I’m going to start today with the material in my Commentary folder.

First up – after 28 years I returned to my Alma Mater in London, UK – The Royal College of Art to see the Spring Graduation Show. Sure the technology has changed – Apple MacBooks on most desktops, but the range and diversity of ideas is equally exciting today, as it was then. Was I really that young when I was there!

There are a number of sites that show the work of the students in the various disciplines, such as the ‘Communication Art and Design Show 2009‘ In 1981 I was in the School of Industrial Design and that now appears to be supplanted by Design Products , RCA/ICL Industrial Design Engineering (ICL stands for Imperial College London ) and Industrial Design Engineering Projects. Two current students that caught my eye were Emma Caselton who has created her own web site and managed to get her products featured in other design blogs such as Gizmodo, and Giles Miller , also with his own web site. The opportunities to get your ideas ‘out there’ have definitely multiplied since my time, but they have to, there were only 16 of us who escaped 28 years ago. Some of us have retired by now, and like RJSID have sites that show what we did do, and others are obviously still active, such as Daniel Weil and Dale Bevington.

I pass through London quite often but this is the first time since those bygone days that I have spent time there, wandering and revisiting old areas that I used to haunt. The images below are some of those I took while there this time.

There are a few other names I would like to mention. Attending the International School of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture , which is located here in Monte Castello di Vibio, Umbria, during this summer of 2009 were many talented folk. One was Vaydehi , a young photographer of Indian origins, who has a web site of her work at www.camerawaali.com

Another persons work I really liked was Hilary Pollock , an Austrailian artist who was returning to the school, having attended a previous session here. She is a painter, Illustrator, printmaker and sculptor – her work visually crosses those boundaries.

The last single person I will mention in this posting is Ailsa Rollo, a young and very talented fashion designer who has recently relocated to Brighton UK. Below some of the creations that she showed during theBrighton Fashion Week 2009.

Click on the images to the right to load them, there are a total of seven outfits that illustrate her talent.

Enough about what I like and mentioning single individuals. Onto web sites that provide what I feel is interesting commentary or thought provoking material

The first is another work in progress by the code monkeys of Google – This one called Google in Quotes – There are different editions (4, plus custom) and different individuals that can be paired commenting on a range of subjects. Politicians must hate it, it is a classic example of a past statement coming back to bite you.

The other site of quotes is called Quotes on Design. While more specific, it is a wonderful repository of pithy phrases. It has the added ability through a provided api to add these to a personal site, and provides a rss feed and the ability to suggest other quotes that you have found.

If you are or want to be an optimist, ‘The Optimist Conspectus‘ may be a useful destination. With comments from different parts of the world and different genders it can be a nice pickup after reading the news of the day.

But if that doesn’t cheer you up, then surf over to the article on the ‘New Scientist ‘ web site that shows some instructive graphics in an article titled. ‘Where is the remotest place on Earth ‘

As a designer there is nothing I like better than an elegant solution – be it a product, a piece of art or and infographic. And the tools we have to hand these days to present previously opaque data, in meaningful ways with the added dimension of time or motion are wonderful. If one thinks of the data sets that were analyzed for the images in the article above… Two other great infographics are below. The first is ‘The Hierarchy of Digital Distractions‘ – something we are to well acquainted with in real life but have not often seen illustrated. It is one of the many infographics displayed/explained on the site ‘Information is Beautiful‘

Another interesting infographic is this from Interbrand which is dynamic, actual a Flash file that while presenting a lot of data alters to make particular points stand out. What were the top brands a decade ago, which are there now and how have the faired in between

And a level deeper for designers is how products have changed over time. In this graphic by the UK paper the Guardian , the Fifties to the Noughties (I did not come up with that name for the millennium decade – they did), the Changing Face of Everyday Design . The images are displayed by decade and six categories – clicking on the category leads you one layer deeper, to larger images of each category. A great resource. This infographic reminds me one one of my favourite design source books, Crosscurrents, by Tony and Claes Lewenhaupt (I see that the book is still available via Amazon or from High Valley Books amongst many sites), which compares Art fashion and design spanning 1890-1989. Design is so much more powerful when seen in context.

As many of you know I am a news junky, reviewing a broad range of news site on a daily basis, exploring the various angles different interests present the same news. On of my weekly visits is the Economist – a great site that allows you advanced access to if you subscribe – you can do so either to the web site alone or in conjunction with the printed magazine. While a bit deeper than an infographic I found this sub site of theirs, called Think Space which explores individuals inspiration very fascinating.

I have in previous entries mention the people at Trendwatching , and their free monthly newsletter that covers a variety of marketing trends, that may impact of you design decision. I also regularly receive an e-news letter from the people at The Cool Hunter which reminds me to visit their site and explore the articles more deeply.

There is another type of site that is quite interesting – those detailing new business ideas or business/causes that you can get involved in. Springwise and Kickstart are two that I found interesting and have added to my already too long list of bookmarks. http://www.springwise.com/

As if it is not already getting hard to make a living as a designer, with clients supplying solutions they want you to tidy up, stock agencies giving away images – or nearly so – and design competitions created by clients to troll for cheap design solutions, this week I got an email from a Stock Photo agency wanting submissions of logos if you please – Give me a break! CreativePro in their newsletter CreativeProse clarified iStockphototo compensation policy and provide links to forums where the issue was being discussed. Logo design, good logo design, is not easy – The broad range of media that the result must work in, if it is going to be successful, can complicate the transformation of a cute idea into a workable reality. Touching on the assorted aspects of this particular type of design is Logo Designer Blog

I have mentioned the SmashingMagazine design website many time – An great mix of useful reference material and inspiration along with a dose of design history. I am eagerly awaiting my copy of their new design book . They recently had a great article on the Bauhaus the ’school’ that has had such a huge impact on architecture, product and graphic deign.

Another favourite web site, mentioned frequently is TED. If I were still working full time I would attend one of their seminars at the drop of a hat. But they are not cheap! – thankfully they are constantly adding material culled from the conference sessions to their web site. Another site that I recently discovered was Academic Earth , a repository of videos on diverse subject that is course material from some of the leading universities in the world. You are never too old to lear or revisit a subject from your younger years and see how it has progressed.

And that is it for this entry – I have stolen time over the last three days to post this and there are other things I had better get on with. Hopefully I will get onto the other folders in my Blog Stuff Folder ( Applications / Font Stuff / Books / Mac computer stuff/ Photography, Images and Ads / Web issues / Products) I want to thank those who have found things that they thought might be of interest to me and the wider audience.

I close with one more individual, Ben Cooper . A young photographer, working with NASA, who gets some unique photo opportunities others never get.

I used to try out a lot of applications, over the last 25 years things have evolved a lot and I always kept abreast of what was happening – If I was going specialise in the use of computers to solve design issues, and educate others in that, as well as carry on a design practice, I felt I should be aware of what was developing. I used to beta test software for a number of companies, and any time a program appeared that solved a particular problem in a elegant way – or could do so, I supported the developer with my dollars. My motto was if I could recoup the software expense on one clients project – the software had merit… I also made it a matter of honour to NEVER use software in my work that was not paid for.

Here a nice clip of the Visual History of iTunes

and here on www.thoughtdifferent.com a visual history of Apples homepages since 1997

Recently Jack Nack , a product manage for Adobe who has an excellent web blog had a particular article entitled Meet Adobe Illustrator (1987) that included this video of the then new Illustrator Version 1.o – the first Adobe product I ever owned.

I found a wonderful set of applications by http://www.ironicsoftware.com/

If you are a visual person who thinks a desktop or a single folder is a repository of all your files, these products are for you. They are search tools that visually order a variety of file types, visually, and provide you the tools to hunt for them. I have tried them all, even all at once, but the load on my iMac was a bit much – Maybe they would be better as a series of additive plugins rather than individual applications.

Below the Leap Interface which brings the Apple Leopard QuickLook to a unified window for easier search

Deep does something similar but only for image files, adding some image specific criteria to the search data – size, colour and tags

My personal favourite was Yep . While specific to pdf files, what it adds is astounding. As you probably know, your print dialogue allows you to save any item that you can see and print as a pdf. That pdf is a cross platform file and if you have the Acrobat application can be modified in some very interesting ways.I addition to the normal ability to add tags, view the file info, see the Quicklook preview, the files can be internally scanned and create a wordcloud, visible to the left of the screenshot below.

The fourth application , Fresh will help those that forget to look where they are saving files to and I gather from the web site there are now some free item – I must note that all the applications are available as fully working downloads

Like the trio of programs above, the second company I would like to mention is js8media.com I have been using the program ReelBean for clip viewing and conversion. The other program of choice for me was/is VisualHub but that program is no longer supported.

They have two other video related programs, ReelNQ, a batch video converter and MovieChapterizer for adding chapters to quicktime movies using quicktime player.

The other two applications they have, that I think are of interest, are AudioReferb and AudioLobe . With these two programs one can modify audio soundtracks, adjusting speed, pitch and adding effects

This company have a few other products but the three I have provided screenshots of, are in my estimation, worth a look if you deal with video formats or audio files. Like the applications of IronicSoftware above, JS8Media market elegant looking applications that fill specific use niches and do so at a reasonable cost.

If you do any screen documentation, you might find you money well spent on Layers .

I quote from their website:

Layers: Screen forensics

Capture your displays as a Photoshop layered image

Don’t waste time capturing each window separately, importing them in your favorite PSD editor, naming the layers, positioning the images, etc.

Do it with Layers in no time! Press the capture hotkey or customize your capture in the inspector. You’ll obtain a full fledged PSD file with one layer per window, including menu and desktop icons, dock and menubar.

This screen shot below sums it up – the output is a layered Photoshop file!

And now for a few less expensive applications that I thought were interesting.

Poladroid , not to be confused with Polaroid , which is easily done! This little application sits on you desktop as shown below, and will spit out up to 10 slowly developing images, cropped and bordered like the instant prints of yore! Why only 10 you ask – that was how much film was in the cartridge! so below the application interface and the output.

It is probably not too obvious by there is a texture to the creme coloured surround area of the finished print, a a fingerprint – nice little touches bringing back some old memories. Some you who will have read my previous posting will have seen some more pristine Polaroid look images before

Continuing with the idea of less money spent, we have JetPhoto Studio . from their website:

JetPhoto Studio is a feature-rich and easy-to-use digital photo software. With just a few clicks, JetPhoto Studio can turn your digital photos into beautiful Flash galleries with a professional look. JetPhoto Studio also makes fantastic web galleries quickly and easily.

25$US Pro version

• No JetPhoto promotion text is on the generated Flash movies or web galleries.
• More customization options to generate Flash gallery (size, color, label etc.).
• No limitation to generate Lightbox web galleries.
• No limitation to locate photos with GPS and generate Google Map gallery, KML, KMZ files.
• An EXIF tool that allows to merge Notes, Keywords and GPS metadata into JPEG files.
• Importing camera raw files into albums.

JetPhoto Server (Pro version 38$US)

JetPhoto Server is a full-featured digital photo publishing service software using PHP. You can establish a photo gallery website quickly and easily. JetPhoto server allows customizing templates for web albums, and presents your photos in thumbnails, picture story or Flash-based slideshow.

This software offers a great feature set for free and the ability to extend it if you want, for some payment. A similar product also free that I use often is JAlbum . Give it a look at well. In this case if you like the program and use it, they will very happily take a donation. With the 15-30 day demo’s, donation ware and partially featured, non pro versions of these applications you can try and use before you decide to support and buy. Please do support to programmers – they do need to eat!

AlternativeTo an interesting site. Need an alternative to Adobe PhotoShop that you can afford? From their website:

Find better Windows, Mac, Linux and online applications. AlternativeTo is a new approach to finding good software. Tell us what application you want to replace and we give you suggestions on great alternatives! Instead of listing thousands of more or less crappy applications in a category, we make each application into a category. Think of it like forever evolving blog posts about good alternatives to the software that you’re not satisfied with. And the “blog posts” are generated by you through suggestions, comments and votes.

Well that completes this entry. I will close off with a graphic from core77 , one of the many site I view daily. It is of coffee, something you will probably have needed to stay awake through all of this. I have a lot more to post but will wait till another day

all for now – R

http://www.rjslade.com/nswager/

Hardware and Software Changes

We have switched from Apple Aperture to Adobe LightRoom

Also during the intervening months and with upgrades to Sarah’s computer and camera she has been busy learning the new hardware and software. The G5 she was using was replaced by 4Gig Ram 2.5Ghz dualcore Intel MacBook Pro, and a 24 inch LCD screen for the studio.

The Canon 20D became my camera and she added a Canon 5D MK2 to her Canon 40D.

Oh and did I mention that Adobe CS4 shipped in there!

The upgrade presented an issue that ought to be talked about. I had two full Extended PShop versions of the CS3 Suite. While I use most of the programs in the suite, my wife uses PShop and PShop – LightRoom is not part of the Suite! So what do I need – One upgrade to the full Suite, one upgrade to the non extended version of PShop and one full version of LightRoom – I will put up with not being able to use LightRoom while she is using it – I only use it to try workflow issues anyhow – they are her images and she can do the tweaking. First we have the fact I am now resident in Umbria Italy, the software was bought from my VAR in Canada – I want to continue to do that – He is a good friend, and can use the pennies for the upgrade that Adobe would keep for themselves if I was able to order it at American prices via the web (which I cannot – yet another issue!) So the full suite upgrade, the PShop upgrade and the full LightRoom! The disks duly arrive and I start plugging in the serial numbers (I had already been using the 30 day demo’s). The suite went OK except that DreamWeaver has not even till now been recognised as part of the Suite and I cannot install any plug-ins into it! -

Adobe have confused copyright protection with usability and copyright protection seems to win out – please bring back the days when you can just drag the application to the Application Folder!

No go for the PhotoShop upgrade though – No way it was going to accept any of the numbers I had! Buried deep, and I mean deep, on the Adobe web site I found what appears to be the definitive list of what can upgrade which and guess what- You cannot officially go from the CS3 to a standalone version of PShop – not without a standalone number of the PShop included in CS3. At this point I blew my stack and provided it with a number and moved on.

( Given that I have owned every damned Adobe product, available on a mac over that last 20 plus years, a lot of which they discontinued after I had paid for them, and taught designers how to use them ( who also bought the ones they needed ) – I regard this as very shabby treatment. ADOBE be careful – you are getting too large and unfocussed on your user base and they will start to bite back if treated this way! )

After the previous explanation of why Aperture vs LightRoom, have we switched? I want to state that Aperture is a great program and remains in some ways better than LightRoom! But the user is using only in conjunction with Photoshop and is submitting her images to sites which we do not totally create so that the ability to modify the web templates is no longer as big a feature. In our opinion, LightRoom better at keywording and its relationship with PhotoShop is better.

Combined with those previously mentioned Adobe upgrades came some very good web based training from Lynda.com. We have used the Chris Orwig series on LightRoom2 for Photographers and PhotoShop for Photographers and found them to be very helpful.

So where are these new images?

For the latest work by PHOTOempt go to www.photoempt.smugmug.com

or use the following links for:

images of London
images of Durham County, North England
images of Mull
images of the High Sierra
images of Catalina Island, California
images of San Francisco
images of Umbria

With luck, I will return later this week as there are some 87 items resting in my folder of ‘blog stuff’ to comment on. All for now – R

My morning scan of the news site sure can be depressing but the web, thankfully is full of a lot of other details. Below are some that caught my attention – not major items but interesting to me as a designer.

But first I want to mention an artist who I met this summer here in MCdV. Sangram Majumdar, Professor of Painting, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD. He was one of the lecturers at the International School of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture (http://www.giotto.org/ ) here, this his first time, as a member of the faculty. Amusingly enough, my first encounter with him was to find him in the main piazza doing a charcoal sketch of the newer section of town, a wonderful architectual drawing. I commented that he ought to be a teacher – his other half who was standing next to him laughed – “well actually, he is”.

The school page for him is at:
 http://www.giotto.org/cimabue/majumdar/index.html And his personal site is: 
http://www.sangrammajumdar.com/

As those of you who have read my background, I have met a few artists in my day – This is one to follow. I think his work is wonderful!

As an aside, he was accompanied by a wonderful violinist this summer, and we had a wonderful time with the couple.

Annelies Mast 2nd Violins, National Symphony Orchestra, Washington DC

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I am alway interested in software that provides interesting methods of showing images. I have previously mentioned JAlbum that will create sites of images, which can then be modified or included inones site. This is another solution

Smooth Javascript Image Zooming For Your Web Pages This much-requested chunk of Javascript to zoom images inline, originally written for this blog but later rolled out to the Panic website and used for screenshots, is now polished up, bug-fixed, available for you to use on your website! More information and details are available at: http://www.cabel.name/2008/02/fancyzoom-10.html

Another approach to image presentation is CoolIris, http://www.cooliris.com which used to be known as Piclens. This works as a plugin to most current browsers

Transform your browser into a full-screen, 3D experience for online photos and videos. *************

For a wonderful reference site on colour, or is that color ?, I suggest you look at -

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY TUTORIALS – http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/

Learn how to take and edit digital photographs using visual tutorials that emphasize concept over procedure, independent of specific digital camera or lens. Topics range from basic camera tips to advanced techniques

From their site:

Cambridge in Colour was started in 2005, and has since grown substantially both in content and in the number of visitors it attracts. On any given day this site has well over 10,000 different people learning about photography, viewing the gallery and contributing to the forums. Thank you to all those who have helped share this site with others

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If you are having trouble with your downloads speed, but it is not consistent, it might be a case of your ISP throttling some of your bandwidth. When BitTorrent files started they were used for ‘grey’ content so it was simple for the service provider to intervene in this method, for the client to complain would necessitate admitting to downloading quasi-legal content. But the world has moved on, and the format has been adopted by legal content.

The site below may be able to help you pinpoint a throttling issue : http://www.mpi-sws.mpg.de/index_flash.php which will lead you to http://broadband.mpi-sws.mpg.de/transparency/bttest.php?

Certain ISPs have been shown to rate limit or block BitTorrent traffic sent by their customers. While there are multiple reports of this on the web, only a few ISPs have admitted that they manipulate BitTorrent traffic. And, to date, it is hard for users without networking expertise to gain evidence about the behavior of their ISP.This test suite creates a BitTorrent-like transfer between your machine and our server, and determines whether or not your ISP is limiting such traffic. This is a first step towards making traffic manipulation by ISPs more transparent to their customers

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I love visualisations of information. Here is another interesting example I came across.

History flow: from – http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/projects/history_flow/index.htm

Visualising the editing history of Wikipedia pages – History flow is a tool for visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors. In its current implementation, history flow is being used to visualize the evolutionary history of wiki* pages on Wikipedia

Below another example of the visualisations of information, this time all in Spanish, I think, but a great graphic of money flowing in and flowing out, and how it has been divided up – from: http://i208.photobucket.com/albums/bb154/chiquiesteban/Presupuestos-dia-1-2.jpg



And here a website of an individual that takes diverse data types and presents them in visually interesting forms – data as ART. Here the mapping of location and intensity of WiFi points during a journey – From : http://yesyesnono.co.uk/ and http://yesyesnono.co.uk/article/30/invisible-journeys

Invisible Journeys May 2, 10:39 AM – 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.

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Those of interested in the history of computing have all heard of the code breaking machines of the war but and article in the NYTimes led me to this gem

The Web Time Forgot : http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/17/science/17mund.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

PAPER TRAIL The telegraph room at the original Mundaneum in Brussels. (image source – Mundaneum)

The place actually has a site at: http://www.mundaneum.be/

Which is well worth a look if yourlanguage skills are up to the excerpt I have included here:

UN PEU D’HISTOIRE(S)

Le projet du Mundaneum, son histoire:
L’origine du Mundaneum remonte à la fin du XIXème siècle. Créé à l’initiative de deux juristes belges, Paul Otlet et Henri La Fontaine, le projet visait à rassembler l’ensemble des connaissances du monde et à les classer selon le système de Classification Décimale Universelle (CDU) qu’ils avaient mis au point.

Outil de connaissance pour la paix, le Mundaneum était conçu à la base comme un centre de documentation à caractère universel. Il fut durant la première moitié du XXème siècle le berceau d’institutions internationales humanistes dédiées au Savoir et à la Fraternité universelle. A partir de 1920, il occupa une aile du Cinquantenaire à Bruxelles. Ses collections y étaient exposées dans l’esprit des expositions universelles.

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A wonderful set of sites, revolving around one designers ideas and thoughts on Logo Design - http://www.davidairey.com/ and http://www.logosdesigners.com/

And then some specific Logo’s that were done for this years 2008 Summer Olympics in China - http://en.beijing2008.cn/63/32/column212033263.shtml

The pictograms of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games integrate pictographic charm of inscriptions on bones and bronze objects in ancient China with simplified embodiment of modern graphics.

Not ‘Logos’ but ‘Posters’ – not quite so concise a presentation of information but usually so. Here a site that has gathered some great classics: http://www.bobstaake.com/posters/

‘Totally Amzing Posters
 – Throughout my life I’ve been mesmerized by posters — particularly those created by the Europeans of the mid-20th Century. These bold, graphic and inventive posters continue to captivate contemporary illustrators, and while many of us have liberally taken inspiration from iconic poster graphics, they pale in comparison to those created from 1930-1960 in France, Italy, Germany, Great Britain, and virtually every country on the European continent’

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Google SketchUp is a program that you must try. I have mentioned it in a previous blog and have played with it from just after its inception, many many years ago, when I bought it as a product from Alias. Now free, at least for the general version, a number of other companies are making rendering plugins that work with it and produce stunning results. They may not be fast and the free versions do not create large output, but they can take a fairly simple to create SketchUp model and produce wonderful results.

I found Renditioner Express first but at the moment it is PC only ( I have not tried Google SketchUp with Parallels on my Intel iMac – maybe I should!) and then I found SU Podium

IDX Renditoner Express (Free) 
http://www.idx-design.com/IDX/IDXRenditioner/FreeVersionofIDXRenditionerExpress/tabid/1011/Default.aspx

The free version of IDX Renditoner Express includes all the same features as IDX Renditioner but differs in render size and possibly speed. IDX Renditioner Express (Free) supports a maximum render size of 640 x 480 pixels. (IDX Renditioner supports a maximum render size of 4096 x 4096 pixels, a full 16 megapixels. It also supports multithreading for higher performance necessary on the large images.)

IDX Renditioner Express (Free) includes a smaller number of light components, but more will be available on the forums at http://forums.idx-design.com. Lights are easy to create and we encourage you to share.

At this time the PC version is available, but a free Mac version is expected soon.

SU Podium – http://www.suplugins.com/

The simplest rendering plug-in for Google SketchUp now runs on Windows or the Mac.

You can make TRUE photo-realistic rendering of your SketchUp model without the pain and frustration of learning a complex program. Podium runs completely inside Google SketchUp from start to finish. It uses SketchUp features such as textures, background colors, groups and shadows to achieve impressive results. Podium is intuitive to SketchUp users. Plus, its simple interface cuts the learning curve to minutes instead of days. Make an impression without the pain. SU Podium works with Google SketchUp 6 or 5, Pro or Free, Windows or Mac.

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I am not a big fan of gaming software. BUT that said, every so often something catches my interest. The following fall into this category, and appears to have a support community.

Welcome to Celestia : http://www.shatters.net/celestia/The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn’t confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.

Additional material for this program is available at : http://www.celestiamotherlode.net/

The one Gaming title I have paid for is XPlane. http://www.x-plane.com/ This is a flight simulator that is simply amazing. Currently in version 9, I quote from the web site

‘X-Plane is the world’s most comprehensive, powerful flight simulator, and has the most realistic flight model available for personal computers. Welcome to the world of props, jets, single- and multi-engine airplanes, as well as gliders, helicopters and VTOLs such as the V-22 Osprey and AV8-B Harrier…”

At the moment it is 39$US, a bargain, but they are soon to return to their former higher pricing. Like the above mentioned software this is also a product with a community – didicated to making an already realistic product even better. This one is so good it is actually used by flights schools.

And to sweeten things they have an iPhone and iPod Touch version. This is software that will sell the hardware – really! Go look for yourself at : http://www.x-plane.com/iPhone/X-Plane/iPhone_X-Plane.html For just under $10, the experience of flying this in your hand is, to me, unbelievable…

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I like music, but my tastes are eclectic (my wife says they are warped) That said, we are blessed with internet service, courtesy of ARIA DSL here in Umbria that lets me listen through iTunes to streamed CBC Classics via the internet. I just have to remember to switchoff the remote speakers – iTunes and Airport Express – before I put on any folk or rock music.

So it was with interested I looked at this site below : Relational Music Discovery – http://www.maxkiesler.com/Relational Music Discovery

‘I spend most of my days and nights in front of the computer screen. Needless to say I listen to countless hours of music. I’m always looking for new music to listen to, and face it, iTunes can only get you so far with it’s rather limited discovery features. Recently, I’ve turned to relational, and visual music discovery engines to find more tunes that related to my current musical tastes.’

• Artist Network Visualization
• Audiosurf: Ride Your Music
• Liveplasma Music Discovery Engine
• Musicovery – Content Visualization
• Musiclens – Music Discovery Visualization
• Music Maps – Who is Listening to What and Where
• Podbop – Mp3 Concert Calendar
• TuneGlue – Relationship Explorer
• ScreenVader – Algorithmic Music, Images and Video
• Whitney Music Box – Visual Harmony

And while on the subject of music, what could be more so than the Minute Waltz – Right? Well not in this case but still worth a look Minute Waltz : http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/05/16/opinion/20080516_schott_2.html

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An avid reader of BrookStones (http://www.brookstone.com/) Vermont Country Store (http://www.vermontcountrystore.com/) and Hammacher Schlemmer (http://www.hammacher.com) catalogues, I like interesting gifts. So this site peaked my interest ; http://www.gnr8.biz/

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Getting good at Adobe PhotoShop takes some talent, some reading and a lot of practice. Thankfully there are a lot of sites out on the internet with free content to help you in your exploration. This is one : http://psdtuts.com/

“About – PSDTUTS is a blog/Photoshop site made to house and showcase some of the best Photoshop tutorials around. We publish tutorials that not only produce great graphics and effects, but explain in a friendly, approachable manner. Photoshop is a fantastically powerful program and there are a million ways to do anything, we hope that reading PSDTUTS will help our readers learn a few tricks, techniques and tips that they might not have seen before and help them maximize their creative potential! PSDTUTS is the sister site to VECTORTUTS, NETTUTS and AUDIOTUTS.”

If you have read this far, heaven knows how many typo’s and grammer mistakes you will have suffered through. While the content interests me greatly, trying to keep track of it, for myself and for you, is quite a task. Spelling and correct punctuation is not one of my strong points. BUT this site might help – http://www.retinart.net/miscellaneous/grammar

‘Retinart – Thoughts on graphic design, creativity and beauty. That’ll pretty much sum it up. From analytical essays on the finer points of typography (get it? You’ll laugh later, promise) to interviews with creatives with something special, the goal is to show the creativity and beauty produced by talented people and to hopefully make you think a little different and see things through a different lens.

Alex Charchar – Retinart is written by Alex Charchar. I’m a graphic designer currently living in Queensland, Australia. I graduated from Swinburne in Melbourne, started to work at USQ in the in-house studio and then wanted to develop my knowledge and love for all things creative. From one educational institutional to another.

After far too long thinking about how to do it, I finally did something with the domain I’ve owned for a number of years for more than getting email about making things bigger. I love clever ideas, elegant solutions and all those pretty things that make us smile, so my (very original) idea was to put together a site dedicted to such things.’

Wake Up Later is a website that touches on the subjects of website building, freelancing, blogging, and online entrepreneurship. We cover a variety of topics from freelance tips and programming to SEO and internet marketing. It is also the home of free stuff for freelancers, a growing repository of Flash, audio, and other stuff free for personal and commercial use. Furthermore, the website encourages the sharing of ideas and experiences through Interviews and GroupThinks.

The person behind this website is Samuel Ryan whom I will now refer to in the first person. I am a web designer and developer who currently resides with my wife in the heart of the United StatesIn Conclusion: Although it’s easy to laugh at the past designs of many of these websites while praising current designs, remember that you are a contemporary of 2008 and five years from now, you might think that even these current sites are a mess. Overall, I’m sure most would agree that design standards have been raised over the last decade, and it will be exciting to see what the next ten years hold…

*************

Now here is my idea of an Entertainment Site – if the conversation ever lags at a party you are at, maybe one of these gems will help ! Unnecessary Knowledge : http://www.unkno.com/

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I have a beautiful friend who used to live in Ottawa and now lives in Washington DC – A fanastic designer who I have had the opportunity to help on occasion. Every time I see an article on shoes I think of her – so this site is for her.

The Virtual Shoe Museum : http://www.virtualshoemuseum.com/vsm/index.php The Virtual Shoe Museum was initiated by Liza Snook in 2004. Once the idea was born, a long search began for designers, photographers and publishers connected to shoes. New friendships developed and our mailbox filled with loads of material on fantastic shoes, art and design on shoes.

*************

I have already mentioned the iPod Touch that I own. I use us to check stocks, weayher, write notes, surf when I am away from my computer and need some nugget of knowledge, I have paid for the full ‘American Heritage Dictionary’ and ‘Ultralingua, English-Italian Dictionary’. ‘AirSharing’ is a great piece of software that allows you to tranfer nonstandard content to your iPod Touch or iPhone – such as Adobe pdf’s or ‘Apple KeyNote’ slide shows.

I disagree with Apple in that I think electronic reading tablet is a great idea and without a lot of work they could create one – Sure the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Readers are nice but for that price they ought to do all the other things that Apple could allow them to do.

Another recent find has been : Stanza – http://www.lexcycle.com/

‘Featuring a clean, well-organized interface, Stanza is expressly designed for reading digital publications, including electronic books, newspapers, PDFs, and general web content. Stanza is built from the ground up to make reading on your Macintosh or Windows laptop or desktop an enjoyable and hassle-free experience. It gives special attention to details that are usually overlooked in other software readers such as hyphenation, text columnation, automatic text scrolling, and user-friendly page and chapter navigation. Lengthy content that can be tedious to read using a web browser or PDF viewer is easy and natural with Stanza.’

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And the last entry here has got to do with the Gorrila of all software suites – The Adobe Creative Suite. A month agao now we were shown what is would contain and it has now just started to ship. It is one of the reasons that I continue to do a bit of design work. PhotoShop alone is worth the price to entry but I also use, most days, DreamWeaver (yes I have had to switch from GoLive, and now that I have I can see why it wond the battle – I just wish that they had provided thoe coders of MenuMachine (http://menumachine.com/) a heads up – the loss of that wonderful plugin for Golive – is a loss all designers should feel. They are reworking it – from the ground up for Dreamweaver but it is not happening overnight (http://menumachine.com/blog/) – meanwhile I limp along with inadequate soltions…

Adobe Illustrator was my first Adobe product – I don’t use it vey often these days but it is an old friend – InDesign took the place of PageMaker and shortly after its inception left Quark struggling to catchup. A wonderful program that allows content layout for diverse platforms – including eBooks – like those used by the previously mentioned Stanza.

BUT the Jewel is PhotoShop! The new version is worth it, the improvements to an already astounding product adding more than enough features to keep most designers happy for a few more years… And soon to be released is Adobe Configurator a tool for creating your own palletes. John Nack on his Adobe blog explains it in more detail…

Adobe Configurator : http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/10/introducing_ado_1.html “By now you’ve probably heard me talk many times about our desire to better manage the complexity and power of Photoshop. The very general interface that Photoshop presents is incredibly flexible, but it can be overwhelming, and it doesn’t do much to show you just what you need when you need it. We can do better.”

There is a very good video of the features here : http://www.russellbrown.com/Transfer/Configurator.mov

And that is it for this entry

Hopefully I will again add to this blog – heavens knows I have a lot of things collected to share with you – R

A wonderful school project that was taken out of context – the poor fellow was trashed on a variety of sites when it was learnt that this was but a project and not a reality. What a shame – it is a wonderful school project

http://biggestdrawingintheworld.com/drawing.aspx

this is the supposed route of the ‘project’, chosen to create a giant map

Fonts:

We all make jokes about doctors and their writing and the need for pharmacist to take course in writing recognition. I know many people who only ever got the ability to print nicely from their Architecture degree, and I myself am not known for the neatness or klegibilty of my own script therefore I found this posting wonderful:

“Something which has always intrigued me: these people that help us communicate … how do they themselves communicate? If we strip away the monitors, and the printing presses, and the typefaces … how would William Caslon have written on a post-it note? http://www.themaninblue.com/articles/handwritten_typographers/

One letter – M

Used again and again for the public transport systems around the world. Here is a compilation of what has been done with it. http://mic-ro.com/metro/metrologos-static.html

The beautiful things that can be done with type are amply displayed here: http://www.aisleone.net/2008/design/a_b_-peace-terror/

“A_B_… is a functional information design piece that uses computational aesthetic principles to compare complex and socially relevant data. The dual-sided overlay of the two graphs allows for a direct visual comparison of the peace and terror measures. The functional nature of the poster becomes poignantly relevant when one makes detailed comparisons across nations for the various measures—many of the results are quite surprising and stand in contrast to prevailing norms of collective national perception.”

Free Fonts: They sometimes say you ge what you pay for but I hesitate to apply that sying to some of the things that are given away in the design world

“Welcome to Font Cubes. Here you’ll find the best free PC fonts and free Mac Fonts from the best font artists in the world. The fonts listed in our free font collection are their author’s property. Please contact their authors for further consultation regarding the use of the listed fonts.
‘ http://www.fontcubes.com/

the barber shop font

MisPrinderType

ABOUT-name: Eduardo Recife- location: BRAZIL – Belo Horizonte – MG

http://www.misprintedtype.com/v3/fonts.php

These Numbers are not free but there are 16 different fonts here so the 129US is pretty reasonable!

http://www.typography.com/fonts/font_styles.php?productLineID=100018&cpuCount=1

I particularly like the ‘Premium” but can imagine times when the others would have been useful



Ralf Herrmann’s Typography Weblog

http://opentype.info/blog/

‘EXPLORING WEBFONT POSSIBILITIES

Embeddable webfonts (as introduced with Safari 3.1) are not just about using fancy fonts on web pages. It also opens new possibilities for using glyphs that are simply not available in the standard system fonts. Let’s say you are a linguist or archeologist and wan’t to set an ancient text and you need characters that are not available in Arial or Lucida Grande. Putting little images inside the text was the only way to do it – so far. But the images wouln’t scale and copy & paste of such a text wouldn’t work properly. But with webfonts you could do those things smoothly – and much more. Here are two examples …”

http://opentype.info/blog/2008/05/14/exploring-webfont-possibilities/

This is once again gaining support, thankfully, with the ability being built into new browsers. There is a great resource here ; http://www.fontembedding.com/

‘Why FontEmbedding.com?

Fonts play a critical role in the display, printing and manipulation of text based information and content. As technology has evolved, so have the intricacies of properly developing, licensing and deploying fonts. This evolution impacts everyone that designs, develops or uses fonts:

• Type designers, font foundries & distributors

• Graphic designers & typographers exploring new media

• Web designers & web developers

• IT managers & system administrators

• Software developers & hardware manufacturers

Type as Art

An interesting site – but unless you want to have others market your ideas, this is only a starting point for your exploration. Note -

‘The typographic creations built with this application will be stored in a database hosted by JRVisuals, LLC. As such they will be and perpetually remain the joint property of JRVisuals and Silo Design. We reserve the right to use these creations for promotional and/or commercial endeavors. All efforts will be made to credit those who took part in their creation however compensation is not promised nor implied.’

Along the same lines:

LADIES OF THE BASELINE http://www.inkfinger.us/store/2007/02/ladies_of_the_b.html

‘Each Typewoman is created entirely with type (letters, punctuation, ligatures) in the typeface of their namesake and sit atop a pattern created with the same. No letterform has been skewed, stretched, flipped or any other bastardizing technique — just scaling at rotating. So the letters are pure as the driven snow! Check out this little glimpse of how the letters are laid over each other:’ http://www.typeisart.com/

Typebase – Foundries and Designers

A listing or links http://www.typebase.com/foundries.html

Credits-Last update on 05-01-2008, TypeBase contains 553 links to fine quality typographic websites around the world, selected by Donald Roos [VetteLetters.nl] & Robert-Jan van Noort [Pankra Studio].

My Fonts – What the font

There are a varierty of sites of this nature – but boy can they save time when the client has provided you a piece of artwok and no idea of the deigners font source.

‘Ever wanted to find a font just like the one used by certain publications, corporations, or ad campaigns? Well now you can, using our WhatTheFont font recognition system. Upload a scanned image of the font and instantly find the closest matches in our database…’ http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

Assuming the client does not want you to match an existing font – here is resource to help you pick an appropriate font – http://www.typesql.com/

And while time is passing you can have this as a Screensaver to keep track of the time http://www.simonheys.com/wordclock/

‘Word Clock is a typographic screensaver for Mac OS X and Windows. It displays a fixed list of all numbers and words sufficient to express any possible date and time as a sentence. Word Clock displays time by highlighting appropriate words as each second passes.’

They say it will also be available in this rotary version

I have mentioned this site before but on July 21st 2008 there was a nice posting covering some wonderful funny doodles – on a napkin no less http://ilovetypography.com/2008/07/21/sunday-type-napkin-type/

If you want a static desktop rather than a screensaver the same site points you to iStock for a free image



They also have a listing of their Popular Articles

• How to Make a Font

• Type History series

• Web Typography Guide

• On Choosing Type

• Identify That Font

• From Moleskine to Market

• Who Shot the Serif?

• Typoholism—an addict’s tale

As you can see, one of those is about trying to identify fonts and it includes the link I have mentioned above

A couple of more fonts for those odd situation; This time from The Design Bureau of America

http://thedesignbureauofamerika.com/thebureaulovesyou/fonts/

‘Welcome to The Design Bureau of Amerika’s design resource site. The assets found here are FREE to download and use. This is simply a way for The Bureau to say “thanks” and give a little something back to the design community. If you use these assets, please show The Bureau some love back and give credit when possible. Thanks,Keith Bowman, Creative Director’

Other sites that touch on type: http://inspiredology.com and http://inspiredology.com/typography/

‘Inspiredology is a new resource that covers everything that inspires us. Most sites show Best of galleries and massive databases of thumbnail sized screen shots of css sites. We are here to give you what our name says, we are here to inspire. If you find yourself stuck or looking on how you can make your project better, visit inspiredology.com to get yourself out of that dark creative hole.’

Type for you – http://www.typeforyou.org/

‘Typeforyou is a blog on typography.

‘My name is Pedro Serrão and I’m a graphic designer from Porto, Portugal.
I like type, playing piano, architecture, product design, motion, travel, music, interaction, MIT, art, vespas. If you´d like to see of my work go to www.pedroserrao.com or www.thisispacifica.com

João Planche www.prideparanoia.com

I’m João Planche, an interactive designer from Lisbon, Portugal. Among other things I like everything that moves, interactive explorations, experimental solutions, architecture, hang out with friends and a special love on typography.

Pedro Mesquita www.thisispacifica.com

Hello, My name is Pedro Mesquita and I’m graphic designer. I live and work in Oporto. I love design, surf, skate and a lot other stuff.’

Any of you who have designed a web site and want the end user to see what you are seeing , know of the problem of the end user not having your fonts. In CSS you use a device called a font stack. A useful resource is: http://unitinteractive.com/blog/2008/06/26/better-css-font-stacks/

‘Better CSS Font Stacks by Nathan on 6.26.08 | One aspect of designing for the web that almost immediately offends designers is the lack of fonts that are considered safe to use. While it is true that there are only a handful of web safe fonts, the ones we do have at our disposal can be quite powerful and diversely useful. On top of that, CSS gives us a nice little thing called a font stack.’

And from ; http://24ways.org/2007/increase-your-font-stacks-with-font-matrix

‘Increase Your Font Stacks With Font Matrix by Richard Rutter’

Not about fonts, but images…

Photoshelter is the most recent outlet for our images… They have available an interesting widget that allows us to embed the images here in the blog… Neat marketing for them, and for us…

Onto getting that type off the screen

http://www.printerville.net/

‘We love everything about printers, paper, ink and printing. We have been playing with them, writing about them, and using them for more than two decades, so we like to think we know more than a little bit about them.

Of course, the world of printers is a big one, and we’ve chosen to focus largely on photo printers for amateur and professional photographers. Run by Rick LePage and Ben Long, Printerville offers unbiased news, reviews, technology discussions and more. We are not affiliated with any printer manufacturer, paper supplier or other company in this market.’

Rick LePage and Ben Long

Remember those names – Articles by them a worth reading. Along with David Pogue, Dan Margulis , Ben Wilmore and the crew from The National Association of Photoshop Professionals (http://www.photoshopuser.com/), Scott Kelby probably the best known.

Fantastic writes were Cary Lu (http://www.tidbits.com/carylu/) and Bruce Fraser (http://www.brucefrasertribute.com/) but have both passed on. If you can find material by them, it is worth a read. Cary in particular helped me through my early days of mac discovery.

From Red River Paper:


‘Inkjet paper from inkjet paper experts. Red River was founded in 1997 and has over 40 years experience in fine papers. We hand pick fine paper from mills around the world and bring them to our plant in Dallas, Texas. From here, we convert the paper to various sheet sizes and rolls, as well as add special features available only from Red River. We offer wholesale direct pricing, and the convenience of over 30 different inkjet papers under one roof. Red River invests the time and money to understand and test the latest inkjet technology from Epson, Canon, HP, Lexmark and others. Our customer service reps are well versed in our products and inkjet printing, and can give our customers helpful advice on which Red River papers will suit their needs.’

Not only a source of printer needs it is a great source of info, like this article on ink jet printing costs : http://www.redrivercatalog.com/cost-of-inkjet-printing-v1.html

And to end this posting I will share with you a brief movie about a font conference.

It is to be found on collegehumor.com at http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1823766

As they say ‘This video wasn’t long enough, so we made it double-spaced.’

Going to stop here, the ‘Interesting topic folder‘ is down to 81 items, three major groups and many single items – I may never get caught up!

Bye for now – R

Photography in the modern world:

The first major thing that happened was my wife had her thumb broken – note I have not said that she broke her thumb. But rather – it was broken.

It is not an easy world for photography these days. Concern over security, post 9/11 has made any photographer a questionable person – why are they taking the photo. Strange in a world so watched by CCTV of security forces, mapped and photographed globally and available online through the likes of `Google Maps (http://maps.google.com/) or Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/tour/thanks-mac4.html) or StreetView (here is a Telegraph article on StreetView. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2008/06/20/eastreet120.xml&CMP=ILC-mostviewedbox)

The private security forces ‘protecting’ the rights of their paymasters do not understand the law regarding photography – what one is allowed to photograph and from where – legally. The reason for the photography is also important.

The UK Guardian Newspaper had an article entitled ‘Are photographers really a threat?’ http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/jun/05/news.terrorism

Three important sources of legal advice, specifically American, British and Canadian are:

• http://ambientlight.ca/laws.php
• http://www.sirimo.co.uk/media/UKPhotographersRights.pdf
• http://www.krages.com/ThePhotographersRight.pdf

In the case here, Sarah, my wife, who among other talents, is a photographer was photographing a local event and a local individual took exception to it, approached her angrily and resulted in her thumb being broken.

The photo that led to this incident are here:

12 hours after a larger tent than this was upside down in the field in the foreground, the festa was again underway – Unfortunately the thumb has yet to heal and current photography is limited.

Pretty innocuous, recording the ability of our local community to spring back from a natural calamity over a very short period of time. The images were taken to record the event for the community and were posted on our site at www.rjslade.com

Given that Sarah also plays the piano, the cello and hauls about considerable photo equipment, the full use of her right thumb is very important. At the moment she has not got that, just considerable pain as the fracture mends and she tries to not do too much with it.

It has given her more time to do the drudge work of being a photographer – cataloguing , describing and keywording images as required by assorted vendors of images.

We continue with out personal sites at:

www.photoempt.com

and

photoempt.smugmug.com

The initial site, which is my own design, and generated by Apple Aperture (http://www.apple.com/aperture/features/) from which I can export the finished sets of images, having modified the built in templates, continues, but is now the second site. I have previously covered in this blog why I chose Aperture over LightRoom (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/) to manage our images – As Sarah gets more proficient herself with Photoshop (http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/photoshopextended/) and we move away from our own site, the reasoning is less important the the workflow issues of management and image editing become more important

SmugMug (http://www.smugmug.com/) is a wonderful site ; I found out about it through a comment made on BagelTurf (http://www.bagelturf.com/) by Steve Weller which I discovered while researching the question of Aperture vs LightRoom. Steven uses them to host his images. They have three different types of plans, Standard, Power User or Professional and a wonderful set of features. We signed up for Professional, and it is the first place we upload any new photography

Following the Mull Workshop mentioned below, Sarah returned to London UK and did a few days of photography. Here the ‘Gherkin’ framed by the Tower Bridge in the evening light. One of the aspects of photography in London is security and Sarah was stopped by police, questioned and documented while doing photography. No hassled but they did take notice. The amusing thing was that this was while shooting an image in Bedford Square, not while shooting a major landmark!

One of a group of bikers practicing their acrobatic skills on the SouthBank. The walls are painted with graffiti. This image required a model release so that it can be sold, and one was obtained. The issue of releases is yet another impediment to photography.

The access to Canary Wharf Underground – one of those iconic shots. Here the security people insisted that a tripod was not allowed

As you can see, if you visit the site, with a little work you can alter just about any aspect of the look that hey provide, but the feature set they provide and the level of support is wonderful. Add to that, the community around it, through DGrin and other forums is outstanding. Sarah has met through them, Muench Workshop (http://www.muenchworkshops.com/) Sarah has Attended one of their workshops in Mull Scotland and is scheduled to attend another in August. Details on these are at:

Mull Scotland: http://www.dgrin.com/printthread.php?t=73417&pp=40

Extreme Sierras: http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=775588

Above and below : The Isle of Mull

Some other sites of individuals that I have found interesting, some found by me, some suggested in articles and by other people

This woman got a write up recently and has some interesting work:

Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir at: http://www.flickr.com/people/rebba/

Gordon Woldford has a great site that shows off his travels around North America.

Gordons pBase site at: http://www.pbase.com/merriwolf

Jim Reid’s site was just pointed out to me – Wonderful!

Jim Reed is recognized as one of the world’s most accomplished weather photographers for his one-of-a-kind images of America’s changing climate. A veteran full-time storm chaser, Jim has spent nearly two decades documenting almost every type of meteorological phenomena — including tornadoes, blizzards, electrical storms and floods. He has documented 15 hurricanes, including Hurricane Katrina — the costliest tropical cyclone ever to strike the United States. In 2004, he penetrated the eye of all four major hurricanes to strike Florida. http://www.jimreedphoto.com/gallery.html?gallery=Fine%20Art

A Web magazine – JPG Magazine. Well actually it is a real printed magazine – yeas – paper – but I have only ever viewed the pdf back copies that are available on the web site. I can’t say I enjoy all the work but it is an interesting source of what is ‘current’ http://www.jpgmag.com/

Researchers have managed to get the hardware and software cost down to a level that makes this hardware viable for most professionals. From Times Online. May 15, 2008 ‘Billion-pixel panoramas — from your own camera’ http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3938717.ece

And the web site dedicated to the project: Gigapan http://gigapan.org/

Three great sites to compare the details of assorted photo hardware. I usually start with DPReview:

• http://www.digitalcamerainfo.com/
• http://www.dpreview.com/
• http://www.steves-digicams.com/diginews.html

(heh I just realized this is now hosted by SmugMug!)

B & H : your first stop when you are ready to buy that new must have: This store is the photographers Mecca – located in New York City it is wild. The staff is very knowledgeable, can come across as quite brusque (downright rude sometimes) but if it is worth having they have it and at prices that are hard to match. Their retail price is better than most Canadian wholesale prices ! Watch the holidays and opening hours though, They are observant jews and honour their calender.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/

“Professional” organizations that worry about these photo issues:

• Editorial Photographers (EP) A non-profit organization dedicated to improving the health and profitability of editorial photography. Our mission is to educate photographers and photography buyers about business issues affecting our industry, and in the process raise the level of business practices in the profession. http://www.editorialphoto.com
• Stock Artists Alliance SAA supports and protects the business interests of professional stock photographers worldwide. http://www.stockartistsalliance.org
• UPDIG Working Group The UPDIG Working Group is an ad-hoc industry consortium of nonprofit associations, whose logos are shown here, along with allied trade groups and manufacturers. http://www.updig.org/published/Updig.AboutUPDIG.html

A few of the other Photography Community Sites you might want to visit:

• Fine Art Photoblog The Fine Art Photoblog is a unique website dedicated to collectors and admirers of fine art photography. The site is something of a mix between art gallery, photoblog, and search engine. http://www.fineartphotoblog.com/
• Fotocommunity Are you a passionate hobby photographer? Are you are ready to be inspired, to share your passion and knowledge with more than 670.000 members? Great! Then fotocommunity is the perfect place for you and your creative works. http://www.fotocommunity.com/pc/pc/channel/50
• The Radiant Vista The Radiant Vista is a creative community of inspiration, passion, and grace. Together we pursue our dreams and explore our endless potential. http://www.radiantvista.com/

Old photo’s are a great source of inspiration. The American Smithsonian and the Library of Congress are starting to put some of their collections online. And then there are articles on particular subjects – I list here one on old images of New York City ( you might have noticed a fondness for this city – we have been there numerous times for enjoyment and photography.

• New York in Black and White: http://wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?p=29988&mode=threaded
• Prints & Photographs Online Catalog : The Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) provides access through group or item records to more than 50% of the Division’s holdings, as well as to some images found in other units of the Library of Congress. Many of the catalog records are accompanied by digital images–about one million digital images in all. http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/catalog.html
• Smithsonian Institution’s Photostream : http://flickr.com/photos/smithsonian

And last, but definitely not least the three main groups of Royalty Free Vendors we list our images with. Why these three? FotoSearch approached us a few years ago as Wonderfile (part of Masterfile) was folding. They represent most of the big names and have a growing body of individuals, who they have approached.

StockphotoPro are recent – we (and I gather from blog entries on the web, hundreds of others) received an invite to join them. We liked their site and the tools they provide and the service/support they have given us.

PhotoShelter is our most recent choice. Again the tools and service of the supplier have been big issues.

While there is no cost to us to have these people represent us, they obvious take a percentage of the sales. We have, as noted in previous posts, dealt with microstock, but the return for the work and hassle is questionable. These firms return a more reasonable amount for each sale and set the bar in terms of image quality and content much higher. Each site has its own requirements though, its own methods of submission, and paper work required to ensure required taxes are withheld on sale. We will never get rich selling our images but it does make it all meaningful and gives our passion an outlet. I came across a joke the other day that says it all:

Q : What is the difference between a professional photographer and a pizza. A : The pizza can feed a family of 4

PhotoShelter

PhotoShelter is an online photo community where 37,000 of the world’s photographers find new opportunities and liberation from the traditional model of selling their work. http://psc.photoshelter.com/

StockphotoPro

Join the professional photographers from across the globe who have already submitted their best Images. Contribute to the StockphotoPro collection and earn a commission every time a picture of yours is sold. http://www.stockphotopro.com/

FotoSearch

What is Fotosearch? Publitek, Inc., dba Fotosearch is a provider of royalty free and rights managed stock photography, illustrations, maps, video, and audio. We bring together many different stock agencies to provide “The World’s stock photography at one website.”™ The products on Fotosearch can be licensed and easily downloaded for use in your advertisements, promotional materials, websites, etc. When you purchase a license to use an image, video clip, or audio clip, you do so based on the license agreement of the publisher of that particular content. The license agreement will be presented to you before purchase confirmation. http://www.fotosearch.com/

That is it for this entry – There are still 84 entries in my folder of URLS, covering colours, fonts, software – Will try to add another posting real soon – R

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!

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

More Reading and Viewing

I love a bookstore – the shelves of books on Art, Design, Photography and Science. And old bookstores with old books on these subjects are just as interesting if not more so, for their historical significance. The new books, the current books have Amazon to bring them to your attention, and in many cases give us a foretaste of the content through the ‘See Inside’ feature. The old books are another issue. The following site in one person interest in old books

BibliOdyssey - Books~~Illustrations~~Science~~History~~Visual Materia Obscura~~Eclectic Bookart. A hard copy in book form, and a review of the book:Touching on the subject of copyright and intellectual property, that I have covered before, with regard to the making of the book Permission Unpossible

Continuing on the theme of intellectual property

You Can’t Picture This - Thousands of UK residents have signed a petition against a law preventing photography and filming in certain public places. Yet this all turned out to be a misunderstanding, and no such law was proposed. Rajesh investigates the way we view the lens and the way it views us.

On the subject of Colour:

Adobe® kuler is an online community where you can explore, create, and share color themes. The color themes in kuler are contributed by its users, many of them designers or in the creative business. You can share with the community your own chromatic ingenuity, too

and a useful spinoff of that is:

Lithoglyph’s Mondrianum is a powerful plug-in that enables Mac applications to leverage the resources of the kuler community. Once installed, Mondrianum acts like a built-in, system-wide color picker, available in any Mac application that supports this feature of Mac OS X. Apple’s own iWork™ and iLife® suites, Google Sketchup™, Adobe® Photoshop®, and renowned applications like Coda, CSSEdit, and many more, all work well with Mondrianum

Colour is but only one type of inspiration one might need. A few other sites that I have found particularly interesting this week are:

• commandshift3 ; A site that shows and rates web site by look. It opens with you deciding which of two images you prefer but as you enter the site you can see what others have voted best and worst.
• A weblog by Andy Rutledge; A beautiful layout and great content. It is called design view
• Royal Magazine ; The Cultivation of Culture – Royal is the private journal of The KDU. (Keystone Design Union). The publication focuses on Collisions, Culture and Capitalism. We believe that we are more than just editors or filters. We believe in active media, and live by the rule of “never just observe, always interact.” We believe that the gravity of our culture is so powerful, nothing and no one are immune to its pull. We are dedicated to injecting sensation back into a numb world.

Images and Thoughts:

How does one express complex ideas in a manner that can be easily understood? This is what we as designers are supposed to do.

We Feel Fine : An exploration of human emotion, in six movements by Jonathan Harris and Sep KamvarHarvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.).

This site and some TED content are included in this Smashing Magazine article that will link you to a wealth of similar stuff.

Data Visualization: Modern Approaches - Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data – tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years…

and a similar approach but concerned with time can be found at: mysociety.org Their mission is:

mySociety has two missions. The first is to be a charitable project which builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. The second is to teach the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to most efficiently use the internet to improve lives…

It is always interesting to get some idea of the talent that is on the horizon, Papers like the New York Times, or in this case The Guardian follow issues like this:

The top 50 - When it comes to design, the UK is home to some of the world’s biggest talent. But who are the brightest stars? We put together a panel of judges to identify the hottest names. Here they are …

Well that is it for today. Have a lot else I could say but I am off to watch a movie and relax. In closing one more article – not so much political, definitely not entertainment – an article that might add some ‘food for thought’ the next time you hear the term Sharia. Like many people, my understanding of what it is has been negatively framed by miss use and understanding. Like the word Communism vs Socialism these words mask so much – can be interpreted through ignorance, or miss used on purpose, for negative reasons. Anyhow, all this to suggest you might find the article Why Shariah on the New York Times an eye opener and provide you with another perspective on the world around you.Really, that’s it – Ross

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