Human flipbook
5·Jan·08
The human flipbook. How too much time on a group of people’s hands makes a great commercial!
fuzzyness
An experience. An experiment. A peppermint. (Me)
A whole lotta framework hoo-hah
19·Nov·07
Been interesting to follow some of the discussions that have been raging (and even baking) over the last week about CSS frameworks: are they useful? are they to be trusted? will using them corrupt the moral fabric of society?
Much of the debate has centered around Blueprint, a stock CSS framework dealing with browser-styles resetting, fonts, typography and (most controversially) an off-the-shelf ready-made grid system, though other frameworks exist, including Yahoo’s UI Library, plus the less ambitious Tripoli CSS, and many others.
One step backwards for Web Standards…
As amusing, irritating and downright annoying some of the commentary has been, it’s certainly forced me to have a think about my position on the subject. My basic thinking on this is that while some of the browser resetting and typography styles are useful (albeit if cherry-picked and adapted – I much prefer the way the Yahoo UI CSS deals with this as a whole), using the ‘easy grid’ aspects of a framework such as Blueprint, even for rapid prototyping, is pretty bad news.
One of the huge benefits of HTML prototyping is that you’re all the time actually building the website, iteratively, and writing the code as you go. You don’t want to end up with a steaming stew of messy unsemantic code (or else Jeffrey’s book will have been in vain…) that you either have to scratch and start again once production proper begins, or at best work through to remove all that nasty presentational code.
What’s the point? Especially for prototypes it’s just so easy to create columns manually in CSS, and the advantage of having complete control of the semantic situation just sits much easier with me.
Although I don’t much care how anyone else does it to be honest, each to his or her own : )
Rediscovering the grid
Ironically, peeking at the grid CSS in Blueprint has brought me back to having another look at layout grids for design in general. As a non-trained designer, grids were pretty much news to me when Mark Boulton wrote his excellent primer on the subject a couple of years ago, and when Khoi Vhin revealed his grid to all back in late 2004.
Rapid HTML Prototyping R’ Us
I now have a far greater awareness of the grid when I’m designing, but still had a bit of a hit-and-miss mentality. That was until in the last year, at Definition we started using HTML prototypes almost completely in the place of writing spec documents or preparing wireframes. Doing this has really made me aware of just how handy it can be to have a really solid awareness (and methodology) for working with grids to aid speedy prototype development.
Grid layouts made easy
So I was reminded today of 2 awesome online tools which today have just ‘clicked’ for me: Grid Calculator and Grid Layout.
- Play with the sliders of the Grid Calculator to get your basic layout framework (oops, that word again…)
- Input the values into the Grid Layout tool
- Save out the generated code to your HTML page-in-development
- Hit CTRL-SHIFT-G
Et volia! An instant overlay/background grid (with subdivisions, no less!) to make quick creation of columns in CSS nice and easy – even easier than it already is in fact.
Ironic that it took a disagreement with Blueprint’s approach to development of grids in CSS to rekindle my own interest in them, and discover an excellent workflow for rapid web page grids in future. At least it’s been of some use to me.
Mailplane
19·Nov·07
A long-time happy user of Mail for my email reading needs, I resisted the lure of Gmail for a good while, even after several early invites and abandoned trials.
I preferred the slickness of working in a desktop app, plus relied pretty heavily on 3rd party add-ons for Mail such as MailTags and MailActOn.
I also liked the tight system integration with my Mac Address Book, plus the convenience of being able to drop attachments right on the Mail icon or into the body of the message itself.
It’s only more recently I’ve actually begun to warm to Gmail, and now it’s replaced Mail as my primary email client. One reason is obviously the convenience of accessing my mail from anywhere, but another is the threaded conversation – surprisingly for some maybe, this took me a long time to get used to, but now I struggle with any other way.
But I do still miss the luxury of having a separate app, which is why I was delighted to discover Mailplane, a desktop app for Gmail. I actually like having a separate app for mail, rather than having mail open in a tab I frequently forget about or shut down. More importantly, Mailplane allows you to drag and drop attachments onto its icon or into the body of your email messages.
Hardly a necessity, but a nice addition to the dock.
Feed formatting woes
16·Nov·07
I’ve been bothered recently (only slightly) that my RSS feed doesn’t honour the formatting I’ve set for my custom fields in Expression Engine.
Although I output a custom field that is formatted with Textile, it gets output as one globulous mass of text in most feed readers. As I say, no really big deal, but…
I found out today that I simply needed to change
<description>{exp:xml_encode}{journal-summary}{/exp:xml_encode}</description>
<description><![CDATA[{journal-summary}]]></description>
in my RSS template. Now my paragraphs, links and images display as intended in RSS feeds.
Hope someone else finds that useful.
Thanks Apple…
15·Nov·07
So I’m sat here at 1 in the morning, performing my 3rd complete system restore in the space of a week, and it’s all thanks to Apple and their lovely slew of recent upgrades and updates.
1. Tuesday: decided to upgrade my brand new MacBook Pro to Leopard. System now running slow as a dog, plus many files won’t even open. I also have a very important proposal to write. Aaarrrgghhh!!!
Cue hasty restore back to my previous 10.4 Tiger system (thanks to the wonder that is SuperDuper).
2. Wednesday: decided that, although upgrading so early on my main production machine was probably a little silly, there’d be no harm in upgrading the harmless Mac Mini to Leopard, surely? What possible problem could that cause, especially as its main purpose is merely as a server for the iTunes library?
Uh oh – upgrade completes ‘successfully’ with the added ‘bonus’ that now our entire Airport wireless network has completely died, and not one single Mac in the entire house will connect to the internet.
Cue hasty reinstall of 10.4 Tiger, with subsequent software update back to 10.4.10.
3. Thursday: the news came that there was a (previously unheard of) software update for Tiger users – 10.4.11 – which mainly included the full version of Safari 3! Wahey!! One of the main reasons I was at all bothered about upgrading to 10.5 was for Safari 3 – the beta is ok but a bit buggy for certain things.
Excellent – sofware update process ensued on MacBook Pro (my important main production machine… uh oh!) On restart, the whole login and boot-up process stalls at the blue screen. Restart and run Applejack (never fails – um… apart from this time). What’s more, I can’t even boot into Safe Mode, and it won’t even let me boot from the Tiger install DVD to run Disk Utility!
Outstanding stuff there, quite an update.
Thankfully, I could boot into my SuperDuper Firewire system clone (which is actually a couple of days old… eek!), grab stuff I’ve worked on over the last few days from the MacBook Pro (as a mounted drive on the desktop), stick the newest files on the clone Firewire drive, then run a SuperDuper erase and restore to get my system back to 10.4.10, back to normality – back to stuff “just working”…
So, thanks Apple – you can stick every single one of your updates and upgrades and take them right back to Cupertino where they belong.
Coda + EE sitting in a tree
10·Nov·07
I’ve trialled Coda (Panic‘s ‘one-window’ web development app for Mac OS X) a few times now, being a long-time Transmit enthusiast.
Until today, it’s never really stuck – I just find myself heading for several apps in several windows by default, it jars with my workflow too much. Particularly, I work a good deal of my time in Expression Engine, and while there certainly are ways of working with flat files (rather than browser-based textarea templates), it’s never really gelled with me as method I can comfortably use.
Somehow today it’s all come together for me (click image for larger image):
Wow – I now have Coda saving not only my EE control panel window settings for every site individually, but also each template is editable within Coda itself, with instant preview of changes. I’m impressed – this is workflow-changing stuff!
For those fancying a go at doing this themselves, none of this is my work.
Firstly, get yourself set up with saving out templates as files. Then read Derek Jones‘ excellent post on using Coda with Expression Engine. Follow that with Chris Ruzin‘s Expression Engine mode for Coda and the job is done.
Look, I like it and if you don’t you can bugger off
10·Nov·07
I love Stephen Fry‘s review of the iPhone from his Guardian column today.
I’m paraphrasing of course, but it pretty much comes down to: “Look, I like it and if you don’t you can just bugger off”.
A joy to read – highly recommended!
Everybody’s wrong about gravity
8·Nov·07
My 5 year old daughter this morning proclaimed:
“You know, everyone’s got it wrong about gravity.”
You can’t argue with logic like that.
GarageSale
6·Nov·07
I’m currently selling my G5 and have decided to stick it on eBay to see how it goes. I’ve been putting the whole thing off – partly due to not wanting to see my beloved machine go, but mostly due to despising the whole process of placing items for auction.
I’d heard good things about GarageSale (a desktop Mac application for creating eBay auctions) so decided to give it a go.
I can highly recommend it – very easy process, nice UI, far more pleasurable experience than fighting through eBay’s tortuous auction process.
‘All you can eat’ web hosting silliness
6·Nov·07
Can’t believe the latest web hosting deal at Site5. How can they possibly fulfill that kind of commitment, let alone for that kind of price??!
750GB of storage PLUS 7.5TB of bandwidth PLUS unlimited websites for just $7.50 per month.
Crazyness. I for one won’t touch it with a bargepole – I’ve experienced first-hand the sharp end of what you get for cheap hosting (actually with Site5 too) and the experience still haunts me.
Font smoothing woes
6·Nov·07
I’ve recently replaced my ‘G5 + 19” CRT monitor’ set-up with a new MacBook Pro, adding a 22” Samsung 226BW LCD to the mix this week too.
Although mostly delighted with the new system, I was quite horrified to see bold/strong fonts looking very ugly indeed – rather like the effect of too much ink bleeding on poor quality paper. Some websites (including my own) became quite unbearable to look at.
After much searching I found the culprit:
System Preferences -> Appearance -> Font Smoothing Style
This was set to ‘Medium – best for flat panel‘ and while I agree that would appear to be the best choice for both the LCD of the MBP and the Samsung, it just didn’t look right at all.
Changing the setting to ‘Standard – best for CRT‘ did the trick, and now fonts are now back to their usual, clear, crisp selves again.
So what happened there? Research tells me that the ‘Standard – best for CRT’ option is the only one that uses straight-forward anti-aliasing. All other options add varying degrees of Subpixel rendering to the mix. Subpixel rendering is essentially a way of increasing the apparent resolution of LCD screens, by way of adding extra red, green and blue pixels.
And my goodness, did that look bloody horrible on both my LCD monitors! I don’t care whether it’s supposed to be a great effect or not, it looked completely terrible on my machine, and now it’s gone everything looks great again.
I’m sure it’s a matter of taste though – I wonder if anyone else has subpixel rendered font smoothing on LCD screens looking good?
Leopard for a fiver!
6·Nov·07
I’ve been umming and ahhhing since Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard was released a week and a half ago whether to dive right in or wait a while.
A few times I’ve nearly taken the plunge to order it (at £85) but then been put off, either by early reports of incompatibilities, or just not having the time.
So I was rather delighted today to be tipped off that I can get hold of Leopard for just over a fiver seeing as I’ve recently bought a Mac from the online store.
I’m sure everyone in the known universe knows about this, but I didn’t, and now I do.
Air Tunes and Airfoil
3·Nov·07
Previous to changing my main computer to a MacBook Pro, all our music was stored and served from a PowerMac G5. This was handy as it had loads of hard drive space and was always on, meaning that I could share the G5 iTunes library over our wireless network (via Airport Express) and play music all over the house, from any of our Macs, into any stereo system plugged into an Airport Express plug.
Replacing the G5 with a MacBook Pro posed a couple of challenges to this nice-and-easy system. For one, I might easily have taken the MBP out to a client, or the lid just might be shut.
Solution: transfer the physical iTunes library over to the Mac Mini instead. That’s always on, and although it hasn’t got a great deal of hard drive space, it’s got just enough to hold the 58GB of music files (with option to extend out to an external drive soon). We can now continue to play music from the shared library, from any Mac around the house.
However, now that means that the music files don’t get backed up – the G5 (and now the MBP) is plugged into an external drive and is backed up each night via SuperDuper but the Mac Mini isn’t. If it dies – so do the tunes.
Solution: I’ve partioned the external drive into 2 partitions – one for the SuperDuper clone, and one for iTunes library media storage. Any new music downloads or CD rips will take place on the MBP anyway, so I’m following a workflow of popping new music files onto the iTunes partition, and then sending the files over to the Mac Mini over the network to join the main library. Sounds clutsy but worth it for back up peace of mind.
Another issue is volume controls – I’d got very used to sitting at the G5 and controlling the music volume using the Apple keyboard controls, leaving the main speakers at a consistent volume. However, that doesn’t work when playing music using Air Tunes over the network. Hmm…
Solution: I’d almost forgotten about Airfoil, a handy little utility from Rogue Ameoba which allows you to transmit the sound output from any app over Air Tunes, rather than just iTunes. If you use Airfoil, rather than iTunes, to play music wirelessly from a shared library, there’s an option in the ‘Speakers’ toolbar menu to ‘Link volume to System’. Lo, we have keyboard volume control back again!
The only slight issue here is that turning the volume up this way increases the volume of system alerts through the computer’s own speakers too. That’s easy: just alter the volume of alerts in the ‘Sounds’ menu in ‘System Preferences’ and you’re good to go.
Like a dream
24·Oct·07
I’m as happy as a pig swimming in its own excrement. Why? Because the arrival of my shiny new 15” MacBook Pro has gone like a dream.
Delivery
Supposed to be delivered 31st October – actually delivered one whole week early. Huzzah!
Unpacking
Always a treat, I’ll never tire of unpacking an Apple product, and this one hasn’t failed me either. I only wish I’d had my camera handy!
Migration
I was unsure how to tackle migrating the data from my old G5. I’d heard Migration Assistant (in /Applications/Utilities) would be the way to go, but I half fancied doing a bootable install from my SuperDuper-powered external Firewire HD clone instead.
However, doing that would require a total disk restore, which would mean I’d lose Photo Booth, iWork 08 and iLife 08, etc – any new apps that I didn’t have on the G5 basically.
I gave Migration Assistant a shot – painless. Simply stick the G5 in target disk mode (restart and hold down the ‘T’ key) and watch it fly. About an hour or so later and a quick reboot, my entire system was all there and ready to go.
The brilliance is that any apps that are newer (for instance iPhoto 08 – I have 06 on the old G5) are still there, with backups made of the older app (in a folder labelled “from old Mac”). Genius.
Parallels
One major reason I needed a MacBook Pro (or indeed any Intel Mac) was for Parallels, purely for testing of websites in PC browsers. I’ve endured Virtual PC 7 for 3 years now and don’t feel I deserve to be treated so badly anymore.
A quick purchase of Parallels Desktop for Mac ensued, only for it to occur to me that I don’t have a separate copy of Windows XP to install onto it. The fully-licenced version that installs as part of Virtual PC is buried within the VPC install procedure.
Hmm…
Then I remembered that each virtual machine is actually stored on the G5 as a single bootable disk image (within /Documents/Virtual PC List). Surely I can’t just use the Parallels Transporter to grab that image over Firewire (I considered using the network too, either would have been fine)?
Well blow me down – 20 minutes later I have an exact bootable clone of my Windows XP virtual machine, right there on my new MacBook Pro running under Parallels! I’m speechless, still.
Internet Connection minor woes
The only issue I had was internet connection – I had to go into Network preferences in the Mac and ensure that the 2 new network adapters were showing and lit green (they were, but only once I’d visited the pref settings). I also had to then open up the preferences for the virtual machine in Parallels, ‘add’ a network adapter to the list (by default it just showed hard drive and CD-ROM) and then choose to let it set up automatically. Bingo!
Activation for the nation
Oh, and you’re forced to activate Windows. Again. No big deal though.
And I am now one happy bunny.
Grab the journal RSS feed