One of the reasons I haven't made the leap from OS 9 to X is the lack of good font handling applications. In the Classic environment, ATM was my choice as the best font management utility, but since Adobe has chosen no longer to develop ATM, I have been forced to find a replacement.
Enter Insider Software's FontAgent X.
Flazoom points to lots and lots of flash based infographics from designers in Spain (a testament to the work is how readable I found the information to be, without knowing the language). These nice examples of flash infographics brought me to wonder if Tufte had addressed the use of Flash for infographic purposes. I was very pleased with his response, partially quoted here:
Among the goals of good information design, maximizing local usability is not the highest--although you want to do the best you can to reduce adminstrative clutter and inconvenience. More important is the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content; making high-resolution comparisons; showing process, mechanism, dynamics, causality, explanation; and capturing in our displays some of the multivariate complexity of the world we seek to understand. If achieving these higher-level goals takes us to inconvenient display techologies, so be it.
Brian Tol of wiremine is visually explaining how to scale content to a user's interest level. If I understand it right, this would create quantiative methods for successful task completion across multiple timescales. Got 3 hours? We've accounted for that; Got 3 seconds, we've gotcha covered there too. Also interesting is his application of this methodology on existing web sites.
Two little workarounds specifically for Jaguar and Photoshop 7 are available from Adobe. A keyboard shortcut fix which disables Jaguar's command plus tilde (app window switcher) so that the default photoshop shortcuts for these keys work again: "selecting the image composite in the Channels palette or selecting the master channel in the Levels and Curves dialog boxes". The other utility is labled Ignore EXIF Color Space plug-in, according to the introduction on Adobe's site some digital cameras (which ones?) send erronious EXIF data, specifiying that an image has an sRGB colorspace, when it may have another. As the name implies, this plug-in forces photoshop to pop open a dialog box in which you can choose the appropriate color profile. Links via MacNN.
I've wanted to put in a little note about phpclasses.org, lots of php goodies are there, available through a bank of mirror sites. The site is free although it does require subscription and does include banner ads. Normally I wouldn't bother with such a resource, but I have, and in fact I've requested email updates whenever a developer posts a new class. Here's an interesting one that just came in, it's a php class for searching text in pdf files. I find it refreshing to see the little nuggets of development as they are added to the phpclasses database, nicer than the larger "solution" efforts one finds in freshmeat or hotscripts. One day I'll learn how to code for myself, it's just a matter of persistence.
Jaguar specific fixes are made to the updated NetNewsWire Lite, the best free desktop rss reader for os x.
I thought I'd post a photo of my daily breakfast, to stretch the limits of off-topicness.
I present to you Forwarding Address: OS X. A nice little weblog dedicated to covering the transition to OS X not just from earlier versions but from Windows and other Unix flavors.
Dive Into Mark has collected no less than 101 Jaguar related links for those interested in all things OS X 10.2
There are a lot of undocumented functions in OS X 10.2 that are being tipped over at Mac OS Hints, including the region screen capture (Command Shift 4), command line screen capturing, and compiling MySQL.
Mockerybird has a nice listing of many of the current Amazon API applications. A great illustration of the potential of opening up your companies database and services to the general public. Besides Google and Amazon, what other companies have opened up?
We are very pleased to announce the addition of James Buckley of ordinary life to our authoring group! That makes two more excellent authors to add to our list, welcome Dan and James.
Photoshop has been quietly updated to 7.0.1. I installed it last night with nary a problem.
The highly esteemed Dan P. Benjamin has just been added to the webgraphics crew, and we are honored to have him aboard. Also, if you're sitting on an employment opportunity, your timing may be just lucky enough that you could hire him, buckets of talent there if you can get to him before someone else does.
Liorean was nice enough to send along two interesting sources for bookmarklets:
woodster (added to the reference links) and stichpunkt (in german, so you may wish to translate).
I found a color picker that is pretty interesting, but wasn't on Nate's extensive review of color pickers. Probably not new, but might be of interest. A. Porter Glendenning's color picker allows you to pick two colors (R, G, B, C, M, Y) and then allows you to see the colors in between the two you've selected or see all the tints and shades of the colors you've selected. Uses web-safe colors based on the color cube.
Whoops, upgraded MoveableType and needed to fix the search.
Liorean's ViewStyles bookmarklet is now available at this new location. Do you have Javascripting skills? Are you adept at fixing issues that Mac IE might be having? Liorean could use your help.
An interesting Flash based rss reader which is free for usage/customization. Lots of work has been done in the Flash/RSS arena, even some I don't understand. Thanks to jdb cyberspace for the latests updates on this popular mix of technologies.
In trying to install Active State's "ActivePerl" for a client with a windows server, I ran into a very frustrating problem with getting things configured to work. The install went through without a hitch, and perl was obviously running, but no dice through the web server. After a good nights sleep, I found the appropriate documentation for my problem here. Starting at the ActivePerl homepage, it takes about 7 clicks to get there, assuming you know where you're going. The documentation is split up into various non-documentation choices plus the actual documentation, from here you can navigate to what seems like the appropriate area, only to find that there is a FAQ which might have your answer. Three levels into the FAQ, the usefull stuff appears. Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy with the ActivePerl product, and the actual install/config was a piece of cake (once I know how), it's finding my way through the documentation which made me pull out my hair. I get the distinct impression that the folks at Active State were simply trying too hard, I also think that even one usability test of their documentation with one person would have raised a big red flag.
Greg Friedman has created a Visual Basic macro that will export your Windows Outlook contacts into a single vCard so that an iPod (or other application which supports multiple contacts in a single vCard) can read them in. At the time this post was authored, one could type "multiple addresses vcard outlook" into Google and press "I'm Feeling Lucky" to get the page mentioned above; thank you google (and Greg).
This page has links to self extracting zips of the Win16 versions of the core fonts (mac users, stuffit will unzip this). The direct link is: ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/developr/drg/truetype/corfonts.exe
Digital Web Magazine interviews Jeffrey Veen and Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path and Christina Wodtke writes about using controlled vocabularies to improve findability in Mind your phraseology!
Here is a good article on The history of the Apple logo. Via LucDesk
FutureFarmers has released a new book/CD-ROM called Harvest which features seven years of their work. Via What Do I Know.
Eric Meyer, CSS guru, has a page which explains how to style lists with cross-browser finesse.
Make bookmarks: the CSS-Discuss Email List Searchable Archives are now available to the public. Given the volume on this list, and the many experts who have devoted time answering questions, this is a great place to find answers to your CSS questions.
Peter Marquis-Kyle noticed that Microsoft's TrueType core fonts for the Web as of yesterday are no longer available for free download. Any insight as to why on earth they would stop offering them would be appreciated. My thought process:
Already installed everywhere? - ok, not a reason to stop distributing
Too much bandwith used? - ha, not compaired to the security update bloatware that folks download everyday
Felt to much like open source? - maybe.
Thoughts?
The publishers of the Before and After printed newsletters, which are now history, are still publishing their graphic design tips on the web. They have a little presentation that demonstrates how to create logotypes using ligatures, linked letterforms. This came via James' Ordinary Life.
If you run a Mac OS X client or server, you might already run Fink, the tool that helps you compile and run Unix applications on your Mac. I've used it to install MySQL. If you aleady run Fink, you might be compelled to also grab FinkCommander, which was released this month. FinkCommander allows you to access Fink to install Unix apps (on my machine they're installed in /sw/bin/) without having to go to the terminal window. So far I've had good results with it. Installed the Lynx and Links terminal web browsers in a scant minute or two.
A handy way to get info on any of the special characters, it's a special character converter from the very helpful saila. Easily the most handy way I've seen to access info on the many many characters (pulldown), very efficient. Only problem seems to be for browsers that don't support some specific encodings a question mark appears... given that the pulldown form factor makes it so usefull, I'm not sure there's a workaround besides bothering to create a crossbrowser dhtml pulldown widget that displays gifs (yikes).
Good things come in pairs, like the next and newest addition to our authors list: Nick Finck, Editor in Chief of one of our favorite magazines digital web. A hearty welcome to our two new authors, we look forward to their contributions.
Somehow we've managed to garner a new author to the crew, Michael Angeles of studioid and ia slash. We are super pleased to welcome him aboard.
A website offering font faces intended for flash (read - pixel fonts), via the Atlanta Design List
Simon Willison has gathered some key differences between the new working draft for XHTML 2 and the current 1.1 version, for those too impatient to wait for Appendix A to be written.
Surfmind is visiting currently, we are bringing the womenfolk to a Lake in South Carolina for watersking, kneeboarding, and tubing, all new activies for Nathan.
Previously I mentioned a downloadable guide for setting up Mac OS X with the pre-loaded PHP scripting language and MySql database (and other web server related configuration thingies). If that was somewhat interesting or relevant to you, then you'll definitely want to know that Mark Liyanage has a whole slew of useful install packs and instructions for OS X server setup.
Want a quick no-hassle interface available for your clients to fill up a database with data? The GNU licensed DataBase Interfaces Kreator might be the quickest solution if PHP/MySql works for your situation.
Another benifit of subscribing to email lists like CSS-Discuss: Discovery of Mark Newhouse's excellent resource for CSS that gets happy in Netscape Navigator 4.x Real World Style. Excellent information sorely needed. Link has been added to our resources column here on wg for handy reference.
Now that I've figured out how to start checking my email-list address again without getting overwhelmed by the sheer volume, I get the pleasure of discovering things like Dan's CSS Playground, which has some usefull CSS related notes and examples.
Make some poetry and win Eric's book. A good deal from consolation champs. Via zeldman.
