The Initial Offering

We’ve launched with only a handful of beautiful choices; however, if you don’t find the one you need today, remember that we’ll be adding to this list on a daily basis (hint hint, authors).

Airmail

“Airmail is a professionally built and designed custom HTML email template! Perfect for just about anyone – usable for everything from newsletters to eFlyers to whitepapers.”

Atlantica

“Atlantica Mail is a professionally built and designed custom HTML email template; perfect for just about anyone – usable for everything from newsletters to eFlyers to whitepapers.”

CleanMail

“CleanMail is a simple yet sexy email template package with 5 different color schemes!”

TheClub

“theClub is a darker color two column template geared towards the nightlife! With this template, you get the original CSS as well as the ready-to-mail inline CSS .”

Quantum Email Newsletter

“A modern & clean HTML email template; comes in three colors: green, blue & pink.”

So if you Have a Moment…

Pay a visit to our newest category on ThemeForest, and considering picking up a new template. On the other hand, if you’re an author on ThemeForest – time to create some tables! There’s money to be made!

• Follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to the Nettuts+ RSS Feed for the best web development tutorials on the web.

We’ve improved performance scores on Google Chrome by 30% since our current stable release, as measured by Mozilla’s Dromeao DOM Core Tests, and by 400% since our first stable release.” – Idan Avraham and Anton Muhin

Windows Only

Expectedly, Google Chome 4 is currently only available for the Windows platform. Reports have come in that it works just fine with the latest release of Windows, despite the fact that it only specifies XP/Vista as being currently supported.

Download Google Chrome 4 Beta

But I’m a Mac!

In that case, you can still download and install the developer preview of Google Chrome for Mac.

• Follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to the Nettuts+ RSS Feed for the best web development tutorials on the web.

Update: Winner Announced

Congratulations to Jason Wendell for being randomly chosen as the winner! Comments have now been closed.

“With Magic Mouse, Apple has brought Multi-Touch technology to the desktop mouse, giving you a new and more intuitive way to interact with your computer. Just as with iPhone, iPod touch, and MacBook Pro, the Bluetooth Magic Mouse adds gestures and swipes to the usual clicks to bring more functionality and help you get more done with less effort.” – via Amazon

How to Enter

Quite easily; simply make a tweet linking to your favorite tutorial on web development, whether it be from Nettuts+ or any other site. At the end of your link, add the #nettuts hash so that we can track it. Then, on Monday, November 2nd (US Central Time), I’ll sort through the tweets and select the winner! Anyone in the world, other than staff members, are eligible to enter!

Note: Envato staff and those who have written more than two articles for Nettuts+ are ineligible to enter.

• Follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to the Nettuts+ RSS Feed for the best web development tutorials on the web.

Join Tuts Plus

For those unfamiliar, the family of TUTS sites runs a premium membership service called “TUTSPLUS”. For $9 per month, you gain access to exclusive premium tutorials, screencasts, and freebies from Nettuts+, Psdtuts+, Aetuts+, Audiotuts+, and Vectortuts+! For the price of a pizza, you’ll learn from some of the best minds in the business. Join today!

• Subscribe to the Nettuts+ RSS Feed for more daily web development tuts and articles.

Join Tuts Plus

For those unfamiliar, the family of TUTS sites runs a premium membership service called “TUTSPLUS”. For $9 per month, you gain access to exclusive premium tutorials, screencasts, and freebies from Nettuts+, Psdtuts+, Aetuts+, Audiotuts+, and Vectortuts+! For the price of a pizza, you’ll learn from some of the best minds in the business. Join today!

• Subscribe to the Nettuts+ RSS Feed for more daily web development tuts and articles.

How Were the Winners Selected?

Each day last week, the community was able to vote on their favorite video tutorial of the day. At the end of the week, I compiled these votes and determined the five most popular. At this point, I worked with a few members of the Envato staff to decide upon the order.

5th Place: How to Save Time and Code Less in CodeIgniter with Doctrine

Prize(s) Awarded

• $100 cash, paid via Paypal.
• 3 month Net Plus subscription.

4th Place: How to Turn a Boring Search Input into a Snazzy Search Suggest with jQuery

Prize(s) Awarded

• $100 cash, paid via Paypal.
• 3 month Net Plus subscription.

3rd Place: How to Test CSS Rules with Firebug

Prize(s) Awarded

• $100 cash, paid via Paypal.
• 3 month Net Plus subscription.

2nd Place: Submitting a Form with Mootools

Prize(s) Awarded

• $100 cash, paid via Paypal.
• 3 month Net Plus subscription.

GRAND PRIZE WINNER: Create a Content Slider with jQuery

GRAND Prizes Awarded

• $500 cash, paid via Paypal.
• 12 month Net Plus subscription.

Thanks again to everyone who entered. It was difficult to narrow the list down to 25, and once again to only 5! If you were selected as a winner, please contact nettuts@tutsplus.com with your Paypal email address to claim your awards. Well done!

Thank you, Screenr!

A huge thanks goes out to Screenr! for sponsoring this competition. I was lucky enough to discover this wonderful new service within days of its launch, and immediately fell in love with the simplicity and conveniences that it offered. So don’t forget; if you need to promote your new company with a video, or simply want to record a quick tutorial for your blog, Screenr will get the job done!

• Follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to the Nettuts+ RSS Feed for more daily web development tuts and articles.

With 5 sites now offering Plus content, $9 a month gives you universal access to each – a little under $2 per month for each site. This moves us closer to our goal of offering the best possible low-cost, high-quality education to creatives. If you’re not a Plus member, don’t miss-out: you can join now.

If you’ve ever been interested in learning more about motion graphics, now is a great time to start. Plus members can log-in and immediately download a collection of AE project files and a two-part tutorial from AE legend Lloyd Alvarez. To read more about Ae Plus, click here. Not a Plus member yet? You can learn more or join now.

Join Tuts Plus

For those unfamiliar, the family of TUTS sites runs a premium membership service called “TUTSPLUS”. For $9 per month, you gain access to exclusive premium tutorials, screencasts, and freebies at Nettuts+, Psdtuts+, Audiotuts+ and Vectortuts+! For the price of a pizza, you’ll learn from some of the best minds in the business. Join today!

• Subscribe to the Nettuts+ RSS Feed for more daily web development tuts and articles.

New Logos

Our marketplaces were looking a bit tired in the visual department. After all, these are sites by a company whose middle name is ‘web design’! So we set about reinventing the wheel with a whole new look, starting from the top with new logos. The illustrations were updated by the super talented Kai Loon and we are usung the wonderful open source font MgOpen Modata…

New Interface

Interface builds don’t get much more complicated, detailed and spectacularly difficult than the new Envato Marketplace design. Fortunately our marketplace front-end dev is Stuart Richardson, a web developer who laughs at problems that make other web developers cry in desperation.

Stu has built a massive interface complete with menus that give us space to grow, a grid view/list view browse, a better site switcher to flick between the five marketplaces, a slick new look and feel and a wildly improved interface. It is easily the biggest, hardest, and I believe best set of websites we’ve built to date …

New Look’n'Feel

Our new look and feel doesn’t stop at the interface either. Thanks to the always talented Derek Herman and my new design wingman here at Envato – Rod Blackney – we have new blog designs, a new marketplace wiki, new Twitter backgrounds, new PollDaddy skins, new badges, a ton of new banners, new Envato Mail and a brand spanking new audio player (courtesy of Lance Snider)!

Also a big thanks to Liam Mckay, Aaron Lynch and Kai Loon who all helped me with concept designs for the new marketplace look and feel. I needed help giving the sites a fresh look, and these three guys delivered!

Features, Features, Features!

… In 1972, a crack commando unit of programmers was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum security stockade to the Melbourne underground. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as ruby developers. If you have a site, if no-one else can build it, and if you can find them, well you still can’t hire the A-Team – because we already did.

And thank goodness for that, because for 3 months our crack ruby devs John, Erin, James, and Clinton have been pulling 10-14 hours shifts, coming in on weekends and doing whatever it takes to make the marketplaces … awesome! Here’s what they built …

1. Follow Authors

A little beta feature we’ve added is the ability to follow authors (yes, inspired by Twitter!) and view their latest files on your homepage. If it works well we hope to do much more with this baby!

2. Huge Forum Improvements

We’ve brought an all-new UI including first reply and last reply, better styles in the posts, email updates from forum threads, the ability to see threads and posts by a user, and a new recent threads sidebar. And we’ve hooked up the marketplace blogs and forums so you can chat about blog posts on the forums as well as see the latest news and announcements from inside the community!

3. Author Dashboard

If you’re one of our thousands of talented authors, you’ll appreciate the new Author Dashboard featuring latest comments, useful links, upload queue information, and latest author-only announcements!

4. Search Within, Search by Tags, Search by Attributes

We have been working hard to improve our search and packaged in with the launch are the ability to search within categories, portfolios, collections, search by tags, search by attributes, search users, search the wiki from support and many other search improvements!

5. File Types, Tags and More Item Page Improvements

Item pages are the core of our marketplaces, so we spent a lot of time making them more awesome. We’ve got a new audio player, inline video players for smaller videos, a "More Items By" section for authors to show off other items, a "File Types Included" area which we’re building icons into and enhancements to comments, tags and attributes!

6. Improved Extended Licensing System

Marketplace Manager Cyan has been working hard to improve our licensing system on the marketplaces and today we introduce our new Regular and Extended options allowing usage in all types of projects at more affordable rates. She has also written out plenty of helpful explanations of how and when to use different licenses in our marketplace wiki.

7. Collection Browsing, Rating and ‘Related Items by’

We’ve been slowly making collections more and more important. In this release you can now browse all public collections, as well as rate them! We’re now using collections to provide buyers with a way to find related items by showing top rated collections containing an item right on the item page!

8. New Wiki Housing Much More Information

Today also sees the launch of our new marketplace wiki at Wiki.Envato.com. It contains tons of articles, tips and FAQs about the marketplaces and gives us a storehouse to build a comprehensive knowledgebase about how to get the most out of the marketplaces!

9. Flourishes

… And there’s so much more! From multiple weekly features on the homepage to new smileys, a better rating widget to username checks on the sign up page, process bars to guide you through processes like signup and depositing to fields to allow users to show off social network profiles, more RSS feeds to Facebook pages, and lots of little features, flourishes and fixes!

Goodies #1 – Free Web Icon Set by TurboMilk

To help celebrate the launch we have a couple of goodies to giveaway. First up is a free set of 25 web icons in 3 sizes created by Eugene Artsebasov and the illustrious Turbomilk team!

Check them out over at GraphicRiver…

Goodies #2 – Marketplace Wallpapers

While the marketplaces are all clean lines and fresh highlights, we wanted to work in a bit of grunge for the blog designs. So Rod put together these super cool wallpapers which we reused in our Twitter and Blog designs. Grab one for your desktop…

What’s Next?

With the structure all in place we’re going to be working on tightening up the new layouts as well as fixing any little bugs (report any you see here). But more importantly we’re working on some big features to improve buying: shopping carts, and one-off purchases (so you don’t need to go through the deposit process).

We’re also going to be releasing not 1, not 2 … but 3 new marketplaces by the end of the year. Beginning with 3dOcean – our marketplace for 3d models, textures and all things three dimensional. Look out for that in October!

In the meantime on behalf of everyone on the team, we hope you enjoy the new design as much as we did building it!

Join Tuts Plus

For those unfamiliar, the family of TUTS sites runs a premium membership service called “TUTSPLUS”. For $9 per month, you gain access to exclusive premium tutorials, screencasts, and freebies at nettuts+, psdtuts+, and vectortuts+! For the price of a pizza, you’ll learn from some of the best minds in the business. Join today!

• Subscribe to the Nettuts+ RSS Feed for more daily web development tuts and articles.