Tips & Tricks: Creating better textures using CSS3 gradients

Jan 30 2013
Graphic Information is Everywhere

There are two fundamental elements that make up our world and how we understand the information in it: Texture and Color Gradients. These two elements play a vital role in telling us all sorts of information like whether an orange is ripe or whether a button on a website is clickable. In the world of the Web, texture is commonly known as “noise”. Despite it’s prevalent use around the Web, producing noise has always been cumbersome, clunky, graphic intensive.

Creating Noise

Noise is often used to help users distinguish important information from less important information. It is also used to give a website a unique feel or effect...

Responsive Website VS Mobile Application

Jan 22 2013

As more and more consumers make smartphone purchases, the arguments around the “New Web” escalate. The most heated being the debate about mobile apps VS responsive design. Which is best?

Native mobile app pundits all heard Mark Zuckerberg loud and clear when he made his famous statement about going to a native mobile app vs HTML5...

Giving Bugzilla a monster makeover.

Jan 3 2013

We use Bugzilla a lot here at RD2. It is a great tool for tracking website and app issues, assigning tasks, and all round helping us get projects from Development to Launch. Unfortunately, especially for those of us that are more design oriented, it’s lack of aesthetics is almost unbearable...

Ford Canada Blog Phase 2: Going Further

Oct 29 2012
Ford Canada Blog Phase 2: Going Further

Looking to create a central hub for the entire country, Ford Canada engaged RD2 and Sonic Boom to help craft a unique and beautiful vehicle for delivering content and spreading conversation around the Brand to the audience...

YouTube Browser-Based Uploader with PHP

Aug 21 2012

Download Example

RD2 wanted to add something special with our 3rd iteration of building the World Traveler Internship website. We created a very unique feature within the application process...

PowerbyProxi Recharges Its Website

Jun 20 2012
PowerbyProxi Recharges Its Website

The country of New Zealand never ceases to amaze us. They are always blazing trails and setting new industry standards in everything they do. They are home to the top competitive sailing team in the world, Emirates Team New Zealand, thought leaders in cloud computing and data management, makers of the best coffee we’ve ever had, and have the brightest minds in the world...

PHP Weather widget using Google’s weather API

May 17 2012
PHP Weather widget using Google’s weather API
UPDATE 08/28/2012

Google has abandoned their weather API and are now using wunderground.com Weather API. I will be creating a new tutorial showing the API in action very soon. Check back to the RD2 blog for updates. Please disregard the below code.

With the recent launch of the Elbowz Racing team website, we decided to add something a little bit fun, but still applicable, into the project: a self-maintaining weather widget using Google’s weather API and PHP...

Detecting the Kindle Fire with PHP

Mar 8 2012
Detecting the Kindle Fire with PHP

There are many reasons to detect the type of platform your user is viewing your website on. There are articles all over the internet about detecting iphones, ipads, android devices, etc. But when it comes to detecting the Kindle Fire, things can get a bit strange. To get the user’s platform, you will want to use the PHP method, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] (see below).


This will return: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-us; Silk/1.1.0-80) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.16 Silk-Accelerated=true

As you can see, there are mentions of Mozilla, Apple, WebKit, Safari, etc...