SpyreStudios - Design and Development Magazine

An effective mobile office is essential for productive traveling designers. There are plenty of reasons why you need a mobile office: besides introducing more traveling into your life, you have easier mobility with your design work, increase your focus, get more quality work done, and simplify and enjoy your life more as a result of it all.

But there are no doubt problems that come up while using a mobile office: distractions, finding good places to work, no internet access when you need it, and so forth. How do you avoid these issues? Well, today’s your lucky day, because this article covers how to overcome common mobile office problems.

There are a plethora of tools out on the Internet today that help designers and developers alike. Many times however, we believe they fall short because “we can handle it ourselves” without the extra cost of such tools.

Conversely, we find ourselves spending quite a bit of time trying to complete such tasks which respective tools would reduce the time spent by a fraction. With this being said, within this article we get our hands dirty and discuss several reasons as to why freelance designers should use invoicing tools.

There’s a ton of solutions and apps out there for creating surveys. I’m sure that at some point in your career as a web-designer/developer, many of you had to either build a survey app from scratch or find a solution to create and implement a survey on a client site. Not an easy task.

I recently had the pleasure of trying out Survd, a small and simple survey app created by Matt Ward. Today we’re giving away licenses to 3 lucky readers of SpyreStudios!

Let me guess… you’ve left your Christmas shopping to the last minute? Well, if that someone you haven’t bought for happens to be in the creative industry (such as a designer, illustrator, developer, video producer or photographer) you’re in luck!

This article is full of gift ideas for the creative person in your life, most of which are digital, meaning you don’t have to wait for delivery times, and your gift will be ready to hand over just in time for Christmas!

The article is spread over three parts depending on your budget. We have a “Budget Gifts” section, a “Mid-Priced Gifts” section and a “Breaking The Bank Gifts” section.

“Cloud Computing”, it almost rolls off the tongue doesn’t it? If you believe the hype, cloud computing is cheaper, safer and easier than any other form of application hosting, it exists in the magical land of ‘cloud‘ where nothing ever goes wrong, in fact, to say it’s reliable is almost an understatement.

However the truth, can often be far different from that which many of the ‘cloud computing‘ or ‘cloud hosting‘ providers would have us believe. The cloud is a complex, multifaceted beast, with varying levels of complexity and specialty, not to mention radically varying prices. All told we would do well to consider just what makes up this ‘cloud‘, when it really is a great solution, and just where we may just be falling for the hype.

Spam is a widespread issue with many and all websites that accept user input. Whether be it a contact form, a comment system, a forum, or any other type of service, you are subject to spam. Ever since the fight against spam begun, hundreds of prevention tools have arisen, with some failing and some succeeding [...]