Adobe has acquired a raft of new web tools in a bid to make its services even more accessible to web designers.

The organisation has bought Nitobi, which makes PhoneGap and TypeKit. It announced the acquisition at its recent Adobe Max developer and designer conference.

Experts say that the new tools will help Adobe to extend its services beyond its Flash Player technology into other areas of web design such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

PhoneGap allows designers to create web apps designed exclusively for use on mobile phones. It is an open source programming tool.

Danny Winokur, general manager at Adobe, said: “PhoneGap is a fantastic solution for developing a broad range of mobile apps using the latest web standards, and is already integrated with Dreamweaver CS5.5.

“It’s a perfect complement to Adobe’s broad family of developer solutions, including Adobe Air, and will allow us to continue to provide content publishers and developers with the best, cutting-edge solutions for creating innovative applications across platforms and devices.”

Meanwhile, TypeKit focuses on web-based typography. Subscribers to the service can use TypeKit fonts on their web pages.

Adobe already offers a font licensing service, which it can now extend to allow flexibility for display and digital fonts thanks to TypeKit’s capabilities.

Lea Hickman, vice president of product management at Adobe, said: “Typography is a fundamental design element and something that designers want to be more creative with on websites – especially as these websites now need to be viewed on mobile devices.”

I have to say that I am a proud and happy user of Firefox, I keep it open all the time while I’m at work developing web sites, at home I never betray it with other when surfing the net, and I never miss the occasion to advice a friend to download it and start to use it.

Today, after one year and a half from the last mayor version,  Firefox 3 has been released promising substantial improvements.

Memory Leak issue
Probably the most well known negative aspect of Firefox is that after a while that the browser is running, it starts using excessively memory, this is know as memory leak. Fortunately in this new release the way how Firefox manages the memory has been improved and now it’s noticeable a huge difference in terms of overall speed.

User interface
A lot of work has been also done to improve the user experience adding new functionalities. It is more easy to access the bookmarks thanks to a new system of star rating, tagging and search functionality. The address bar is now a lot more flexible allowing users to use it not only to type in URLs but also to search websites already visited or search for bookmarks. The zoom re-sizes all elements of a viewed website (not only the text as it was in previous versions) this improves user experience for those with particular accessibility needs as it renders, scaled up or down, pixel perfectly, all websites independently from how they are developed.

Offline web applications
Switching Firefox 3 to “work offline” it is possible to use web applications without connection, data will be saved on the computer to be later synchronized on the server once an Internet connection has been detected. This is a new way how to use web applications and it is still in process of standardization within HTML 5 specifications.