'Design Thoughts' : rjslade » automobiles

Late May – Time does Fly

admin0 — Thu, 22 May 2008 12:32:05 +0000

Hello Again:

Late May now, almost a month since the last post

So much has happened! Where to Start? My URL’s folder on my desktop now holds more that 60 links of things I thought interesting, and my Application folder contains a variety of new applications that having found, tried and paid for, I want to tell you about.

I think I will tackle that URL folder first and try to put some order into it. Then maybe a few entries over the next few days…

If you don’t know the Screen Capture Keystrokes that Apple has included in your system, you ought,and even better the modifier keys to make specific selections of things like entire windows. But they are not the only story out there. the people at konigi.com have a list of 6, Apples and 5 others:

http://konigi.com/notebook/6-screenshot-utilities-you-should-know-about

And of course there is the next category up for capturing moving imagery on your screen. I personally settled on iShowU now at version 1.66 from

http://www.shinywhitebox.com/index.html.

And you must not forget Screenshot Settings.app, a two trick pony that does nothing but change the format of those created screen shots and where they are saved to. Don’t like Apples choice of png – like pdf and a specific folder?

I tried to look up the source of that last mentioned little application – it is actually a small Applescript. Search Results for ‘Screenshot’ at http://www.versiontracker.com returned ‘no Result by that name’ Oh well It is a script and editable at that using Script Editor.

Font Stuff:

The I Love Typography is again the source of some wonderful web inspiration regarding fonts and their use.

15 Excellent Examples of Web Typography

PART I: SHOWCASE http://ilovetypography.com/2007/09/19/15-excellent-examples-of-web-typography

15 Great Examples of Web Typography

QUARTER 2, 2008 http://ilovetypography.com/2008/05/07/15-great-examples-of-web-typography-q2-2008/

Do you know the origins of that wonderful character, the Ampersand ? One of my found in ‘Hoefler Titling‘ At Hoefler and Frere-Jones in their News, Notes and Observations section you will find a illustrated history at:

http://www.typography.com/ask/showBlog.php?blogID=98

I have also found another site dedicted to all things Ampersand to quote:

” The Ampersand- A scribal abbreviation for and. Derived from the Latin word “et.” I like the ampersand. I think it is often the most attractive punctuation mark of them all. This blog is an attempt to give this humble character the respect it deserves.“

It is located at: http://ampersand.gosedesign.net/

The folks at Smashing magazine have assembled ‘50 breathtaking typographic posters designed by artists across the globe’, while no facing the limitation of type on the web, these too are great inspiration. The collection is at:

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/02/25/breathtaking-typographic-posters/

If like me you are concerned about making your web type accurate and cross platform, knowing the correct coding for the odd characters in most fonts are needed. The ‘Designers Toolbox‘ have assembled a useful resource at:

http://www.designerstoolbox.com/designresources/html/

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web – A practical guide to web typography , is an ever increasing set of articles on the various aspect of just that. As of late May it is up to 3.2.1 Use titling figures with full caps, and text figures in all other circumstances. To date the subjects of ‘Rhythm & Proportion‘ and ‘Harmony & Counterpoint‘ have been addresed. As a work in progress it is worth returning or subscribing to its RSS feed. The site is at:

http://webtypography.net/

Have you ever needed to know what different fonts at differing sizes would look like on the web? And having then got the correct size spacing, alignment etc wanted the correct CSS description. Well it is available – one very great site called ‘typesetter – compare screen font‘. It is located at:

http://typetester.maratz.com/

Think you know your fonts? Helvetica vs Time – Easy ! But try out ‘ the rather difficult Font Game‘ and see how good you really are. It is located at:

http://fontgame.ilovetypography.com/

Yet another way of having type elements retain their visual integrity on the web – Have you heard of sIFR – to quote ” sIFR (or Scalable Inman Flash Replacement) is a technology that allows you to replace text elements on screen with Flash equivalent ” if you want to know more about this technology they have a site at:

http://wiki.novemberborn.net/

A beautiful font based screen saver; You can test it for awhile but it is not free.

It is called dropclock and the site is located at:

http://scr.sc/products/dropclock/

While I am still mentioning things web related I know one of the largest problems it trying your web site in assorted browsers for a client. If you are lucky the client has collected data from his existing site using some tool like Google Analytics available at:

http://www.google.com/analytics/

With it you will know what browsers, what platforms, what screen sizes, languages and plugins your viewers are using. A great starting point when doing a redesign. Use your tool of choice to develop the new site – mind you if you, like me have a preference for GoLive – you are now out of luck – Adobe have mothballed it. It has always been a better tool for the designer, Dreamweaver for the propellerhead – oh well. It still works, if you have it – it is just no longer supported or sold! Gee I bought it before it was an Adobe product – I remember it at the Boston MacWorld way back when…

Anyhow you have a site – now does it work? On the mac you throw it at Safari, FireFox and the now unsupported Explorer. If you are lucky enough to have a intell based mac, you probably have PARALLELS DESKTOP 3.0 FOR MAC from:

http://www.parallels.com

or VMware Fusion from:

http://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/

so that you can run Window XP or Vista. Hopefully XP – got your Service Pack 3 download for it yet. If you are using Apples of Boot Camp,make sure you down load the SP3 upgrade from Apple before you upgrade your copy of XP. Having used both Boot Camp and PARALLELS recently I strongly suggest PARALLELS of the two – It is so seamless – I have had no experience with VMWare.

Anyhow – you try Explorer, FireFox and Safari also on the PC. But what about the other browsers. I have used and strong suggest Browsershots. To quote ” Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here.” You will find it at:

http://browsershots.org/

If they don’t have the browser – don’t worry about it. You will save yourself a lot of potential embarrassment if you do use it! Don’t let the client have the opportunity to use the fact the site was created on a Mac – for the reason it doesn’t look or work as it was meant to!

Lets move onto Cars – Automobiles.

I like cars, old cars. This last week has marked this years Mille Miglia here in Italy. 3 days to drive from Brescia to Rome and back. The second day has them going through Assisi, located near me here in Umbria.

One of my favourite cars has always been the Lotus Europa, but also up the is the BMW M1 – I doubt at six foot two I could even slip into the former, and given that used M1 are trading for 100K or better I can’t afford the latter. Still I was intrigued to see BMW’s supercar icon, the M1, which to quote: ” blew out the candles at the Concorso d’Eleganza at Villa d’Este this weekend. In honor of the car’s thirtieth birthday, BMW rolled out the new BMW M1 Hommage ” See the images at:

http://www.autoblog.com/2008/04/27/modern-retro-bmw-m1-homage-officially-revealed/

and:

http://www.thecoolhunter.net/transportation/BMW-M1-Concept/

A Wonderful VIDEO: Volvo’s 81-year History in 9 Minutes. I found this link originally on:

http://www.autoblog.com/2008/04/11/video-volvos-81-year-history-in-9-minutes/

but they had linked to the source file on YouTube. Here it is, we.ll woth 9 minutes

Photography:

I have before expressed my interest in HDR Photography. Wonderful galleries of images are located at:

Most people who are interested in the subject have probably found the article by Colin Smith at:

http://www.photoshopcafe.com/tutorials/HDR_ps/hdr-ps.htm

Having read that and played with the HDR features in PhotoShop CS3 and the demo of Photomatix from:

http://www.hdrsoft.com/

I found a new product – HYDRA from:

http://creaceed.com/hydra/

To quote: ” Hydra is about mixing a number of under- and overexposed shots to get a natural sight of a scene. It provides human eye-like perception to your photographs by allowing you to create high dynamic range (HDR) images from a series of regular photographs, either from DSLRs or traditional point-and-shoot cameras.” As I use Apple Aperture I was also interested in the fact it worked as a plugin to Version 2.1. I downloaded the demo, I tried it and I paid for the product – Very simple to use – I like it. Here is an image I have done with it:

Now having said that, My wife is on a photoworkshop in Mull , Scotland , led by Mark Muench – http://www.muenchworkshops.com/gallery/3200186_JKGVA and I gather she has learned some new tricks – Apparently HDR is frowned on by this group of professionals and my wife says I have wasted my money – but then it was only 60$, one third of that from hdrsoft. I will report on what they had to say in another posting. They also have informed her that Aperture was not the best choice and to stick with PhotoShop and Adobe- I guess we all have our own preferences and workflows.

This week also brought a link to:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/audio_video/times_online_tv/?vxSiteId=d8fa78dc-d7ad-4d5a-8886-e420d4bc4200&vxChannel=Times%20Online%20News&vxClipId=1152_timesonline0664&vxBitrate=300

and ‘Billion-pixel panoramas — from your own camera‘ on the Times Online – UK Newspaper site at:

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3938717.ece

and another site related to this sort of photography.

http://gigapan.org/

It is amazing the technology spin off that is happening across the entire field of photography from the panoramas in Google Earth to the PhotoSynth and World Wide Telescope from Microsoft:

And into OUTER SPACE

From the Guardian and the UK National Archives, information has been released regarding UFO’s. Regardless of your own belief or not some interesting reading at the Guardians, Explore the X-files :

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/05/explore_the_xfiles.html

or the National Archives, newly released UFO files :

http://ufos.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

On a more mundane subject regarding things whizzing around in the sky above us, from the European Space Operations Centre ” Space debris: evolution in pictures – Between the launch of Sputnik on 4 October 1957 and 1 January 2008, approximately 4600 launches have placed some 6000 satellites into orbit, of which about 400 are travelling beyond geostationary orbit or on interplanetary trajectories.” at:

http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/ESOC/SEMN2VM5NDF_mg_1.html

The images of the debris that the astronauts and spacecraft must avoid are frightening.

NASA have a site of multimedia : Images, podcasts, video and TV of past and present events…

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/index.html

Presentation:

Be it a slide show, a series of images or a story you need to tell. We all have to order and assemble information in a presentation , either for ourselves, our friends or your clients. If you have a Mac – you get a lot of programs supplied with your machine and if you keep iLife up to date, and/or have paid extra for .Mac and iWork you probably won’t need anything else. A .Mac slide show is great! But if you want something a bit better?

Photoshop outputs images as slide shows in a variety of formats – here is one:

http://www.rjslade.com/DolceGara_RJS/index.htm

This collection of images is of a Dessert Competition that we have had every year in Monte Castello di Vibio, since I arrived – I have been lucky enough to be a judge. Note the controls in the bottom left corner of the window – play with them and see what they do.

Then from Photoshop you can use a plugin such as SimpleViewer. It is available free from here:

http://www.airtightinteractive.com/simpleviewer/

They also have a paid version that allows more customisation by providing the source files. Some of the navigation is obvious, some not so. You can see the larger images loading in the thumbnails and the arrow under the thumbnails obviously directs you to more thumbnails – it is obvious isn’t it. Less obvious is that as you mouse over the vertical midpoints of the larger image you will get left and/or right arrows that take you directly to the next image. The plugin is available for use with an assortment of programs. For an example see here:

http://www.rjslade.com/Torraccia/index.html

As an aside the images are of the Summer Bar just below the walls of Monte Castello di Vibio.

Of course if you have the full version of Acrobat, you can build a show in it. The people at CreativeTechs recently posted this tip on doing just that:

http://www.creativetechs.com/iq/build_an_acrobat_pdf_slideshow.html

As I advise a lot of artists, one of the advantages of this solution is ensuring that the colour profile of the files are included. Artists get quite upset when colours shift! Not all browsers on all platforms display the true colour of an image.

There are a growing number of online places that will host your presentation after assisting you in creating it. One of these that I have looked at recently was: SideRocket -

http://www.sliderocket.com

One I have paid for was BannerZest from -

http://www.aquafadas.com/

I got it as part of a MucUpdate bundle (http://www.mupromo.com/) that included

Parallels ($79.99), BannerZest (49.00), Sound Studio (79.99), DVDRemaster Pro (49.99), Typinator (29.99), StoryMill (44.95), Leap (59.00), MenuCalendarClock (19.95), Art Text (39.95), Hazel (21.95) – Total Value: $474.76 (Get it at MacUpdate for $64.99) Can’t argue with that sort of pricing, even if you only use half of the products regularly. I up graded BannerZest to the Pro version and you can see a simple set of images above, created in it , those of the cars in the Mille Miglia.

Why is it that we are so often dissappointed when we open the packaging and see the product inside. This is particularly true for food so from: Advertising vs Reality – A Product Comparison Project

http://funtasticus.com/20080324/advertising-vs-reality-a-product-comparison-project/

A German website, Pundo3000.com, has conducted a study of 100 different products by comparing the look of the products as shown by the packaging with the actual contents inside the boxes. Quoting the website, which is in German: “ All products were purchased, the packaging photographed and the contents prepared and photographed too. All products were then eaten up.” and also: “The purpose of the project is not to discredit any brands or products but to critically compare the packaging advertising with the inside contents ”.’

If you like the way more news site present tomorrows cover pages, the evening before you will love this site:

http://www.newseum.org/todaysfrontpages/default.asp?p_size=611

619 front pages from 58 countries. ” The Newseum displays these daily newspaper front pages in their original, unedited form. Some front pages may contain material that is objectionable to some visitors. Viewer discretion is advised.“

As you must know – news is not just content but also presentation. Here is a site on just that subject:

http://www.designingthenews.com/

From the site “About – Well here it is, all you ever wanted to know about DesigningTheNews.com, and all about what/why/when/how it is and does! Over the coming year (2008) this page will be updated with more information as I focus and refocus what I want the site to do, as well as maybe explain a little about the content it frames, and why I’m doing this.

The ‘elevator description’- DTN is a series of experiments which visually explore the news in various ways to encourage new ways of seeing a predominantly text based medium.

What is DTN all about?- News in general is primarily a text based format. When accompanied by an image, the image serves to reinforce the story, but what if the news was the image? DTN is about bridging the gap between traditional cartoonists and modern day generative news visualisations.“

But it is the presentation of data that is most interesting to me.

here are a few really interesting sites:

http://www.notcot.com/archives/2008/04/stefanie_posave.php

has an article on STEFANIE POSAVEC “ON THE MAP”

http://yesyesnono.co.uk/article/30/invisible-journeys

has a article ‘Invisible Journeys‘ dated May 2, 10:39 AM to quote the site:

” Invisible Journeys is my first try at data visualisation. I have seen a few wifi geographical mapping, but they looked a bit too technical to my taste. Here, i aimed at a semi abstract visualisation while keeping the ability to extract sense out of the graphics. Below is one of the visualisation showing 4 different journeys. Bigger to smaller rings : London / Vescemont / Belfort / Barcelona.”

and a third site is: http://benfry.com/

Quoted from the site: “Biography – Ben Fry received his doctoral degree from the Aesthetics + Computation Group at the MIT Media Laboratory, where his research focused on combining fields such as Computer Science, Statistics, Graphic Design, and Data Visualization as a means for understanding complex data. After completing his thesis, he spent time developing tools for the visualization of genetic data as a postdoc with Eric Lander at the Eli & Edyth Broad Insitute of MIT & Harvard. During the 2006-2007 school year, Ben was the Nierenberg Chair of Design for the the Carnegie Mellon School of Design. At the end of 2007, he finished Visualizing Data for O’Reilly. He currently works as a designer in Cambridge, MA.” Really intersting stuff.

All this interesting material from so many places. Not always posted by those who originally created it, but hopefully the correct sources referenced. I have tried to note where the material has come from – credit where credit due! On the issue of copyright ‘Who’s Ripping Off Your Website Content?‘ is an article in Issue 71, 5/15/08 Written by Anne-Marie “HerGeekness” Concepcion :

http://www.senecadesign.com/designgeek/ .

The story she recounts is all too common I would suspect. Her story will lead you to Copyscape at:

http://www.copyscape.com/

They have both free and paid services that could help you protect your content, or at least let you know who else is using it. Of course you can also use Google Search and do it yourself.

Information Architects of Japan, have taken the old idea of the London Underground map and populated it with another type of information. Not the first time I have seen this sort of thing but the example at:

http://informationarchitects.jp/wp-content/uploads/2008/02/wallpaper1600_1024.jpg

It is good and you can buy it here!

http://informationarchitects.jp/web-trend-map-3-get-it/

‘ Web Trend Map 3: Get it! -It was featured by The Guardian, WIRED, Le Monde, Corriere, kottke, Boingboing, Techcrunch, Mashable, Valleywag and literally thousands of blogs. We are happy to announce that the coolest gift for geeks, the A0 poster of the 2008 Web Trend Map (841mm x 1189mm / 33.25in x 46.75in), is now up for grabs’ :

I have included a small example here but other versions are available at the web address I have quoted above.

Odds and Ends;

I have to assume no one has read all of this material in one go! but I have a few other things to include this time. Maurice has supplied many links over the last month, I thank him on your behalf. A recent one is this:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/digital_image_resources_on_the_deep_web.php

to quote: ‘ Digital Image Resources on the Deep Web – Written by Sarah Perez / May 14, 2008 8:33 AM

Sometimes you stumble across something that really makes you say “wow” and reminds you that there’s so much more to this internet thing than just the latest web app. Case in point is this article describing some of the visual resources available on the web. The deep web. These images won’t show up in search engines’ image searches or on Flickr (save one exception), but instead can only be accessed via the links below.‘

Another resource is the MoOM – THE MUSEUM OF ONLINE MUSEUMS . It is located at:

http://coudal.com/moom/index.php

to quote ” Welcome to the Coudal Partners Museum of Online Museums. Here, you will find links from our archives to online collections and exhibits covering a vast array of interests and obsessions: Start with a review of classic art and architecture, and graduate to the study of mundane (and sometimes bizarre) objects elevated to art by their numbers, juxtaposition, or passion of the collector.”

For a colour specific source there is Follow the Rainbow: 101 Color Resources for Web Designers located at:

http://whdb.com/2008/follow-the-rainbow-101-color-resources-for-web-designers/

It is part of a larger site with lots of information presented with a bit of humour. Quote ” Hello and congratulations on reaching our humble Web site on the World Wide Web. Well, I suppose you’d like to know a little more about us, the wonderful people who have built WHDb. Well, we are two monkeys working in a cage scrambling frantically to complete this Web site so our masters will let us eat again. One of us is pictured below. This Web site features your daily dose of WWW goodness and all that encompasses, namely software, gaming, and Internet commentary.“

That list of URL’s in my URL folder that started off above sixty, it is now less than twenty. So I will close with two more things.

The first – TEN THOUSAND CENTS located at :

http://www.tenthousandcents.com/top.html

to quote ” Ten Thousand Cents is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, “crowdsourcing,” “virtual economies,” and digital reproduction.”

A great work of participatory art!

And as so much of this posting has been about the news, and its presentation what better to close with than another video clip from flicker. The Day There Was No News from ‘Today there was no news. And here is the proof.‘ : Double click the image below to play the clip.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/arbernaut/2476955162/

That is it – Really! Hope you enjoy the reading and find it helpful – R

Late Posting, Long Posting…

admin0 — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 16:22:13 +0000

To those looking for a weekly fix from this blog , I apologise – I was away for a weeks holiday – yes even we on pension need holidays! I knew it was a holiday as I drove 2100Km – somehow that always happens!

The Holiday

Unusually, this time I did not have internet access. The furnished apartment we normally stay in when we go south is located in Acropoli, about 30 minutes south of Salarno Italy. For details of the place see Discovery Agropoli They had a bad storm a few days before we arrived that had fried his router, so my usual wireless access was not available.

This time we spent a lot of time visiting archelogical sites – revisited Pompeii and for the first time visited Herculaneum and Oplontis, two other sites that were buried in the aftermath of the Vesuvius event. Pompeii is definitely the most well know of these sites and is huge. This was our second time and we have seen only less than half of it. That is having spent more than eight hours exploring its streets. Given that all the buildings are never open, some still under re-construction, I would estimate an equal time will be needed to see the balance of it. Mind you, we are busy taking photos and referring to our own guide books, rather than glued to the audio phones that are provided, for a cost, and which help visitors see the site in a couple of hours! If you are going to go to the trouble of seeing these places – why get the “Readers Digest’ version?

If you want to see some images that we have taken at Pompei, see those posted at

http://photoempt.smugmug.com/gallery/4343618_p2jjF

The newer images are not yet posted but ought to be soon added

http://photoempt.smugmug.com/gallery/4697382_N9Lmz

Anyhow – The highlights of this Pompeii visit were the Villa of the Mysteries and the Brothel or The Lupanare. I recently saw a list of the best art in the world to see: The World’s 50 Best Works of Art (and how to see them) and the Villa of the Mysteries was included. Having previous been to Pompeii and missed it, it was 1st on the list this time.

The other Pompeii building of note this time was The Lupanare or brothel – here we have proof of the ‘oldest profession’ Needless to say, it is on a corner – even then, location was important. The interior decorations that remain (as some have been removed to the National Museum in Naples) are amusing – I have not included those here – this is a family site! But even in those times, on the lower walls were scenic images of plants and patterns, and up at adult eye height, the ‘menu’ is displayed.

As good as Pompeii is, it does not hold a candle to the other two sites. We spent two 1/2 days at Herculaneum . It was buried by the pyroclastics after the main eruption, some 17 metres of very hot mud, but it left buildings standing and perfectly preserved; pieces of wood, albeit carbonized, are still there, as are the wall paints, the mosaics, and the multilevels of building that are less obvious at Pompei. The site is much smaller, but to me, had a much greater impact.

But the best of the three – Oplontis. This site was one palace, that of Poppaea Sabina, wife of the Emperor Nero. It consists of more than 100 rooms and some of the most beautiful frescoes I have seen. It also contains the remains of a swimming pool 61 x 17 metres !

Getting to this last site was a bit of a trial – It is located in a rather rough area of Naples suburbs and is currently under re-construction, prior to the summer season of tourists. All access roads were blocked and the signage was lacking… Three times around the site in our car, close, but unable to find an entrance, driving on crowded narrow streets, hunting for a place to leave the car.

Oh well – It was a great trip – tiring but very memorable. So much to see, so little time. My advice if you visit Italy – give the Amalfi coast a miss and head further south.

Onto Design Issues

Having touched on the issue of sex above, my first link today will be to a related subject. A wonderful, subtle ad for the longstanding magazine, not exactly known for its lack of sexism…

Automotive – Darrell has provide a link to

http://www.oldclassiccar.co.uk/ .

Which includes:

Volume 1 Images: Photographs of 1920s and 1930s vintage cars, lorry and sporting machines
Volume 2 Images: Photographs of 1940s WW2 era cars, buses and lorries, racing cars and more
Volume 3 Images: Photographs of 1950s automobiles, including trucks and a few wrecks too!
Volume 4 Images: Photographs of 1960s classics, from Austin, MG, Chevrolet, AC, Ferrari, Ford and heaps more
Volume 5 Images: Photographs of more recent 1970s classics, from Austin, Lancia, Datsun, Jaguar & many more, please click here

If your favourite old car was not on the Telegraph list provided in the last posting , maybe it is here.

From the CoolHunter.net I have found my dream car. Like the banner at the top of this page, a Ferrari. I have always lusted after a Porche Carrara but living here in Italy and regularly seeing these works of art on the road, I am starting to be torn… Not to worry, I cannot afford either, and at this point in my life I doubt I will ever own one!

I mentioned the Telegragh above. This week they had a useful list of ‘The 101 most useful websites‘. These cover the subjects of: Technology, Entertainment, Advice and Information, House and Home, Social, Shopping and last but not least, Travel.

Adobe, Apple and Other Software

Adobe has been busy: Lightroom has been upgraded to version 1.4 and Version 2 is available in beta – a beta with a tist. If you are a current user or an invited guest of a current user the beta willlast till version 2 ships – otherwise it has a 30 day limit. Still the 30 days of full use to ‘kick the tires’ of a program is a wonderful marketing method. Truly gives one a chance to see if it will meet your needs and that yours needs really need it.

Adobe have also:

updated DMG Conversion tool and Camera Raw
shipped an update to Flash Player
launched Photoshop Express, with a good review at DPR Review
started to ship Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 for Mac
shipped Adobe Media Player
started Adobe TV

some free Photoshop actions are available at

http://www.addictedtodesign.com/free_photoshop_actions.html

I particularly like the ‘Polaroid 600 Instant Film‘ action given Polaroid’s withdrawl from the film market

100 wonderful photo effects Photoshop tutorials are available which cover off many useful effects you may want to use. While many of the examples are based on the PC version of the program as is obvious from the screen shots, the same apply to the Mac versions.

Also made avaialbe over the following week were:

Liquid Resize In their words: Liquid Resize is a “content aware” image resizing application for Mac OS X and Windows. Liquid Resize will allow you to resize an image without traditional geometric limitations while minimizing any distortion that would typically result from changing the original aspect ratio of an image.

Rsizr is a similar solution, albeit online rsizr is a Flash application that lets you resize JPG, PNG, and GIF images on your computer. With rsizr, in addition to normal image rescaling and cropping, you can also resize images using a new image resizing algorithm called seam carving (a method of image retargeting) that tries to keep intact areas in your image that are richer in detail.

And while mentioning plugins, Aperture 2.1 has shipped! Plugin were announced with the shipping of V2 but have been accessed in this version with the inclusion of Dodge and Burn within the program, and others like Viveza from Nik Software providing trials of a wonderful selection tool. Other vendors are also working on extending the abilities of Aperture as can be read in this informative article about the upgrade. If you use or are considering using the program it iw a great article that reveals many not so obvious alterations between version 2 and 2.1

Fonts:

Lets start with the source of free fonts – well one family at least, BB PetieBoy. I personally like the destoyed version. I regularly get the myFonts newsletter and only recently have realized that these fonts are created by quite a community. on further looking I really liked the work of Ellinor Maria Rapp of Sweden. I particurly like her FG Elias and FG Nina both available at a good price! I am a particular sucker for this style of font, handletter or handwriting

Along the lines of Handwriting the people at FontShop make available a great pdf of their Font Magazine with current and past issues available. They have a Handfont service – for about 300US FontShop will make a digital font from your handwriting. Available in either PostScript or TrueType formats for Mac or Windows. Given the quality of my handwriting this would be a waste of money, but if you know someone with nice penmanship…

Continuing on the FontShop site, have a look at Fontstruct Here are some on-line tools to let you make your own fonts and see the work of others. Although still in beta some interesting typefaces have already been created. I was charmed by kawaii a dingbat font.

Another font site I came across this week was House Industries. I managed to find time to spend on ‘i love typography’ where they posted a new article on Apri; 4th ‘On Choosing Type – FIRST PRINCIPLES‘

I mentioned in my last posting embedding of fonts for improved web presentation. This is one of the features that has been added to Version 3.1 of Safari and the latest web standards of HTML 5. A wonderful example of this is this web page If you want or are interested in the details go to this site

Another good site for the use of fonts on the web is ‘A practical guide to web typography‘ which is a work in progress.

Other sources for web issues, not just fonts, is the site of Eric Myers , Designing with web Standards, Jeffery Zeldman and the Zen of CSS Design Both of these latter two have books published by New Riders that are part of my library

Finishing this topic with a tie-in to a previous one – if you are going to use a font on a web site, make sure you are using a font that allows it. They need to be licensed for this use or ‘open source’ . Apple in the documentation of Safari 3.1 misleadingly implies that any font may be used. This is not the case!

For more of one rights to use, Anne-Marie Concepcion has included in Issue 70, 3/25/08 of DesignGeek a short piece on ‘A Fair(y) Use Tale‘ with a link to A Fair(y) Use Tale - a video primer, by the Media Education Foundation

Regarding Intellectual property, the European Court has just made a dangerous decision in the favour of Addida regarding the use of stripes, as mentioned here in a International Hearld Tribune article.

Yikes this posting is getting rather long! So I will close with a bit of reading from others and some music, legal music, sources.

Leander Kahney, a name that elicits a response in the Mac world has a few books published. Two of them have been made available digitally The ‘Cult of Mac‘ and the ‘Cult of iPod‘. Surf over to nostarch.com and scroll down to ‘We’re Giving Books Away‘ to find the links.

For music, the folks at BusinessWeek have assembled a selection of sites where you can get your music legally. Content will vary depending on your geographic location, as will the definition of a legal download, but it is nice to have a resource like this to point you in the correct direction. The BusinessWeek main site is a wonderful source in information and has joined my list of news sources.

That is it for now – I will continue to collect thoughts for the next posting. I am also going to remove the need to be logged-in to post a comment. Maybe more of you will add a response.

I will be in Canada for a week starting Thursday April 17th so if you think you see me in the Toronto/London area – it just may be me!

It feels like Sunday

admin0 — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 16:47:21 +0000

But it is Monday ; Easter Monday

Easter here in Italy is the big church festival of the year. In Canada, I always thought of Christmas being the most important church day of the year – but then what would I know! Interestingly, while England and North America include Good Friday as an integral part of the celebration – it is not a holiday here. Today, Monday is.

This allows me an opportunity to add to the blog. Not that I have neglected it!

I have upgraded, re-installed it twice, and re-input all the articles that were there previously! Thank goodness for backups. What really saved my bacon was the program I mention a few blogs ago – ecto – Still in beta 3 and being updated regularly, it is still a work in progress. I have been having trouble trying to make the entries consistent looking but fonts, styles, sizes and all sorts creep in that I do not want. At the moment I have reverted to using a plain text editor – Text Wangler by Bare Bones Software, Inc. This is the free version of their product BBEdit

BBEdit is the leading professional HTML and text editor for the Macintosh. Specifically crafted in response to the needs of Web authors and software developers, this award-winning product provides an abundance of features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text. BBEdit transforms text with high performance.

Then I will open my WordPress pages in Safari. Have all of you downloaded this weeks update from Apple! It is worth it. If you go under the menu item View to Customize Toolbar you will see some new icons. One for tabs, one for a side bar, one for bugs and one for tools – under that tools menu there is a whole lot of new items – or at least new to me. You can now figure out what the various page features are! This adds some of the features that can be added through plugins with Firefox. I also use Saft and Safari Stand – add-ons to the program.

Saft is a Safari plugin to add features like draggable tabs, full-screen browsing, search-able bookmarks and history, URL shortcuts, kiosk mode and more.

SafariStand for Mac OS X – Includes: Sidebar (thumbnail tab), ‘Stand Bar’ (Bookmark, History, Side Bar compatible, Simple RSS Reader), ‘Quick Search’,'Stand Serach’ – supports Spotlight

Saft amongst its many features allow me to save single page pdf’s and SafariStand presents the tabs as little page images down the side! Neither are really needed but we must play with out toys!

I have not given up with ecto, and I still bounce between FireFox and Safari – I am itching to upgrade Wordpress to 2.5 – which is a Release Candidate but not yet official and I want to try adding some images to the weblog – but slowly slowly. At the same time I’m continuing to alter the look of our SmugMug site.

Anyhow, onto today’s entry:

AUTO Design

B.A.T. stands for Berlinetta Aerodinamica Tecnica. An article and a slide show from the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/automobiles/collectibles/23BAT.html

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/03/23/automobiles/collectibles/0323-BAT_index.html

From a wonderful car shape, onto a green design:

The Lightning Car Company - The Lightning Car Company is proud to release one of the UK’s first electric sports cars for 2008.Combining classic, British sports car design with racing car technology and state of the art NanoSafe™ battery power and Hi-Pa Drive™ electric motor innovation, the Lightning has been developed with exhilarating performance front of mind. Whilst its head-turning looks will appeal to the most discerning of drivers, unlike other sports cars, the Lightning is also easy on the conscience. With virtually no polluting emissions, this energy-efficient car uses clean technology and will have the ultimate green rating. Following production of several petrol Lightnings and with the electric prototype build now well underway, the electric Lightning GT is now available to pre-order.

IDEAs

As a source of ideas I have mentioned TED already. A good idea that is well undertaken and appears to have results by causing the ideas it showcases to snowball. This has in the past been sponsored by the likes of Adobe and BMW. This year a major sponsor was Autodesk

Autodesk not only participated as a major sponsor, but hosted a lunch on Sustainable Design featuring Autodesk CEO Carl Bass and IDEO CEO Tim Brown as well as demonstrated a technology experiment called the BIGVIZ.

In their words:

The BIGVIZ is an exploration in visualizing the Big Ideas presented on the TED mainstage. Two visual cartographers, David Sibbet and Kevin Richards, created over 700 spontaneous sketches of the presenters’ ideas using Autodesk Sketchbook Pro software running on Wacom Cintiq tablets and rendered on a Perceptive Pixel multi-touch display. These tools illustrate the power of interactive visualization to present the big picture to foster insight and communicate ideas visually, central principles of design innovation.

THE BIGVIZ-Download a 200 page Acrobat pdf book featuring the sketches, illustrations and ideamaps of each of the TED mainstage presenters.

THE BIGVIZ Movie -Watch a three minute movie of the TED2008 BIGVIZ sketches created by Autodesk animator and compositor Keith Chamberlain with music scored by TEDster Michael Montes.

I found all that out, and watched the movie and downloaded the pdf all because I was visiting the site to view some of the newer offerings from this years conference. I thought the two listed below were really good:

Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight - Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened — as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.

Craig Venter: On the verge of creating synthetic life - “Can we create new life out of our digital universe?” asks Craig Venter. And his answer is, yes, and pretty soon. He walks the TED2008 audience through his latest research into “fourth-generation fuels” — biologically created fuels with CO2 as their feedstock. His talk covers the details of creating brand-new chromosomes using digital technology, the reasons why we would want to do this, and the bioethics of synthetic life. A fascinating Q&A with TED’s Chris Anderson follows (two words: suicide genes).

Another exciting project that has been acknowledged by TED through receiving a TED PRIZE is:

The Encyclopedia of Life - This is the very beginning of our exciting journey to document all species of life on Earth. Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about all life

Another Day – More Wordpress Exploration

admin0 — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 10:00:18 +0000

So after the February 6th sorting out of the site and trial of MacJournal I have been thinking.

Would some other software I already own also create the formated text that I can then cut and paste into the Wordpress posting. The posting window of WordPress does have two modes – One supposedly WISYWIG – which it is not – and one for CODE. Unfortunately the contents of neither are maintained consistently when a page is saved.

MacJournal has a nice feature in that it will upload a post negating the need of the Worpress entry method. But where is the problem? Is it in the use of Safari, rather than some other browser – is it the use of the MAC OS rather than WINDOWS. So lets see.

It turns out that WordPress is much more friendly with FireFox. This suggests that it might be a renderng problem with Safari… Hmm

I will try to use GoLive and CSS styles and see if that cut and pasted into the code window works. If it does I have a solution using software I have already paid for!

A few News articles I found interesting:

Energy sources are always an intersting topic with great relavance in todayd world

From The Economist print edition Jan 31st 2008 at Electricity storage-Ne plus ultra A new version of an old idea is threatening the battery industryPUT the pedal to the metal in the XH-150 a souped-up Saturn Vue and watch the instruments. Sure enough, the speedometer shoots up in a satisfactory way. But an adjacent dial shows something else: the amount of charge in the car’s capacitors is decreasing. Ease off the accelerator and as the speedo winds down the capacitors charge up again.Such a capacitor gauge could become a common sight on the dashboards of the future. A capacitor can discharge and recharge far faster than a battery, making it ideal both for generating bursts of speed and for soaking up the energy collected by regenerative braking. AFS Trinity, a company based in Washington state, has turned that insight into a piece of equipment that it has fitted into an otherwise standard production model as an experiment. The result ‘the XH-150′ was unveiled at this year’s Detroit motor show…. more

Also on the subject of electricity -

Three Tesla Electric Car Reviews The Telsa Roadster’s been a long ways a comin’, and here are the first reviews in the March issues of the fossil-fuel loving, pulp-based mongrel cousins of Jalopnik. And after a few hours flogging the e-car on California’s Skyline Boulevard, most pubs have concluded that the Tesla is the first electric car the first green car, really that deserves a spot in any car aficionado’s fantasy garage… more

Staying on the top of energy – in this case fuel cells, from:

About H2Go is the groundbreaking new line of hydrogen fuel cell powered toys developed by Corgi International in partnership with Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies.The first model to be released under the H2Go brand is the HF Mach 3.0. This is the worldís first and only hydrogen fueled radio controlled car that requires no disposable batteries, setting the pace for the next generation of toys. Powered only by water and sunlight, the compact kit is entirely environmentally friendly. It comprises a remote control car, a refueling station, a solar panel plus a remote control, and is set to fascinate and provide hours of entertainment for children and adults of all ages. The HF Mach 3.0 is designed by world-renowned and award-winning designer Professor Luigi Colani a pioneer in organic design. Please see further materials for more information on Corgi and Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies.

Interestingly, at least to me, when I downloaded a news release from this site, that had been saved in Words .doc format, and opened it in Apples iWork Pages, I was presented with the document and its entire history! Who had created the file, when and what changes had been made to it. This is not the sort of information you want published… Be careful what features your software provides you.

I start most days reviewing 8 different news sites – papers from both sides of the Atlantic and the many sides of opinion. A subject that is of great interest to me as the creator of ‘things’ is intellectual property. On that subject I found the following interesting:

Warhol is turning in his grave An exhibition of pop art at London’s National Portrait Gallery unwittingly celebrates a golden age before copyright was kingThe excellent programme for Pop Art Portraits, the current exhibition at London’s National Portrait Gallery, has a lot to say about the pictures hanging on the walls and the diverse source material the artists used to produce their provocative works.Apparently they cut up magazines, copied comic books, drew trademarked cartoon characters like Minnie Mouse, reproduced covers from Time magazine, made ironic use of a cartoon Charles Atlas, painted over iconic photos of James Dean and Elvis Presley – and that’s just in the first of seven rooms… more

It turns out this this is one of a series of article by the UK Guardian Newspaper

Cory Doctorow is a digital activist, science fiction author and co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing. Each fortnight he writes about copy protection, digital rights management (DRM) and the entertainment industry

From a rival paper to the Guardian, the UK Telegraph comes:

Polaroid snaps out of making film. Polaroid is focussing on technology for the digital age. The company behind the instant camera, is to stop making the film used in its iconic technology. The firm is to close factories in Massachusetts in the US, Mexico and the Netherlands after the digital age left almost no market for the film… more

and

Boldly go where no man has gone before… more

This is not an article, but a film clip of an upcoming movie. Yes – Star Trek! Gee I remember the original series – watched it avidly as a child! Now most of that fiction is science.

On Software:

Java 1.5 and OS 10.5 – We have started at PHOTOempt to look at other avenues of image distribution. One of them is Alamy and it turns out that they have an electronic upload method that utilizes Java Script 1.5 and ones web browser. No problem – I use a Mac with the latest software, OS 10.5.1 as of today. Oops – Java 1.5 does not work on it. The latest official Apple release is for OS 10.4 and only on an Intel Machine – I have one of these and an older G-5. The Apple Developers release of the latest version, used with Safari – no go! So if Java is used in your interaction with web do not move up to OS 10.5 Leopard ! I have resorted to installing the latest Java on Windows XP which I run on my Intel iMac in Parallels, a super application that will allow simultaneous use of Mac and Windows OS.

I also found this – continuing on the use of Java – but this type of Javascript does work on the latest OS. From:

FancyZoom 1.1- Smooth Javascript Image Zooming For Your Web Pages a chunk of Javascript to zoom images inline, is now polished up, bug-fixed, available for you to use on your website!

Carrying on with the theme of information presentation, a site and service that will display your material for you:

Issuu – You Publish Issuu is the place for online publications: Magazines, documents, and stuff you’d normally find on print. It’s the place where YOU become the publisher. Upload a document, it’s fast, easy, and totally FREE. Within seconds you’ll have a super cool online magazine you can post anywhere on the web and share instantly with your friends… more

And then onto more image manipulation software. Just a brief introduction to the current tools for altering the aspect ratio of your imagery

Content-aware image resizing tools and development are to be found at:

http://eigenclass.org:80/hiki/seam-carving-in-ocaml

http://liquidrescale.wikidot.com/

http://www.crystalxp.net/news/en225-retarget-liquid-resize-image.html

These are pixel based solutions and where not web based require the current use of either the terminal program or the Windows environmet.

For a different twist one can convert an image into vector:

Precision Vectorization Online

And the final mention of this posting code to the coding people at Microsoft

Microsoft Research Group Shot Group Shot creates a composite image from a series of photos. The photos must be of the same scene, taken from the same point of view within a short period of time. The application uses regions that you indicate to build a composite image automatically.

Hope this is interesting – will be back soon – Ross