB format) and it automatically generated 5 colours that blend well together. The generated palette can be downloaded to Photoshop or Illustrator.
5. Colors on the Web
   This is another website with helpful colour and inspirational colour resources (note that it’s a new site so some pages are still work in progress):
   • Colour Schemes that you can browse by Categories (Corporate, Elegant, Fun, Kid, Monochromatic, Modern, Retro)
   • Colour Info, Colour Meaning, Colour Tools< , Colour Forum/li>
6. Color Blender
   Here you can pick two colours of your choice, specify the number of midpoints you’d like to see. The palette will generate a palette that contains the colors you input as well as the requested number of midpoint colors, and the hexadecimal values of those colors.
7. COLOUR lovers
   I’ve already talked about this site in my How to Get Inspired post, but it’s a must see site that had to be included in this list
8. Daily Colour Scheme
   This site sports a shiny new web 2.0 look, and is still beta. So far it’s collected 14 colour themes, but they are worth checking