Friday and Saturday Software and Links
17 02 2008I have been trying to find a tool to collect my news and items I want to add to this site.
Those built into WordPress itself, are based on a browser interface and while OK in FireFox are less than solid in Safari – my browser of choice. Maurice Belanger had mentioned that another acquaintance uses ecto – So I decided to give it a spin. Lets just say I have after a couple of hours I have paid the 17.95$ US that was requested.
It is not perfect but they are working through the version 3 beta and features are constantly being added. For those on a PC – commiseration first – but there is a version for that platform as well
I am very intrigued with the templates of WordPress and desperately want to explore how to modify them to produce the features that I want – As a designer and not a propellor-head, this will be a challenge, but there are a lot of templates available to work with..some are provided directly from Wordpress at: http://themes.wordpress.net/ but there are other sources as well.
A good one is:100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes They have developed one they call their own:Dilectio: A Smashing Wordpress Theme and the same people smashingmagazine have an article on the relatively new idea of ‘paid for’ premium themes, group of people building a new market on the backs of the work by this free community WordPress Themes: Are They Here To Stay ?
At this point I should say a few words about smashingmagazine. From the site at: http://www.smashingmagazine.com
Founded in September 2006, Smashing Magazine delivers useful and innovative information for designers and web-developers. Our aim is to inform our readers about the latest trends and techniques in web-development – clearly, precisely and regularly. We don’t try to convince you with the quantity, but with the quality of the information we present. That’s what makes us different. In fact, we smash you with the information which will make your life easier. Really. Why Smashing Magazine? Well, why not? We smash our readers with information which might be useful for them, even although they haven’t realized it yet
At the moment I have some 30 bookmarks of site that I troll regularly to find interesting articles on design. SmashingMagazine is one of those. They spend a lot of time collecting links to interesting content and ideas – sometimes related to one theme, others more general in nature. From these I visit but a few and from those I try to keep track of those that I think are interesting or might be interesting to myself, and hopefully, you.
Other series of articles, also linked from SmashingMagazine, one on fonts.If ever there was a subject that mixes art, technology and human advancement it is the issue of fonts and methods of visible communication. It is a subject that on its own could keep a person busy for a very long time. Articles by Topic: Fonts … and one on sourcing images for you desktop
I spend a lot of my time on the net, doing design work for clients, exploring new programs, keeping up to date on current events and continuing to learn. Two of the services I have taken advantage of that deliver content to my electronic mail box are ‘A Word A Day‘ and ‘DelancyPlace‘.
The magic of words — that’s what A.Word.A.Day (AWAD) is about. We are a community of more than 600,000 linguaphiles in at least 200 countriesh
Delanceyplace is very simply a brief daily email with an excerpt or quote we view as interesting or noteworthy, offered with commentary to provide context. There is no theme, except that most excerpts will come from a non-fiction work, mainly works of history, and we hope will have a more universal relevance than simply the subject of the book from which they came
For an interesting article on the evolution of the Google logo, the following link shows the development of a modern day icons development explaining some of the reasoning behind the choices made. And another icon – those three stripes that we all recognise as Adidas
If you would rather read a whole bunch of articles from one source…
New Adobe Magazine availableVolume 2, Issue 1 of Adobe Magazine, the company’s quarterly design and technology mag, is available for download. The new issue features Photoshop being used for concept art, architectural illustration, and scientific imaging.
Maurice passed on this link, among many on tools for the creation of ‘greek text‘ – that imaginary content that we designers use to simulate the content that the client has yet to provide… You know – the stuff you forgot to remove before the web site goes live!
The one I use since the advent of widgets in the Mac OS is the Lorem Ipsum Widget available on the Apple widget site. There is also an Apple Service generator lipServiceX available, which provides one of the pop up or pull down services that are available is so many applications. Have not yet discover Apple Services and what they can do for you?
I was interested in this new bottled water product – not for it thirst quenching abilities but for its unusual form factor
As a seasoned traveller who always tries to just have carryon luggage, this article appealed too me. 7 Reasons To Travel With One Bag – a variety of authors around the web offering sage wisdom on why you should travel with one bag.
For those of us who were not able to make it to San Francisco and the MacWorld in January 2008, the conference organisers have provided, on line, and free, some of the content. Not the same as being there, but a wonderful resource.
And now I will end this posting with two entries on environmental issues. The first is a web site and movie on the Life Cycle of a product, its normal representation and some of the reality behind it. Having watched that you can move onto the second link, more description, and a calculator of costs.
Life Cycle Analysis Calculator From birth to imminent death,IDC’s free online LCA (Life Cycle Analysis) Calculator estimates a product’s carbon footprint.The web service was devised following the results of a survey of designers and engineers working in new product development by Industrial Design Consultancy (IDC), a multi-award winning product design agency based in Berkshire. The survey revealed some 50% of companies interviewed admitted that the environmental impact of a product was not currently a major design consideration for them. Yet, 82% believed it would be in the future. 61% were also aware of life cycle analysis (LCA) as a process to calculate a product’s carbon footprint, but only 29% believed their company had ever carried out an LCA during design stages. The interviewees were united in a resounding positive response to the possibility of a free LCA online service; all said they would use it and be willing to employ the simple changes that could make a great difference to a new product’s environmental impact.
That is it for today – well actually two days, it has taken me that long to steal the time to do this entry! – R
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