Well now you can! This new application called Bumptop has the potential to truly innovate and what they have managed to do with 3D presentation and smooth physics-based animations is startling. If you thought Vista had a clever user interface then you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The physics based animations are the most impressive in my opinion and man you could do some damage on your desktop if you were in a bad mood! Still, I’ll be interested to see exactly how this is implemented, how fast it is and more importantly what platforms it will be available on.

There’s a full video presentation of bumptop from co-creator Anand Agarawala if you want to see for yourself and the video below also shows the application in all its glory.

A truly great presentation about the art of innovation from Guy Kawasaki. Although slightly off topic for this blog I was so engrossed by what Guy had to say that I had to include it and its well worth an hour of your time if your in the internet marketing game. His comments on mission statements, venture capitalism, Apple and company mantras are at the same time insightful and very funny.

You can view the presentation over at Zentation.com.

This new ecommerce application from Tradingeye supports web standards (xhtml/css) and all pages are WCAG AAA / 508 valid. It’s built in Coldfusion (yuk!) or PHP (Yummy!) and even has search engine friendly urls. You can test it out with the all important online demo and after spending some time in the admin section it looks like the real deal.

It’s not the cheapest solution on the block but then again most other ecommerce applications have incredibly bad seo and web standards capabilities. Developers do get a 50% discount so its well worth checking out if your a web design company or developer.

www.tradingeye.com

These Ajax resource sites are springing up all over the place but I was impressed with the layout of this one. Its all very web 2.0.

www.ajaxrain.com/

I like to send some love out every once and a while and the following sites deserve a mention.

www.bubblebaby.ie

One of the nicest e-commerce designs I’ve seen in a while, I’ve always been a sucka for Trebuchet MS! The only thing that lets it down is the lack of search engine friendly urls.

www.travelingguys.com

A simply awesome website with wonderful photography and a powerful message. Here’s to the Global Awakening.

www.stonebriar.org

Many Churches are taking website design to a new level these days and Stonebriar community church is no exception. A wonderful design with excellent use of photography.

student.opendoorsuk.org

The “Open Doors” Student site is also a well thought out website and the designers have done a great job of building a christian, youth orientated website without resorting to any cliches.

This is something that despite being such an easy process I keep forgetting how to do. Therefore I have decided to document the procedure for my reference and for anyone else who would want to know.

The easy part of this process is simply copying the profile folder for Thunderbird and pasting it to another location (ideally a backup device such as an external hard drive). If you don’t have a device like this then give yourself a slap and go see the nice people at eBuyer for a reliable external hard drive.

The tricky part however is locating the profile folder in order to copy it. For Windows 2000/XP installations this should be as follows.

C:\Documents and Settings\Windows login/user name\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\Profile name\

As an example mine was

C:\Documents and Settings\Gary\Application Data\Thunderbird\Profiles\43mmzgrt.default

If your looking for something that will backup Thunderbird or FireFox automatically then check out MozBackup.

Page bloat can still be an issue these days, even with broadband and css being used for a majority of website design. This tool from Pingdom will help you analyse your total loading time. It basically mimics the way a page is loaded in a web browser and the full page test loads a complete HTML page including all objects (images, CSS, JavaScripts, RSS, Flash and frames/iframes). The load time of all objects is also shown visually with time bars which is a nice visual touch. I can see this being a very useful tool for any website developer but you can make up your mind by checking the site out below.

Try the Full Page Test from Pingdom.