I’m not sure how we managed to not realize this was happening for such a long time, and I’m very sorry to all our users that this occurred. Plainly we need better feedback mechanisms in place. In the meantime we’re adding automated testing to the Favourites feature to make sure at the very least that same issue doesn’t crop up again.

So in summary, favouriting is all working again! Go forth and Favourite!

Packed with WordPress, Site templates, CSS, Javascript, Motion projects, PSD’s, 3D Models and textures, Vector files, TUTS+ Premium Tutorials, and vouchers from MediaTemple and RockablePress!

The bundle is on sale for 5 days, starting now. This is a limited time offer that ends on Tuesday, August 24 at 12:00pm Melbourne, Australia time (check the current time at Envato HQ!). Visit the Birthday Bundle website & purchase the bundle now!

What’s in it?

Open

WordPress Theme – $30

96 Display

Site Template – $15

BrandMedia Modern

PSD Template – $10

Graphic Designer Newsletter

Email Template – $10

DesignerWannabe

Site Template – $15

3D Coming Soon Mini Placeholder

Site Template – $15

Photoshoot Creative Template

Site Template – $15

The Archer WordPress Video & Movie Player

Video Player – $12

Digital boxes preloader

Preloader – $3

Unity3D Starter Pack

AviaSlider – jQuery Slideshow

Javascript – $12

Griddler Pricing Grid I

CSS – $4

Twitter Widget Pro

WordPress Plugin – $12

AJAX Contact Form; Extended

PHP Script – $5

Simple User Counter

PHP Script – $3

jSocial

JavaScript – $4

Reveal Transition

Motion Graphic – $2

The Elegant Spin HD

Project File – $15

3D Identity

Project File – $12

The Shatter

Project File – $15

Sketch

Project File – $8

Incubus Logo

Project File – $10

Onyx Logo

Project File – $8

8 Grunge Backgrounds

Graphics / Backgrounds – $5

Stylish Mosaic Background Wallpaper

Graphics / Backgrounds – $1

6 Photoshop Actions

Add-ons / Photoshop – $2

Flyer / Postcard Template

Design Template – $5

Sexy Vector Laptop

Vector – $2

Tileable Leather: Woven Texture 3.0

Texture – $2

Shiny Bubble Backgrounds

Graphics / Backgrounds – $3

Lead True Type v1.0

Font – $4

Badges and Sale Tags

Graphics / Web – $3

Old TV – Wide & Normal

Isolated Object – $2

Solar Pricing Table

Graphics / Web – $3

Creative Pro Mega Pack

Design Template – $4

Smart Photo Strip

Photo Template – $3

The Newspaper – frontpage

Design Template – $6

Light Bubbles

Presentation Template – $3

21 web icons

Icons – $4

High Armchair

3D Model – $20

HDRi – 1325 Sun Clouds

CG Textures – $20

Game-Ready AWP Sniper Rifle

3D Model – $10

One Fine Day

Corporate Music – $9

Driving Far, Far Away

Corporate Music – $9

Dreaming

Ambient Music – $9

Space Sequence

Ambient Music – $11

Smoke Orchestra

Cinematic Music – $9

Space Battle Number Four

Electronica Music – $9

Coding a Complex Design into CSS and HTML

Combine Hand-drawn Art with Photoshop

How to Blend Images Together Using Adjustment Layers

Ultimate Type Twisting with Adobe Illustrator

And not to forget the vouchers from MediaTemple and RockablePress!

Visit the Birthday Bundle website, and purchase the bundle now!

Last week Adobe asked us to change our name and URL so that it would no longer contain the term ‘Flash’, which is a registered trademark of Adobe. We know that the success of our sites is about the community and content, not the names. So here at Envato HQ we’ve been busy thinking up new names and we think we’ve found a great new home for both our marketplace and our Tuts+ blog on Flash.

As of today the two sites now live at ActiveDen and Activetuts+.

The new names amend the use of the word Flash, open us up for adding other technologies and are short and memorable! To kick off the new names I thought I’d round up a few of the best tutorials and items on the sites:

Kick Ass Flash Files – ActiveDen

Without a doubt the leading marketplace for Flash files, ActiveDen has some really popular files. Here are a few of the latest:

More Popular Items on ActiveDen

Killer Flash Tutorials – Activetuts+

Though it’s one of our newer Tuts+ sites, Activetuts+ is already brim full of quality Adobe Flash, ActionScript, Air and Flex tutorials and gaining momentum with every passing week. Here’s a few of the standout tutorials:

1. Build a Fluid Website Layout
   A fluid web layout uses 100% width (and height) of the browser, floating all the contained elements into certain positions. This is opposed to fix-width layout where contents remain fixed no matter what the browser size is…

2. Create an Attractive Digital Clock in Flash
   ActionScript 3.0 is a very powerful language, capable of creating anything from simple and light utilities to full-featured desktop applications…

3. Build a Mini Golf Game with ActionScript 3.0
   In this tutorial I´ll show you how to create nice Mini Golf Game with ActionScript 3.0. We´ll work with Event Handlers, Functions and also the Timer Object which is a really cool feature in AS3…

4. Build a Dynamic Flash Gallery with Slider Control
   In this tutorial, we’ll create a gallery which displays all image files in a given directory. A slider is used to browse easily through the images…

5. Create a Shuffle Gallery in Flash Using XML and ActionScript 3.0
   In this tutorial I’ll explain how to access and use the Display List whilst creating an XML based image gallery with ActionScript 3.0 …

6. Create a Glowin Mouse Trailer in Flash
   Mouse Trailers are objects which follow the mouse cursor as you move it. In this tutorial, I’ll help you create a blue and shiny mouse trailer using ActionScript 3.0 …

More Flash Tutorials on Activetuts+

More About The Change

You can read more about the change on the ActiveDen Blog or on TechCrunch. There’s also a super long discussion thread on the ActiveDen Forums.

I’d also like to take a moment to say thanks to everyone for helping us with the transition and supporting FlashDen through three years of amazing growth and community, here’s to many more as ActiveDen!

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!

Recently our awesome Tuts+ interviewer Emil asked if I minded being video interviewed with some questions put forward by the Psdtuts+ readers. Since no-one really wants to see my enormous head on screen for too long a period of time, I asked my lovely wife and partner in crime Cyan if she’d be in on the interview and we thought we’d put up the video to help celebrate 3 years of Envato.

The Interview

So without further ado, if you’ve ever wondered about how Envato started or about who we are, I hope you enjoy this little interview of us!

Don’t like Blip.tv? View the interview on
YouTube as individual questions

Here’s to Another 3 Years!

It’s kinda hard to believe it’s been three years already! I still think of us as a startup. I can’t stress enough how thankful we are for all the readers, users, authors, buyers, and staff who have helped us these last three years. Something that’s really come home to me since we started Envato is that you don’t build great companies without lots and lots of great people. From all the positive comments we get, the good natured communities that have grown around our sites, the amazing files that get sold on our marketplaces and the kick-ass tutorials that people contribute to our blogs. I know I have a tendency of overusing the word awesome and I am guilty of typing far too many exclamation marks in my day, but hey what else can I say … it’s pretty awesome!!!

So enjoy the rest of our celebrations. I’ll be back tomorrow with some announcements of upcoming Envato sites that we’ll be releasing in the forthcoming weeks, so stay tuned!

Don’t Forget …

Meanwhiles there’s lots happening during this birthday celebration, so don’t forget to check out:

1. $300 of Files for Just $20!
   If you haven’t already taken advantage of this amazing deal, head over and grab it while it lasts! You won’t find better value anywhere! Get All The Details

2. Tuts+ iMac Giveaways & Bonus Tutorials
   The iMac giveaways are now well underway on Tuts+ and tomorrow there’ll be a whole stack of free tutorials and source files in the Tuts+ Birthday Bundle.

3. FreelanceSwitch Birthday Giveaways
   There’s Job Board subscriptions, Pixelmator, Billings, ForkLift, Freshbooks Shuttlebus subscriptions and copies of Rockstar Freelancer all up for grabs! Get all the details

It’s been almost a year since we first launched Creattica Daily and we are moving the site in this new direction partly because of larger plans here at Envato and partly simply because the blog hasn’t proven to be financially sustainable – i.e. it’s been posting losses for a very long time :-)

When Daily first launched I’d had a couple of plans for the Creattica domain, one was to create a sort of social network for creatives and the other was to build what I call a “Sessions” blog about creativity. In the intervening months both these plans have been folded into our Tuts+ plans and we’ll be unveiling a Sessions site there and a social network in the next 6 months. We’re doing this partly to consolidate a little and partly because it’s become apparent that both plans make more sense as part of our broad Tuts+ plans.

Meanwhiles this Daily blog, while experiencing a healthy growth in RSS readers (up past 7,000 recently) hasn’t really grown much in traffic or revenue. Consequently it’s been a bit of a loss maker for some time now and it doesn’t look set to change anytime soon. Since Creattica.com – our inspiration gallery is continuing to grow and has proven to be financially sustainable, it’s going to be the entire focus now for Creattica.

So today we’ve given Creattica Daily a makeover, and it’s sporting a massive 1280×1024 optimized design. In case you’re wondering this is the first time we’ve ever created a site design in this size, and it’s a bit of a test to see how people react. Less than 8% of Daily’s visitors are on smaller screens, so it is a good place to give the larger size a whirl. So we’d love to hear your feedback.

I’d like to say a special thank you to Niki Brown and Travis King for working so hard on Creattica Daily this last year and also thank you’s to all our loyal readers – thank you for all the support!