Post Archive

› May 31, 2002

Photoshop 6 Primer

TrainingTools.com is offering free access to their Photoshop 6 online course. It's not super indepth, but I learned a few things clicking through, and the price is right.

› May 28, 2002

Content Editable

Lon from Q42 writes:
We have “released” the code for the contenteditable feature for Mozilla as part of the Xopus open source project.
It's very easy to use. You just have to say:
<div contenteditable=true>you can edit this</div>
or by script of course:
document.getElementById(“someID”).contentEditable = true;

Subpixel Smoothie

For those lucky enough to have LCDs (and Macs) check out Smoothtype. Anyone have a review they would like to share?

› May 27, 2002

The Bottom-line of Prototyping and Usability Testing

GUUUI - The Bottom-line of Prototyping and Usability Testing

› May 26, 2002

CSS tool for Mozilla

CaScadeS is a WYSWYG style sheet editor for Mozilla's Composer. Like many of Mozilla's add on tools, installing is super easy. Lots of screen shots to show how it works, although I haven't yet tried it, or tested the validity of the markup it produces.

› May 25, 2002

29

Ugh, last year of 20's starts today. Several folks share this day including Miles Davis and Yoda. I am also not very pretty, although unlike the others I have yet to make a significant contribution to our culture... maybe next year. For those in the states, have a great 3 day weekend.

› May 24, 2002

Yahoo! : Security In Web Services

A recent article in DDJ summarizes a talk given by Yahoo! chief scientist Udi Manber regarding ongoing and emerging security threats that Yahoo! is facing from users and abusers.

The title of the piece, "Security In Web Services: An Evolving Threat Model", may mislead some readers who are accustomed to thinking of "Web Services" in terms of XML-RPC, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. Manber spoke instead of attacks against / exploitation of more traditional services provided by Yahoo!, including auctions, financial news sites, Yahoo email accounts, and personals.

Manber quote : "The kind of countermeasures that we're doing are pretty weak. If you compare it to cryptography we're a hundred years behind."

› May 22, 2002

Opera Bookmarklets

Giuseppe De Rosa writes:

“Hi. This note is just to focus your attention on the latest release of Opera Browser: 6.02. This version lacks every support of the bookmarklets technology!!! They disable it in the final build (1101). The latest enabled version is 6.02 build 1087 (beta). I thought you had to know this... bye gdr”

This is news to me, honestly I hadn't been using bookmarklets in Opera too much, so testing with prior versions for bookmarklet compatibility isn't something I've done to much extent. Upon downloading the latest version, I can't seem to find any bookmarklets that work, even the very simple ones. Perhaps they have some reason for disabling javascript in bookmarks? (assuming this is what was done) Any corrections and/or further information would be appreciated.

› May 19, 2002

Wisdom from the Industry?

In this New Architect (formerly Web Techniques) article, several prominent industry types provide speculative technology forecasts :

"By Design : Wisdom from the Industry"

Resize px font here in win ie

I am experimenting with a simple little script (key.js) which allows Win IE users to resize px specified fonts. Just press the plus and minus keys to toggle between two font size settings. Someone who really knows js could make this much better (dave?).

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› May 17, 2002

Creative Commons

James from ordinary-life.net points to Creative Commons, possibly a more suitable answer to the question of how designers can contribute to the freely available pool of open source wares. Looking good

D-Kitchen

Oh, that's who did the most beautiful opening sequence for six feet under: digitalkitchen. Am very much liking this type of flash interface, super quick and clean and simple - high class via sharp use of white space. Maybe takes a hint from Relevare, clearly a different enough concept though. The about section instructs users to "use arrow keys to scroll text", one might argue that the need for this type of instruction indicates that it's not intuitive enough - I would argue with that theoretical person however, possibly the most elegant way around less than optimal scroll bars, or scrollbars that require a re-learning due to the fact that they don't match the user's os gui scrollbars. *smack* (swats at the run-on-sentance bug). (link via k10k)
Side note: When racking brain for name of Relevare site I googled for “revelare” and found it via an older post on this site where I misspelled it the same way... that's really bad.

Flash Guru

Nice! flashguru.co.uk is back as FlashGuru's MX 101, the flash mx knowledge base. Kudos Guy Watson.

Font sizing

While doing some errands I stopped by the new Apple store in Atlanta and drooled over the various g4s, powerbooks, ibooks, imacs and cinema displays. A corny buy powerful inertia forced me to try viewing this site via osx ie5.1, and I discovered that the current 80% font sizing seems to require a magnifying lens. Perhaps using percentage font sizing is plauged with some of the problems that using ems encounters. Jeffrey Zeldman has put his elegant writing style to work on the problems with using ems for font size reducing, a very worthwhile read. The need to rework this site's design and markup continues to be hindered only by sweeping allergy attacks, perhaps some coffee will help.

› May 13, 2002

Back in town

Back from excellent trip to NYC, spent time with old buddies and visited grandma for mother's day. Back home now, and just in time for the 2002 5k Contest

› May 11, 2002

More CSS Goodness, and More

Scott Andrew has posted some explanations/tutorials on block level vs. inline elements (yesterday, today, and more to come?), and has posted descriptions on the use of the same, and even goes so far as to show how to convert an inline element into a block level element and vice versa. Remember: "CSS is for separating structure, not content, from presentation."

Also of note today is Dan's release of his rotating image PHP script at hivelogic.com. He plays fast and loose with his code and is always willing to share.

› May 10, 2002

Going to Print

Eric Meyer has written an in-depth article for A List Apart "CSS beyond the browser - Going to Print". Learn to create adept print style sheets so that a "printer freindly" version of your site is not needed. Auto insert link urls for the printed page, deal with font sizing, hide certain areas from the printer, and much more.

› May 9, 2002

[webgraphics] New Comment Posted

A recommended improvement to WebGraphics which all of us getting email notifications will appreciate: Instead of the above, let's have a useful email Subject line instead, like

[webgraphics] New comment on 'Why DHTML Will Win'

And here's how you do it. I was on the verge of posting this question on the MT forums, when I saw someone beat me to it. Serendipity.

Why DHTML Will Win

Thanks to the realization of web standards, DHTML is poised to fulfill its potential as the interface tool of choice. So says the ever-germane Steve Champeon in a thought-provoking article that gives hope to Flash ignoramuses like myself.

Call for Open Source Icons

Brent Simmons is making a call for open source icons. This brings to mind qbullets (not open source), which sparked our own micro icons (open source but only 3) and also michael angeles mini icons (14 of em!). While it's nice to remember these, I suppose it's a bit different than what Brent is asking for, which I believe is true out and out ico files? Maybe any bitmap will work. One of the benifits of not distributing icons open source (as in the qbullets) is that you can dictate consistent usage. Perhaps if a site was setup with categories for various icon types (file, exit, open) and icon designers could submit their icon works individually based on intended use and then group them by theme... Let's think how we can help the need, it sounds like it could be fun.

› May 8, 2002

Mrs Eaves OpenType

Emigre has released their first OpenType format font with Mrs Eaves Open Type.

“This format makes it possible to incorporate typographic features, such as small caps, ligatures, old style numerals and lining numerals, all within one font file, thereby simplifying font management and usage. (Accessing these features requires an application which supports OpenType features, such as Adobe InDesign 2.0) ”

(via typographer)

Markup Properly

Brain Upgrade Initiative by codebitch makes an important case for the use of valid markup. I might even suggest that this is of a higher importance than "intended use markup" (if I can make up a phrase) - meaning that table based layouts which validate might be better than non-valid css based layouts. Of course there is a spectrum of errors we are capable of introducing. A typo which invalidates a page can be much less damaging than improperly nested markup (both are invalid, but one has more impact). (link via Meryl)

CSS Bug Ring

The CSS Bug Ring explains CSS browser bugs and provide demo examples of advanced CSS behaviors. Good stuff.

› May 7, 2002

Thundercats Ho!

At long last a beta download of Brian's Thundercat system is available for download. Thundercat is php/mysql based, developed for weblogging, and has some sweet and unique features such as: auto rss feed generation by category (and more), and link redirect to keep track of link rot. Did I mention it uses MySQL for storage.

Golive 6 Tutorials

There are some interesting new features to GoLive 6. I have not used the product myself, and I am not sure how well it is suited for creating css based layouts, but features such as the site diagram tool, photoshop text variables, and photoshop image links seem wise for large production efforts. You can read about them in these Adobe Golive Tutorials

More Beautiful Sites

Since we seem to be on a kick of turning the Web-Graphics readership on to aesthetically great work, I thought I'd take a chance to once again give propers to my two favorite design firms, Kleber, whose clients include The Designers' Republic and NinjaTune, and Hi-Res!, creators of the Requiem for a Dream site, Amon Tobin's site, and donniedarko.com, a site I spent an hour exploring today after seeing the film last night. These two firms are prolific in their output and in my opinion consistently deliver some of the finest design on the web.

› May 6, 2002

Hello Mr. Snail

Very neat closeup photos and a nice clean look (although table based) at this web studio site

Blogdata Tutorial

Flattery is nice, but tutorials are even better. David Gagne has created a detailed Blogdata tutorial, intended to help MoveableType users get the most use out of all the posting specific features.

› May 4, 2002

This is a test post

This is a test post sent via w.bloggar. I think this is going to work nicely. Now if only it had some handy entity placement buttons or regex replacement. I'm able to use w.bloggar and other blog apps like it now that I have upgraded to MoveableType 2.1 and made sure that the required modules are installed.

Casting a Critical Eye on Mozilla RC1

I myself haven't yet gotten around to grabbing Mozilla RC1 (I'm still quite happy with 0.9.9), but had, until now, heard nothing but positive reviews. In a post to his weblog titled "Mozilla RC1 - A major disappointment", Kevin A. Burton (of Reptile fame) recently had some unflattering things to say about RC1. The line that might stick in people's heads :

Will there every be a Mozilla 1.0 or is it just going to be asymptotic to 1.0?

To those who are using RC1 right now and anyone else who has followed the rollercoaster ride of Mozilla development ("good" and "bad" milestones) What do you think?

› May 3, 2002

MX Decompiler

Open some of those new Flash MX files to take a look at sounds, images, movie clips, and apparently even actionscripts with Sothink SWF Decompiler (via newstoday)

Open Office

Open Office is just what it sounds like, an open source development of an msoft-office-like suite of tools. Happily a OS X port of Open Office looks to be nearly done. (via tijs)

Doing Our Part

Have a weblog? Help out textism with a google bomb as such: Verisign

Moveable Type 2.1

MoveableType has released version 2.1, which is mostly a maintenance release. Interesting highlights include a full implementation of the Blogger XML-RPC API and the metaWeblog XML-RPC API so that tools such as w.bloggar, BlogApp, BlogLet, BlogBuddy, Jericho, etc can be used to post to your weblog. I belive the entity switcher which Dave created to auto convert often used characters to their proper entity equivalents has also been folded in:
“Added NoHTMLEntities option to the mt.cfg option to specify whether HTML::Entities should be used in encoding characters into entities.”
Find all the goodies in the 2.1 changelog.


dreamweaver vs. golive

Dreamweaver MX marketing versus GoLive 6 marketing attempts to clarify feature compairison tables released by both Adobe and Macromedia. Maybe a bit defensive on golive's behalf, but interesting non the less. I have used neither applicaiton for several versions now, but remain interested.

› May 2, 2002

thisisamagazine

Check out some beautiful work at this is a magazine (via whatdoiknow) First issue is up now, next issue comes out on a certain birthday later this month. Shame on me.

Illustrations

We need to post more links to inspiring works... I’ll start off by pointing you to Rachael Cole’s site. I had the pleasure of working with her and she taught me lots of web design tips. Now she’s getting her MFA, and doing some fantastic illustration work in the planet’s best city.

› May 1, 2002

Complex Times Demand Greater Simplicity

Although the article Complex Times Demand Greater Simplicity is targeted towards advertising, the promotions for simplicity seem to have a broader audience. Perhaps in an effort to battle the unfocused attention tendencies mentioned in the article, the author used lots of bullet points, which as a reader, seems unfortunate. While I agree that simplicity is an fantastic goal, and seems to be gaining a larger qualified acceptance, the methods of getting there may be the most complicated of all. (link via xblog)

Dreamweaver MX CSS and XHTML

Rachel Andrew has written tutorials on Dreamweaver MX and valid (X)HTMLand Dreamweaver MX and external CSS for positioning. She wrote an article on Best Practices with CSS in Dreamweaver MX.