An interesting infographic that visually shows how the world spends its time online
The average American spends more than 60 hours a month online, the equivalent of 30 straight days a year. I certainly hope at least one of those days per month is here at The Graphic Mac. Regardless, this infographic offers plenty of interesting information about how the world spends its time online. Not only is it great information, but the graphics are quite nice as well.
If you find yourself taking screenshots a lot, you no doubt dumped Mac OSX’s built-in screen capture utility long ago. My preferred screen capture app is Snapz Pro. But the one area that few apps do well is capture an entire Web page (including the portion not currently on screen). There are a few stand-alone apps that can do this, but most require you to manually type the URL into the app for it to work.
Simple screen capture in Firefox
Pearl Crescent Page Saver Options
Pearl Crescent Page Saver offers plenty of flexibility
There’s no valid reason to bother with this – heck, it’s not even Halloween yet. But I came across this site and it’s fun as heck to mess around with. Upload a photo of yourself and go to work turning yourself into Frankenstein, a vampire, and more. Just visit the Buffalo Wild Wings Night Hunger site to get started monsterizing yourself. A tightly cropped head shot with a simple background work best. This is the second time I’ve referred you to a Buffalo Wild Wings site because it was über-cool! The main Buffalo Wild Wings site I recently wrote about is awesome as well.
Long-time Mac users probably remember the day when Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator were the only games in town. With Mac OS 9 and the early days of Mac OS X, IE was the lean, mean, speed-machine; while Navigator was continuing its fast slide to irrelevance. But with OS X’s Unix underpinnings, and its sleek new GUI, it wasn’t long until developers started porting old browsers, or releasing all new ones to run on Apple’s shiny new OS. One of the earliest non-MS/Mozilla browsers was OmniWeb. It was easily faster than most anything out there, had a slick interface, and boasted features few other browsers offered at the time, such as tabs on the side, per-site preferences, built-in ad-blocking, and more. Due to Microsoft’s barely-an-effort port of IE to OS X, and Netscape Navigator suffering from never-ending software bloat, the time was right for other vendors to make their move. OmniWeb’s popularity exploded, and with it came a (welcome) blistering onslaught of Web browsers available for the Mac. (more…)
If you’ve followed this site for a long time, you’ll know my utter hatred for Flash Web sites. I find them clunky, slow and generally not worth the time it takes to load when all is said-and-done. In most cases, it appears that the designer built the site simply to show off the fact that they know every nifty Flash trick in the book. But there are always exceptions, and Buffalo Wild Wings is one of them.
Buffalo Wild Wings has one of the few really cool Flash sites
If the idea for your next project includes graffiti lettering, then venture on over to Graffiti Creator to start vandalizing your desktop! The site, run by Mike Wigén, claims to be the first “graffiti generator” on the Web. I won’t argue the point, but I will say that it’s one of the best ones I’ve used. It allows just enough customization to make it interesting, yet simple enough to save the image and easily trace in Adobe Illustrator if need be (hint-hint).
I haven’t yet seen EVERY site on the Web, but Bio-Bak is definitely one of the coolest sites I’ve seen in as long as I can remember. Upon entering the site, you navigate around simply by “dragging” the page around your screen. I recommend going with the full screen mode. You must find the toolbox, then the metal detector. Once you do that, the metal detector will help you find the missing tools. Once you’ve collected all the tools, you can “zoom out” on the site to see the much larger picture. And trust me, it’s worth seeing!
Is this the coolest site on the Web?
If you’re new to CSS, or want to learn CSS to bring your Web site into the modern-day Web, check out this helpful post containing links to gain a basic understanding of CSS and all that it can do for you.
Seashore – open source image editor using Cocoa framework. Inkscape – open source vector graphics editor similar to Illustrator & CorelDraw CinePaint – open source image editor that supports 8, 16 & 32-bit images Gimp – the most popular open source image editor with a huge following of users
OS X does a great job at minimizing file fragmentation by rewriting files in contiguous space when a file is opened, is under 20MB and contains more than eight fragments. This works quite well to prevent heavy file fragmentation, but what it doesn’t prevent is free space fragmentation. TheAppleBlog covers disk framentation in this informative article. The article includes a brief tutorial on how to tell if your free space is fragmented without the use of a commercial program.
InDesignSecrets offers a tutorial on how to customize your Links Panel and have the settings stick across workspace resets and app restarts. VectorDiary has a quick tutorial showing you how to converge points together using the Average function. The Average function is pretty powerful, and wildly under-used.
Snap2Objects discusses all aspects of typography, including anatomy, categories, adjustments and more in Fonts101. The article is fairly informative, and includes plenty of links to find fonts, font managers, and more type-related articles.
If you’re not on Twitter, you’re missing out on a great resource. You can follow me on Twitter to receive tips and links I don’t normally post here, as well as general discussion. If you’re already using Twitter and looking for a more advanced desktop client, you might want to check out atebits on Monday – as they’re scheduled to release a desktop version of their popular iPhone Twitter client, Tweetie. There’s a brief intro video posted their now, and it looks fantastic. If you use the popular Evernote service, you’ll be interested in knowing that they now have Twitter integration.
There are plenty of sites that offer the opportunity to view other designer’s work on the Web. The latest I’ve come across is DesignFridge. The site offers a clean interface for viewing inspirational Web design from users around the world. The gallery is categorized by style, so it’s easy to find samples of just what you’re looking for.
