Jim Dalrymple.com

I have been to many product launches in the last nine or 10 years, seeing everything from the original iPod to the latest Macintosh G5s, but last night I attended my first every book launch. My brother-in-law officially launched his new photo book on our province, Nova Scotia Landmarks: Portrait of a Province from the Air.

Of course, Monique and I went to support Len because we are family. After seeing the finished book, I would have gone anyway. He has worked hard on the book for a year with the book company and years before that taking pictures. During the presentation Len showed some pictures from the book and some from his private collection that aren’t in the book — overall a moving experience, especially when he showed the devastating effects of Hurricane Juan last year.

I think each Province and State has a book on its beautiful places to visit, but as the title of this book suggest, every picture was taken from an airplane. Len is an accomplished pilot himself, but a friend of his flew, while Len snapped the pictures. Samples can be seen at Len’s Web site.

So congratulations on a successful launch and good luck with the book Len.

Founded in the mid-nineties, The Iconfactory remains a favorite of many Macintosh users who value quality icon art. The Iconfactory gives away much of its work for free, giving users custom work for holidays like their recently released Halloween icon set, but they also design custom icon pieces. If you think your life hasn’t been touched by The Iconfactory in some way over the past few years, I can almost guarantee you’re wrong.

Among its large customer base, the Iconfactory counts Apple, Microsoft (Messenger, Office X), Macromedia (Studio MX 2004), Aladdin Systems (Stuffit Deluxe), Extensis (Suitcase), Matterform Media (Spamfire) and many other well-known and up-and-coming companies as customers.

But why should we really care about icons? After all it’s not like they are really important in the big scheme of things, right? Wrong!

Take a look at Mac OS X — part of the thing that people like the most and rave about is the fluid look and feel, the realistic nature of the interface. That is the Iconfactory. Actually I don’t know if they designed anything in OS X, but these people had an effect on the way icon art has developed over the past 8 or nine years. That’s a pretty substantial contribution to the industry.

Gedeon Maheux, one of the founding members of The Iconfactory, is probably one of the nicer guys in the industry. Gedeon, Corey Marion and Talos Tsui brought together some of the best artists and designers to build a business out of a hobby — not a bad accomplishment in itself.

There are many icon sites on the Internet today, designing Mac hardware icons and everything else you can think of from Star Trek to TV shows, but it’s all inspired by three guys from Greensboro, NC that call themselves the Iconfactory.

I have been experimenting a lot with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) lately to see what can be done in designing a simple Web site. If you are using Apple’s Safari 1.1 or later, you are seeing things on this Web page that people using Camino, Firefox, Internet Explorer and most other browsers don’t: text shadows. Using shadows for story headlines is nothing knew; people have used Photoshop for years to make graphics with sophisticated layers and drop shadows, but the text shadows you see on this page are all done with CSS — not a graphic in there at all.

Safari supports new properties proposed for CSS level 3. In fact, Safari 1.1 has added support for three new properties: text-shadow property, rgba() colors with alpha values, and the :selection pseudo-element.

CSS has become much more prevalent in Web sites over the past couple of years — the recent redesign of Macworld and MacCentral (where I am the online editor) makes extensive use of CSS. Using a style sheet you can easily change text size and many other elements of a Web site, including the ability to add drop shadows to any text on your Web site.

While doing this blog I set out to use CSS as much as possible. I met my goals to a great degree, although there are still a few tables; ultimately, I would like to rebuild it without using a single table.

Unfortunately for some, Safari is one of the only browsers supporting these new properties. If you don’t use Safari, you can see what you are missing by checking out this image of the Web site.

When you turn on the television in the morning and see some sort of disaster, you are glued to events, sometimes for hours. It always seems so far away — volcanoes, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes or plane crashes, you feel bad for the people that it’s happening to, but you always think “I’m glad it didn’t happen here.”

Yesterday, I woke up to news that a 747 jumbo jet had crashed at the Halifax International Airport, about 10-15 minutes from my house. Luckily the jet was a cargo plane, so it wasn’t full of passengers, but it did have seven crew members on board — there were no survivors.

Apparently the tail of the plane snapped off during take-off, leaving the pilots totally unable to control the aircraft. The plane crashed into the woods seconds after liftoff, exploding into a fireball that reportedly lit up the early morning sky.

MK Airlines, have had four planes crash since 1990, but company officials said they wanted to concentrate on the families of this crash — fair enough, but we also have to know what the cause of the accident is.

“Utter Destruction” is how the crash site has been describe by witnesses. My sympathies go out to the families of the crash.

Monique and I have been very fortunate these past few years. We have been able to travel a little and see some really nice theatre performances. We have seen 42 St. on Broadway with Melanie Griffith and a very nice play in London, England when we were there two years ago. Neither one of those compares to The Diary of Anne Frank, a play we saw last weekend in Halifax.

The cast of the play did a terrific job, drawing you into the middle of the daily struggles that Anne and her family had to endure. The woman that played Anne was so believable — you were riveted by her every word, wondering what she was going to say, wondering what the next thing to happen to the family would be.

The stage was setup to look like the attic that the families had to live in for nearly two years. During the day they had to be quiet all day — no walking with shoes on, no talking, coughing, etc. — nothing that would alert the workers down below that someone was upstairs.

After two years of hiding from the Germans, someone told the Gestapo where the families were hiding. Anne and her family were taken to separate concentration camps, where all but Anne’s father died. After the war, Anne’s father returned to Amsterdam and was given the diary that Anne kept through the years of hiding. He allowed a few people to read the diary and it was eventually published.

We took our nine and 11 year old kids to see the play, hoping they would have a better understanding of what people had to go through during the war. Monique’s parents were 12 or 13 in Amsterdam when the Nazi’s invaded and last night at Thanksgiving dinner her father told us about when the Gestapo burst into their house and took his father away. His father was detained and put into a concentration camp, but he lived. I think between the play and the discussion at dinner, the kids got some real life experiences on World War II.

I had my 37 birthday a couple of weeks ago and something struck me: I don’t feel old. I remember my Mother telling me years ago that you are only as old as you feel and I’m begining to believe she is right. It’s a shame it took me this long to listen to her on this one, but it’s okay to still learn new things.

When I was 15, 25 was old; when I hit 25, 30 was old. Now that I’m past both of those markers, I see 60 or 70 as being old. I think I’m in a pretty unique situation that not many people find themselves in — I love my job, my wife, my kids, my dog, my family is great and besides debt, everything is going really good for me.

Is there a time when I will be too old to enjoy any of those things? I really don’t think so. I remember when I was in my late 20s and some of my friends werre freaking out because they were having their 30th birthday. When I turned 30, it was no big deal to me.

As I approach 40, the thing that I think about the most is how I looked at 40 year olds when I was 20 — I thought they were ancient, on their last legs, ready to die at any minute. Yet, here I am, and I am nowhere near dead.

I think as long as I keep enjoying what I am doing and have my family behind me, I will always be young.

After years of visiting San Francisco for work, I finally made it to Alcatraz last weekend. My friend Paul, his son Loren and I were amazed with the Island prison, made famous by its many notorious inmates and the one escape attempt that, to this day can’t be proven unsuccessful.

Looking at Alcatraz from the shore of San Francisco Bay you think that the prison is not that far from civilization, but once on the Island it must have seemed world’s away. A comment by one of the prisoners on the audio tour we had said that having the city in plain view was torture in itself, reminding the inmates on a daily basis what they were missing in life.

Al Capone, Machine Gun Kelly Doc Barker and, of course, the Bird Man of Alcatraz were some of the most infamous inmates of “The Rock.” You also see how history vs. Hollywood is so wrong sometimes.

For instance, the Bird Man wasn’t the Bird Man in Alcatraz — in fact his cell was far away from any windows that I remember Hollywood portraying him with. The Bird Man actually got his reputation while in Leavenworth prison where he married a woman and started a bird company with her. He sold birds from the prison and would leave notes in the cages; sometimes the notes instructed people on how to take care of the bird and other times the notes gave explicit details on his sexual fantasies.

If you are ever in the Bay Area, Alcatraz is one of those places that you just have to see. If you plan to go, make sure you book you tickets at least two weeks in advance; that’s the reason it took me over 5 years to see it.

See the pictures from Alcatraz