Post Archive

› December 27, 2001

Palm Desktop X

Got a Palm? Running OSX? Then you're sure to be hoopin' and hollerin' over the release of Palm Desktop X. Grab it and get n'sync.

› December 23, 2001

More blogging tools...

(Blogging being just one potential use of tools which are all basically CMS and/or community tools; it may be a subject for debate how these differ from more generalised CMSs.)

web-graphics.com was instrumental in getting me interested in Moveable Type, which I'm very happy about. The only blogging software I knew of before MT was Blogger, Userland and Greymatter. I don't know whether it reflects a speed-gathering trend, or whether I'm just becoming more attuned to the "Powered by..." small print at the bottom of sites, but I'm noticing new players with increasing regularity!

Two new ones (to me):
Brand Ben Brown
"Ben Brown is a one man Web application powerhouse. He brings his expertise building community software, content management, XML data storage and manipulation, and high-end Web applications to your needs.
[...]
Brand Ben Brown provides free software to the personal homepage community. The basic versions of all the off-the-shelf products are available for free to people who run non-commercial, non-profit, personal Web sites."
I saw this at designforcommunity.com

Drupal ("Drop" in Dutch -- phonetically at least.)
"Drupal is a content management/discussion engine suitable to setup or build a content driven or community driven website. We aim towards easy installation, excessive configuration and fine-grained maintenance capabilities. Due to its modular desig n Drupal is flexible and easy to adapt or extend. Drupal is written using PHP and MySQL. The source code is available under terms of GNU General Public License (GPL). "
I saw this at www.iaslash.org/ia
"ia/ news for information architects"

› December 20, 2001

wedding

Will be married to most specialist woman ever on the 28th. Leaving town on Saturday, hopefully some of the other folks here will pick up the slack. If you want to wish her the best, please feel free to email her.

› December 18, 2001

font dispenser

Interesting fonts with different inspirations are displayed in an intriguing interface. This list of fonts to download is via gmtPlus9

IE 5.1

Super-sized gratitude goes to whatdoiknow for finding an update to the mac os9 version of IE and writing about it. I guess that scrollbar problem I wrote about earlier isn't so much of a problem (now that I've figured it out of course).

› December 17, 2001

design changes

yup, I'm messing around with the design here a bit more, nothing major just updating the theme. The above photo is of ice cubes. I'm not liking any of this, back to the drawing board.

navigate in time/context

very interesting navigation method captured in a small java file, seems to have the tufte-like "multivariate information" going for it: Idea Line. Unlike many experimental navigation systems, it does seem to feel natural to use, and the learning curve is small. via flazoom

impermanence

brushstroke discusses thoughts on impermanence and copyright and even flirts with the law. The discussion reminds me of the unintentional permanence of usenet postings, 20 years of which have recently been made availalbe through google. Here is a posting in which I actually revealed it was my first day using newsgroups! And in case you're wondering, LGC stands for La Gloria Cubanas.

coloring contest

dollarshort is having a second coloring contest... what fun! I'm a new regular reader of dollarshort, so I enjoyed viewing the first contest's entries.

› December 16, 2001

alternate interfaces

andy is working on a new version of our old dhtml based card interface for the search engine, this time in director. A version of andy's work will be demo'ed here soon pulling various rss feeds to start.

upgrade

I've upgraded to the new 1.31 version of moveabletype, so nice and easy to upgrade. Also thought it might be time to switch out the page style and colors. The photo above is actually a closeup of moss from my backyard (which I didn't realize was so jungle-like until I brought it into photoshop). And in an unrelated personal note, I have 11 days of singlehood remaining.

pixelview

interviews with webdesigners at pixelview. via b&r

› December 15, 2001

easy fix

bluerobot provides easy fixes and a good explination/demonstration for the Flash of Unstyled Content (FOUC) phenomenon which occurs with win IE5+ on pages that @import stylesheets. via glish

dark animations

sort of like an episode of redmeat, but less happy go lucky - it's a series of bizzare but fascinating animation studies done mostly in flash: Modern Living. via dotpsd

› December 13, 2001

throwing in the towel

webstandards.org decides to post a message in bad taste rather than a quiet period of inactivity. Seems needlessly destructive.

pardon the dust

Trying to fix a Mac IE5.0 bug which prevented scrollbars from showing up until re-size (sometimes). The bug seems to be gone now that I've removed absolute positioning in the left and right columns. The fallout is that the rest of the css has to be cleaned up to work in the floating column world. I believe everyone is readable except for mozilla at this point. Certainly not done optimizing here.

› December 12, 2001

design rant

Owen from the noodleincident has put together a worthy read: Design Rant.

› December 10, 2001

flash text arc

Noel wraps dynamic flash text on an arc and gives controls to prove the point. Now if we can only get him to release a few of those flas.

More Photoshop 7/X

For even more screenshots of Photoshop X (or '7') and ImageReady running under OSX, check this out. Of particular interest is this shot, which shows something very new -- a built in file browser for your hard drive. Very slick Adobe. Very slick...

DBeef

A fun for/by designers w/ issues site: designbeef.com. (via tsod)

› December 8, 2001

photoshopX

exciting screenshot via metafilter

New Extension Manager

This may be old news, but I never saw this mentioned on any other web site. Last week Macromedia updated their Extension Manager to 1.3 for Win / Mac. Fixes some nasty menu display bugs. Download it here.

› December 7, 2001

image parse favelet

I've been hunting down developer bookmarklets and favelets for the next webgraphics feature article, but today I went ahead and made my first bookmarklet. It grabs all images from a page, and displays them along with their height and width and (in IE) filesize. Just drag the link below into your linkbar, or bookmark it and use anywhere:
imgParse
I'm posting this here, but it's not tested much at all - as of this post, only IE 6 and Moz 0.9.5 on Win2k. Comments on compatibility, suggestions for improvements, etc will be greatly appreciated.

› December 6, 2001

rtfm

Over the last 3 years I've somehow forgotten to read the CSS2 specs, how did that happen? Hey they're actually illustrated and broken out into nice chunks!

› December 5, 2001

puppy

And here's the puppy mentioned in the last post.

Personal Note: A dog rescue

For the last week myself and herself have been nursing a lost pit bull puppy back from starvation and parvo into jumpy happy healthy puppyhood. If we did not already have a small zoo, this sweet creature would be an ideal companion. All of this has brought a new level of understanding about pit bulls and the difficulty of placing them in good homes. Visit and support the Pit Bull Rescue if you can, I'll post a photo of puppy this evening.

› December 3, 2001

Flash Font Metrics

Interesting font measurement technique in flash. via slorp

› December 2, 2001

ahh, line height

Like taking off a belt that's too tight, the relief of increased line height has been implimented. If you've been here before, you may need to click on the little font-sizer buttons (the A buttons above) to see the results. Other forthcoming improvements include a fix for Mac IE5's tendency to not provide scrollbars until refresh, and stylesheet switchouts for browsers like Omniweb which aren't happy here.

› December 1, 2001

Mr. Clean

Things are almost all cleaned up here. I found zeldman's XHTML:Guidelines a handy reminder that this stuff isn't so hard. Just have to clean up a little more with the Moveable Type templates, maybe spray a little deodorizer around, and we'll be ready for company.