TUAW reports that the wizards of widgets at iSlayer have come up with yet another really useful tool for the Dashboard. Organized is a free widget with an event calendar, world clock, notes, and to-dos, all of which are synced to iCal and Mail.
I'm not a huge fan of Dashboard Widgets, but I'm always on the lookout for something that can integrate iCal and Mail. This looks well worth a look see, especially since I really like iStat menus.
John Nack has posted a note to let us know that Adobe has posted Beta 2 of the upcoming Flash Player 10 to Adobe Labs. An Adobe engineer pointing out that on Mac OS X this new build runs the GUIMark test suite some 3x faster than previous versions. That's VERY welcome news given that Flash has always been a thorn in Mac-user's side no matter which browser you use or how fast your connection is.
A while back, I ranted about developers, PC writers, bloggers, Microsoft and Mac users in general. Today, I want to chit-chat about the iPhone.
The iPhone, it's the 2nd-coming of Christ. It'll make your stupid kids smarter, your fat-ass smaller, your husband's beer-belly smaller, and your ugly wife hotter! The iPhone makes your e-penis huge like no amount of Viagra can. It'll deposit $100,000 into your bank account today, and it'll eradicate every douchebag in Washington D.C. and replace them with hard-working, honest Americans with the touch of a button.
With all that up-side, it's no wonder that every Web site I visit, I get a heaping helping of iPhone B.S. shoved down my grocery pipe. My RSS reader of choice actually puked on my keyboard this morning, and I'm pretty sure I saw an iPhone Mail icon mixed in the puddle of mush.
Sites I used to love reading are gagging like a cat with a furball in its throat with iPhone articles. Enough already!
Based in Cornelius, NC, The Moore Creative Company opened its doors in August of 1997 as a graphic design shop owned by Ran Moore and his wife, Jennifer. When the company was born, it was 100-percent devoted to graphic design for print intentions — an eclectic mix of jobs, from brochures and letterhead, to billboards and vehicle graphics. The company primarily targeted the local commercial and residential real-estate industries.
As the years unfurled behind it, the company evolved and grew beyond the geographical boundaries of North Carolina and its initially narrow Clientele focus. Today, The Moore Creative Company employs a staff of three designers, four developers, and a search engine marketer. Its clients represent a diverse roster of companies that vary in size, as well as industry. And what was once a print-centric workflow now is unevenly split, with 20 percent representing print output, and the 80-percent balance devoted to electronic and online media.
"We transitioned to more Web-site design and interactive Flash [and] animation work online, and later, to more e-mail marketing design," Ryan Moore recalls "We probably hit the 50-50 split between print and online around 2001 or so, and now we do more jobs that start with electronic items, and that we're suggesting print items to support or complement them — versus the other way around."
It was a few years ago when The Moore Creative Company underwent a transition of another kind; it switched layout platforms, from QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign. Moore says the revamp of the workflow went quite smoothly, overall, and the design team appreciated the synergies between Adobe InDesign and the rest of the Adobe Creative Suite — Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. — they'd already been using.
The only "glitch" in the workflow was so minor it may not even be properly categorized as a "glitch," and that was how to handle legacy content that needed to be reused or creative content submitted by clients that came in the form of native-application QuarkXPress files. Moore began a quest for a tool that would allow his creative team to reincarnate QuarkXPress files in Adobe InDesign, without having to essentially rebuild the layout, element by element.
So in some ways XPress 8 is an admission by Quark that Adobe is now setting the standards for how designers work... By going back and re-focusing on the little stuff, they’ve actually made some giant strides forward.
Gene Gable has a First Look at Quark XPress 8.0 over at CreativePro that's worth reading if you're a Quark user thinking of upgrading.
As you probably have guessed by the content here at The Graphic Mac, I'm not a Quark XPress user (though I was for many years). That being said, the new features look quite appealing. However, the new "interface" reminds me of a kid's painting program. Very gaudy and comic book-like, in my opinion.
As you may recall if you're a long-time reader (going back to the CreativeGuy blog days in 2005), I posted an article titled Color shifting and replacement in Photoshop covering the easiest way to change the color of objects in your image. It's an excellent and simple overview, which I re-posted here at TGM late last year.
Veerle also covered the tool in this blog post in 2006.
Well here we are in 2008, and video is all the rage these days, so here's the same color replacement tip in a video post over at Sebastian Sulinski's Design site.
This tool is often overlooked by most designers - though professional photographers are most like as attached to it as they are their favorite lens. Play around with it for a while, I think you'll begin to see how powerful the tool can be in no time.
Font-related support requests always seem to be present in support forums across the Web.
Below are the fonts that ship with OSX Leopard which are the minimum required by the system in order to function properly:
There are two rules that you must remember when dealing with fonts in OSX. First, never, ever, EEEEVVAAARRR disable, move, rename, spit-on or otherwise agitate AppleGothic.dfont or LucidaGrande.dfont. You're hosed if you do. Seriously!
Second, read up on fonts in OSX.
For more information about fonts in OSX and how not to shoot yourself when dealing with them, you can take a look at this fantastic (and lengthy) article by Kurt Lang; Font Management in OSX.
It appears that Kurt keeps this informative article updated with each new OS release, so you should probably bookmark it. It's by far the most in-depth, informative and balanced font article I've ever seen. If you find it useful, throw the guy a bone... his Paypal address is at the very bottom of the article.
In a somewhat crowded market, yet another visual CSS editor has been released that's certainly worth checking out.
Flux is a visual CSS editor that uses Javascript to add some flair to your designs. Flux allows you to drag & drop elements onto your page, move them around and watch your CSS files get updated.
Flux retails for $69, and a demo is available from The Escapers Web site.
For longtime users of Adobe Illustrator, you may not have even noticed that back in Illustrator CS2, Adobe finally added a simple way of underlining text - rather than drawing a vector line with the pen tool and grouping it with your text.
CS2 and CS3 users can use text underline and strikethrough by opening your Character Panel, click on the Options flyout menu and choose Show Options. Two new buttons should appear near the bottom of the Character Panel. Much easier for us old-timers!
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a good way to specify the styles of fonts and other page elements on your sites. It makes it easier for you to update styles too, because when done right, you only need to make a single change to update the styles on multiple pages and elements.
To help you work with CSS, Hostm.com has created a free tool called Simple CSS, which runs on Macs, Windows and Linux. Simple CSS allows you to easily create Cascading Style Sheets from scratch, and/or modify existing ones, using a familiar point-and-click interface.
HDR, or High Dynamic Range Imaging seems to be all the rage these days. HDRI is described as:
In image processing and photography, high dynamic range imaging (HDRI) is a set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of exposures (the range of values between light and dark areas) than normal digital imaging techniques.
Digital Photography School has a fantastic Introduction to HDR Imaging, covering the methods used to achieve the effect.
Photo by Wil Hybrid
I came across this commercial for JBS Mens Underwear. Obviously it's a foreign commercial, the topless woman would never fly here in America. The end of the commercial is hilarious!
One of my favorite effects for an image is the tilt-shift effect. It makes an ordinary image appear as though it is a miniature model, as the photo of Times Square in NY above shows.
Tilt-Shift Photography has a great tutorial to show you how to turn your image into a tilt-shift masterpiece, using just the tools built-in to Photoshop. Keep in mind that you want to give the impression of a miniature model. Miniature models are usually viewed from above so try and choose a photo with an elevated viewpoint.
IconFactory has released three Indiana Jones themed icon sets, with a fourth on the way. The official icon sets from the Iconfactory that include treasures and items from the Indiana Jones™ movies were crafted with accuracy and detail by Anthony Piraino.
The Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom and Last Crusade sets contain nearly 30 beautiful icons. No word on when the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull set will be released, so check back on the download page often.
Users of Apple's Safari Web browser may be used to the ability to view PDFs natively right in the browser window, but until now Firefox users have been mostly left out in the cold.
Quartz PDF Plugin is a new add-on for Firefox 3 which brings the same capability as Safari. It worked perfectly in my tests. The plugin requires Firefox 3 running on OSX 10.4 or higher.
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