What do you do before you launch a new business? Why, throw a silly little pre-launch sale party, of course!
Check out the new DIY Themes marketplace, and you might just find yourself a new WordPress theme.
Original post by Chris Pearson and software by Elliott Back
Well, we’ve known is been in the wings for quite a while, but the beta for Photoshop Express — Adobe’s first online application — finally touched down this morning. Although they undoubtedly bring a mammoth graphics reputation to the table, they may not have it all their own way as there are already some well-established and classy competitors in this new arena — specifically speaking Picnik, Pixer, Phixer , Pixenate and Fotoflexer.
First impressions:
1) The sign-up process wanted to know which country I came from — as long as it was the US. Come on guys! Are you FedExing the app to us? DO computers use a different gauge of Interweb in Europe?? Have the terrorists been waiting to use Photoshop Express to make particularly visually attractive evil plans?
Silly stuff. Don’t ask questions that only have one answer.
2) The interface is a basically an online Adobe Bridge, with lots of blacks and charcoals making your imagery appear richer. If you’re a Bridge fan, Express will feel very familiar, although being a consumer-level product, you would have to question how many users could draw on Bridge experience.
Even if you’re not a Bridge fan (like me), you’d probably still have to concede this is a nice environment to work in.
It also seems remarkably fast for a browser-based app, doing a pretty slick imitation of Bridge’s sliding thumbnail resizer — all without ever leaving the browser.
3) The first part of their offering is a Flickr/Picasa equivalent, giving you 2Gb of free storage on joining. A few years back that would have seemed pretty generous, but with so many unlimited uploads services around, maybe not so much now. However the app can interact directly with photos in Picasa and Photobucket, and it also makes it very easy to display your images in Facebook, Wordpress and most social networking sites.
4) Once you have your photos uploaded, the editing tools provided are relatively slick but certainly aimed at ‘Joe Facebook’, rather than photographic professionals or artists. Although each filter is highly configurable, most can only be applied to the image as a whole, so targeting small problem areas (such as the underexposed face area below) isn’t possible — at least at this time.
The Tools are separated into three sections.
Basics: Crop & Rotate, Auto Correct, Exposure, Red-Eye Removal, Touchup, and Saturation.
Tuning: White Balance, Highlight, Fill Light, Sharpen and Soft Focus
Effect: Pop Color, Hue, Black & White, Tint, Sketch and Distort
5) While the standard way of applying live effects to images seems to be sliders and dials, Photoshop Express takes a slightly unconventional, but I think quite effective method to apply its filter effects. Activating any tool auto-generates a series of eight thumbnail variants across the top, and simply hovering over any one will update the main image in real time.
‘Smart live presets’ like this are usually a better option for less-experienced users than mysterious sliders and dials, and will often deliver a good enough result to even experienced users 4 times out of 5. Manually configurable controls are available under the ‘wrench icon’ when more precise control is required.
As you might expect from a company with such vast experience with image processing, the quality of the finished images generated by Express is very good — noticeably better than some of the competition. Perhaps the single most impressive part of the Adobe offering is that all effects are non-destructive, leaving you free to re-open an earlier edited image and remove your changes.
What Photoshop Express is:
If you’re looking for an attractive, reliable and easy-to-use photo improver for your dad, sister, a client or even yourself, Photoshop Express offers a simple, effective option.
What Photoshop Express isn’t:
If you’re looking for an online replacement for your desktop-bound Photoshop CS3 (even partially), you’re probably barking up the wrong tree. Express doesn’t even attempt to mimic any of the manual brush, pen or targeted retouching tools you might be used to having access to on your desktop. If you’re looking to do more than point ‘n’ click adjustments, Fotoflexer might offer some more of the options you need.
Original post by AlexW and software by Elliott Back
Friday marked my last day as a Web Strategist for AMD.
Although I was only there for a year, it was a great experience — my first working as part of a big multi-disciplinary web team for a large, multi-national organization. I learned a lot.
Why my last day? Because on Monday I start my new gig as Director of Web Production for the US division of NCsoft.
NCsoft’s PlayNC web site
For those who aren’t into gaming, NCsoft makes massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs). These include:
Yes, that’s right. I’m going to be running the web team for a company that makes video games — being an avid gamer it’s an understatement to say that I’m excited about the position and the opportunity.
Working for a large corporate web team has certainly been educational, but I’m looking forward to being back on a small web team and being much more hands-on. It suits my working style and makes better use of my skills and experience (at least, I think so).
I’m also looking forward to leading a team again. After managing the web team at Seattle Children’s Hospital for 4+ years, moving to the role of an individual contributor felt more limited than I liked in terms of what I could actually get accomplished.
So, expect some MMO-related posts in the future. Is anyone else a fan of this genre of gaming? If so, what are you playing?
Original post by dennislembree@yahoo.com (Dennis E. Lembree) and software by Elliott Back
If you use FeedBurner to deliver your RSS feed then you’ll want to check out Feed Analysis by BlogPerfume. Plug in your FeedBurner URL and Feed Analysis will spit out a variety of pretty charts of your site’s RSS activity.
Whereas FeedBurner only provides reports for the last 30 days, Feed Analysis will report your subscriber count, number of daily views and clicks for up to 50 months.
Don’t forget to mouse over the charts as they are interactive.
Subscriber chart for this blog for the last 12 months
It will also predict the number of subscribers you will have in the next 3,6, and 12 months which could be useful if you’ve actually set some goals around these numbers.
[via Woork]
Original post by dennislembree@yahoo.com (Dennis E. Lembree) and software by Elliott Back
So I’m on my way to becoming a full out Lifehack link blog. Sweet. Maybe someday I’ll get back to writing about Web design. There is much to be said. Until then:
12 Essential Rules to Live More Like a Zen Monk
Living like a Zen Monk is not a big deal for me, however, some of these rules would definitely seem to make for a nicer, more productive life, I think.
Turn your insomnia into ultra-productive time. It is easier to get into a state of “flow” (or: hack mode) when no one and nothing is bothering you late at night. I did this for quite awhile about a year ago, out of necessity, not insomnia. Use carefully, however, as it lead to burnout for me.
Some good Q&A with the founder of lifehacker.com.
10 ways to control your cravings
Tips for overcoming your hunger cravings (and thusly, losing weight, or sticking to diets).
A holiday season for getting rid of stuff. Awesome. I think I will start celebrating it. Some of the more philosophical aspects of it however: guilt, etc, can only be gotten rid of by what we are celebrating in this current season: Easter, and Jesus’ resurrection and victory over death.
Happy Easter, everyone 
Original post by Matt and software by Elliott Back
For all the recent buzz and bubble generated by the IE8 beta, the slightly depressing reality is that IE6 is still going to be occupying more of our thoughts (and nightmares) for the foreseeable future. Even as IE7 has begun to gain marketshare, I can’t say I’m spending any less time writing IE6-specific code than I was, say, two years ago. Sad but true.
Likewise, if we ever thought we’d encountered all demons IE6 had to offer, we were mistaken there too, as George Reilly recounted in an interesting read last week.
Despite the fact that George draws upon seven years of ‘Microsoft insider’ experience, he spent 5 months trying to eliminate persistent, ‘app-killing’ IE6 browser hangs when using the garden-variety PNG32 alpha-transparency hack.
The fact that even he eventually admitted defeat and converted his images to PNG8 could be viewed as a sobering lesson for us all. Can you be 100% sure your PNG32s aren’t locking up at least some of your IE6 users’ browsers?
Of course, these things are often a trade off.
It’s seem like a question of the devil and the deep blue ‘e’.
Today I thought I might run through one of the approaches I’ve been taking to improve those images in IE6.
Let’s take a relatively simple example that you might recognize from the site at the moment.
On the left we have the post-it note graphic (a partially transparent PNG8) that we intend to overlay on the blueprint background on the right.
As we might expect, in all modern hip’n’groovy browsers we get a smooth, blended edge between the yellow post-it note and blue back. The magnified section shows a pallete of maybe a dozen yellows, blues and grays working together to create the illusion of a gentle clean transition (live example to test here).
Unfortunately the same images rendered in IE6 (and lower) are a major disappointment and, in my opinion, a show-stopper.
The problem is all the semi-transparent yellows and shadow grays that blended with the blues to create ‘inbetween colors’ have been rendered 100% transparent by IE6. Our pixels are either yellow or blue — not halfway between.
To be fair, it’s true that as complementary colors in this example represent an absolute worst case scenario – ‘diagonal bright yellow on blue’. Nevertheless, worst case scenarios happen all the time, so we still need to be able to generate a more acceptable result.
While we’re never going to be able to reproduce the transparent shadow in IE6, we do need a way to generate a lot more of the yellow/blue blending colors along the edge. I’ve found the easiest way to do this is to bring a tiny slither of the background inside our yellow shape.
In the diagram at the right, I:
Of course, you could choose to simplify the process by applying the border to the actual note, but keeping the border on a separate shape gives you more freedom to re-color each edge if you need to.
This is the final IE6-friendly PNG8 graphic and here’s an example of it used in front of the blue background for your own browser testing pleaure.
Finally, here are a few browser screencaps I prepared earlier.
As you can see, there’s no tangible loss of image quality in Firefox — or any modern browser for that matter. The transparent shadow is still as smooth and useful as ever.
However it’s clear the result in IE6 is light years ahead of our initial result. There’s no shadow, but the edge is as crisp as we could possibly want.
As you may have already realized, this is more of a ‘general approach’ to better PNG8s than a magic bullet for all your PNG8 woes. It’s certainly true that by ‘baking’ our graphic into a particular background color, we are permanently reducing it’s flexibility. There are going to be some occasions where this method isn’t an option.
But just as surely, there will be many situations where this method (or variations on it) will help you turn chunky, unsightly, unusable IE6 renders into perfectly acceptable results.
Hope you get some use out of it.
Original post by AlexW and software by Elliott Back
It’s Spring cleaning time. This weekend I was busy uncluttering my life and minimalising my surroundings (starting with my desk). I tightened down my schedule, started a good To Do list system with Things (and pen and paper), reconciled my bank accounts for the last year (I use Mvelopes to keep track of my finances. Great program), and my wife and I have started a crusade against junk/clutter/hoarding.
I’m feeling great. My mind is already freer, I’m feeling less stress, and more ability to focus. I heartily recommend a GTD system and minimalist life style. I have a ways to go yet, but we’re making progress.
Some great links from the last couple days on various GTD-related sites I’m starting to visit after the jump.
The Minimalists Guide to Fighting (and Beating) Clutter Entropy
An important article, at least in concept. Some great tips on how to keep clutter from coming back (as it inevitably does).
I want to write more about this as there is a strong spiritual connection here as well (”It’s all gonna burn, baby…” and “You can’t take it with you…”), but in a more immediate sense, junk around the house is simply a fire hazard!
12 Tips for an organized desk, and creating a minimalist workspace
This is where I started. I spend most of my time at a desk, so I figured at least it ought to be clutter-free.
Great little new site by Guy Kawasaki. Met with mixed reviews, but I found this incredibly helpful to find new, good sites on the topics it covers.
Christians (and Jews) call this “The Sabbath” and it indeed is vital for mental/emotional/spiritual health. In fact, the word Sabbatical Latin, Greek, and Hebrew for “cease” or “rest”.
I’m pretty bad about being late for meetings. Good tips.
The Key to Productivity: Schedule Calibration
The reason I’m so frantic most of the time is because I set an unrealistic schedule.
Tips to maintain focus while you organize
I’m distracted easily. These are some interesting tips for staying on task. Probably more generally applicable than just for organizing.
Managing computer file clutter
For all you digi-packrats out there.
Self control can be exercised like a muscle. The more you practice self control, the easier it gets.
Not sure magic is the right word, but focus is definitely powerful.
More later!
Original post by Matt and software by Elliott Back
In Question Your Work, Jason Fried lists 8 questions to ask yourself (or your team) when you work on something.
This concept of questioning what you are doing is especially relevant to the arena of web design, which is notorious (in my experience) for having few — if any — criteria for success and for not asking these questions.
The questions Jason lists are:
Some of these questions seem pretty obvious, but I can assure you that more often than not they have not been asked. Or, if they’ve been asked they have not been fully answered.
I can recall plenty of web projects where the criteria for success was “getting it done.”
Often I’ve been able to tie the project back to relevant business objectives by writing a creative brief and forcing the client to clearly outline the goals of the project.
However, there have been times — when I’ve been brought on to a project after it’s started and the deadline is looming — where the direction has been set and you don’t have time to ask these questions.
All you can do is get the web site/application live within the timeframe and do the best you can. It’s pretty disheartening.
So, the next time you start a web project, or are brought into one that’s already in progress, or are well into a project that you have started, ask some or all of these questions — it might not be too late to change tack.
Original post by dennislembree@yahoo.com (Dennis E. Lembree) and software by Elliott Back
Original post by Matt and software by Elliott Back
Original post by Matt and software by Elliott Back