I have been using the Little Snapper screen capture app for well over a year now to capture screenshots of our Joomla Templates but for some reason I have never really looked into the options it provides for sharing images.

It's probably easily explained by the fact that I (like I assume most people do) form habits in their workflow that hard to break. My usual workflow for working with Little Snapper is to take all of the screen shots of the template once the local version has been finalised, and then export the images to fireworks where I crop and resize them. 

My Music to Design to selections tend to be a little (and unapologetically) electro-centric but over the last few years I have been trying to widen my scope and one genre that listen to regularly are movie soundtracks. I love watching intense and intelligent movies and love them even more when they have beautiful, intense and sublime soundtracks.

I know that the whole one page parallax design meme is getting a little old and that there are certainly some great examples of the style implemented in live websites, but I really like the implementation here by Cultural Solutions.

Apart from the subtle and yet powerful way they have implemented the parallax I love the textures and judicious use of css3. This is certainly one of my favourite designs for the year.

There is a screenshot after the jump but it doesn't really do it justice - so make sure you check out the live site as well.

There are some tracks that I seem to be able to listen to while designing that never get old. Of course it depends on my mood but for the most part the tracks listed below could easily be put on repeat and I would never get tired of them - well I haven't yet at least.

Work is progressing nicely on our June Joomla template release and while it is still a few days off launch I thought I would take some time out from coding it to show you what we have in store. The Element template is a colourful building block type design that will feature some subtle patterns fused with bold colours to create a versatile and flexible Joomla template for you to use in pretty much any situation.

You can see the full screenshot of the work in progress after the link. At this stage I'm hoping to have the Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 1.6 template ready for download early next week which should bring us back closer to our desired release timeline for our monthly template releases.

As promised yesterday, here is the next Joomla template from our back catalogue to be ported to Joomla 1.6. Newstream was released back in July 2010 and is an elegant magazine or media portal that has been used by Joomlabamboo club members for sites as diverse as traditional news portals, real estate sites, travel directory and even a food website.

You can check out the original demo of the Newstream template on our template showcase or club members can head straight to the download area and grab a copy.

Please note that two extensions featured on the demo - CaptifyContent and the JB BB Code plugin (For the twoline menu items) are yet to be ported to 1.6 but we hope they will be available in the next few days.

As a reminder you can check the status of any template by checking out the Version information page on the Joomlabamboo Knowledgebase and also follow JB Activity on twitter to keep apprised of all Joomla template and extension releases.

RedShop is a relative new comer on the Joomla ecommerce scene but it's offerings are genuinely impressive. I had some direct contact with redShop when we built the Shop Ignition Joomla template back in March and I really liked what I saw.

The scale of the extension is incredible and the templating system has a good balance between separating the design from the code, which makes theming the shop a pleasure for the non coder.

The following interview with Ronni from Redcomponent has been on the back burner for a little longer than I would have liked but I hope you will agree that it makes for some good reading.

While we wait for the Tienda ecommerce extension to make the leap to Joomla 1.6 I thought I would knock out a Joomla 1.6 port of the Simpleshop Joomla template. Even without the Tienda or K2 overrides it's an elegant and minimal Joomla template and may make a nice simple base to build your next Joomla 1.6 project on.

Club members can download the template from here or if you need a refresh of what Simpleshop looks like check out the Simpleshop demo.

After finally getting our May Joomla template out the door last week, it's time for us to put our heads down and start focussing more on porting some of the Joomla templates from our back catalogue across to Joomla 1.6.

By far one of our most popular themes over the years has been Avanti and so I am very happy to announce that it is now available as a Joomla 1.6 Template and quickstart package. 

The next templates to be ported across to Joomla 1.6 will be Simple Shop - without Tienda and Virtuemart support, Ecolift, Newstream, Cultivate and Powerplay. Eventually all of our Zen Grid framework based templates will make the leap so if the theme you need ported isn't on the list hold tight - or bug us int he comments to move your template up the list.

For now club members can download the Avanti files from the Avanti download page.

I know I only just posted the notice regarding the availability of the Joomla 1.5 version of the Hub Joomla template but I'm happy to announce that the Joomla 1.6 version of the template and the quickstart are available now also. 

Members can download both packages from the Hub download page.