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Do people still read books?
Posted on February 15, 2005 | Filed Under Books, Internet
I know it sounds like a stupid question, but I mean it. I can’t remember the last time I sat down with a good book and did nothing but read for hours. That’s not to say that I don’t read all the time, I do, but usually it’s from the Internet, not from a book.
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The Iconfactory: Icons in the Macintosh Industry
Posted on October 20, 2004 | Filed Under Internet
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.
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Safari supports new CSS properties; other browsers behind
Posted on October 16, 2004 | Filed Under Apple, Internet, Mac OS X, Technology
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.
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The power of CSS
Posted on September 30, 2004 | Filed Under Internet
I’ll have a lot to say about CSS over the next few weeks. Not only have I redone this site using a lot of CSS instead of traditional HTML tags, but the company that I work for also redid its Web sites, Macworld and MacCentral, using an all CSS design.
For an idea of the power of CSS, take a look at the Zen Garden. Choose one of the different designs on the homepage and instantly the look and feel of the site will change. How useful is this? Take any industry and think about what you could do. What if you really celebrated Christmas and decorate the office — now with a click of a button, you can decorate your Web site too.
Of course, there are more practical uses for wanting to make a wholesale change to a Web site. For instance, a font change of size or color can be made with one small change to a style sheet instead of trying to go through a whole site, archive, etc. to change HTML font tags.
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Trying out some new software
Posted on September 25, 2004 | Filed Under Internet
As you can see the site has changed quite a bit in the last few days. I’ve added quite a bit of stuff, like the left hand sidebar that shows the most recents posts on the blog, a category listing of the different posts, a calendar to see the current months post, a search and RSS feeds.
I have also worked with CSS to enable little treatments on the site like the dotted underlinging of links and changing color when you hover over them. Now, I am finally getting my photos online using an application I found today called Galerie. If you use iPhoto for your images and want to post them on the Web, this application is the best I’ve seen anywhere.
It was incredible simple to use and has more user-configurable features than any other plug-in or application — best of all, it’s free.
To make an album, just start the application — it launches iPhoto for you — and choose the iPhoto album that you want to use. Then it’s just a matter of changing the size of the images and thumbnails and Galerie looks after everything else for you. I tried to use the built-in upload feature, but I didn’t have any luck with that. No matter, I just uploaded them directly into the ftp and everything works.
I wish it had a feature to make an index page, but I can do one of those too. This is a damn cool application!
Update: Seems I made a mistake about the application’s ability to produce an index page of all the albums. I updated the blog.
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