Author: Stan Shinn

Need creative design but don't want to start from scratch? Logic Arts Corporation announced the availability of "The InDesign Ideabook" (ISBN: 0-9669587-5-6, $59.95), "The QuarkXPress Ideabook" (ISBN: 0-9669587-6-4, $59.95), and "The PageMaker Ideabook" (ISBN: 0-9669587-4-8, $59.95) by author and designer Chuck Green. Each 276 page Ideabook includes 315 professional-quality design templates on a dual-format (Mac and Windows) CD-ROM. The books catalog the templates, tackle the basics of design, production, and marketing, and feature related topics such as working with illustrators and photographers, choosing paper, and working with commercial printers.

Says author Chuck Green:

Re-inventing the wheel every time you start a project is a waste of billable time. A well designed template provides a detailed framework on which to build—a comprehensive styles palette, page sizes, folds, margins, placeholders, columns, gutters, and so on. Instead of spending 15 or 30 minutes to create a simple brochure, you'll spend 10 seconds. For the complex projects such as books, newsletters, catalogs, and reports, even an experienced designer will save, literally, hours.

Each Ideabook includes 19 categories of templates: advertisements, books & booklets, brochures, business & rotary cards, calendars & forms, cards, invitations & notes, catalogs & product sheets, certificates, correspondence & messages, direct mail & postcards, flyers, folders & binders, labels & tags, newsletters, packaging, posters & signs, presentations & publicity, promotional materials, reports & proposals.

Read more: New Template Collections Help Print Designers Optimize Output

Some recent stats on email delivery rates:

The highest delivery rates in DoubleClick's report are in retail, at 93.8 percent, consumer publishing, at 93.3 percent, and business publishing, at 93.1 percent success rates. The lowest delivery rates were found in financial services at 88 percent, business products and services at 88.4 percent, and consumer products and services, both just over 90 percent.

Read more: E-mail Delivery Rates Up, Click Rates Mixed

PHP 5.1 is now in beta, and introduces PHP Data Objects (PDO).

The PDO library lets you access any of an extensive selection of supported databases using a single set of functions. So not only do you only need to learn one set of functions to code to multiple databases, but you can transition an application to another database without having to change all the functions throughout your code.

PHP developers have been achieving this for years using database abstraction layers, at first homegrown, then open source, and finally official. This is the first time such an abstraction layer will be completely built into PHP, and not a layer of PHP code sitting on top of it, however.