I had an interesting chat with a few colleagues of mine yesterday, and it was on the subject of the "front end dev". The two colleagues in question were a designer, and a good all-round developer, each with 10 years experience in their respective fields. So they've been through the mill.

The subject of JQuery came up, and after a little rumination on things, we kinda agreed that what the web needs, is a new specialism, the front-end developer. So were we right? If you're a dev, is now the time to go for that niche and specialise, if you're a designer, are you going to have to get used to your finely crafted CSS getting butchered by some nightmarish hybrid creature, neither a designer or a fully fledged dev? (A were-dev?)

More...

Hot on the heels of Editing JPEG Photos Without Recompressing - Part 2, I've had a few days to ponder, and I'm back with more thoughts on editing JPEGs without recompression, and maybe with a conclusion. Where we left off, we'd determined that the JPEG compression steps that we'd need to deal with, in decoding order, are:

1. Huffman decoding
2. Run-Length Encoding
3. Zig-Zag scan
4. Quantisation
5. DCT transform

We're aiming to do as little of the above as possible, so to affect the image compression as little as possible (if at all).

More...