Get with the program! If you’re not using Firefox, I’d suggest now is a good time to switch. The newest release Firefox 3 is an excellent upgrade packed full of new features. In addition to a host of cosmetic features, I’ve been using it for almost a week, and the speed improvement is noteworthy. As a web designer/developer…I implore you to switch from IE! Although, as much as I bitch about IE I can say this…it has kept me employed, fixing cross platform issues etc etc., but honestly folks, we’d all rather be spending our time designing interface improvements and improving user experience. Check out all the newest features of Firefox here, personally I really like the tagging and the new “native platform look and feel”, but the speed improvements were most impressive. It’s still not quite as clean looking as safari, but you can’t compete with Apple on design. Join the over 8 million other people today!

Here is a cool site for all of us who are lucky enough to work with a two monitor set up! The site updates occasionally with background sets designed to fit both monitors.
Mandolux!

This is some very interesting stuff. A new way to resize images using similar paths of color through the image in order to remove small sections or add space based on the similar colors. Watch the video and be stunned by how simple (with the use of a computer of course) it really is, and how great the results are. I sure hope to see a Seam Carving tool in the next release fo Adobe Photoshop! *Update- Apparently Ariel was snapped up by Adobe rather quickly already.*

More Info- Dr. Ariel Shamir

Chances are you’ve heard something about this “iPhone”. If you have not, you are either deaf, blind or so in love with Microsoft you have enabled your sensory filters to block out anything Apple related. All the hype aside this is really going to be an amazing gadget. It’s certainly more than “just a phone”, and it will really raise the bar for the portable market. It runs a slimmed down version of Apple’s operating system, which makes it quite a powerful little device capable of running your itunes, playing video, surfing the web, etc etc. What we are all really excited about of course is the touch screen, and it remains to be seen how easy it is to use, initial reports have been very positive. Apple has just released this informative..rather lengthy 20 minute video that goes through all the features and apps included with the phone. It’s a good place to start if you want to familiarize yourself with just what all the hype is about. A “revolution” maybe not, but an evolution for mobile phones, and devices it certainly is.

Apple: iPhone Guided Tour

Here is a great reference for when your head is like a bowl of soup overflowing with all sorts of HTML and CSS tags, and you just draw a blank…it happens to me anyway, all the time. Here you can select a tag and it instantly displays the definition, and provides a nice visual example of the usage (complete with a panel on how it looks when displayed).

HTML Playground: Website
Tip of the hat to Mr. Fortin for the link

How is this for an excellent and appropriate use of Ajax? PCNames let’s you start typing in a name and then finds out (as you are typing) possible domain matches, and display’s their status. This really cuts out quite a few steps in the old method of domain name searching. I’m going to cut this review short, and simply let you try it out for yourselves…too cool, our only question might be what’s up with the lame name?

PCNames: Official Website
Tip of the hat to Mr. Willis for the link

If you are feeling like the creative well is a bit dry, or you just happen to have some of that rare thing known as “free time”, take a spin through the awesome archive of Ads of the World. This is a huge collection of really creative ads guarenteed to spark some sort of flame in your creative brain. Check out this super cool image for an ad about a waterproof camera.

Ads of the World: Website

HDR is a way of creating cool photographs using a somewhat complicated method of combining overexposed and underexposed RAW images into one final saturated painterly image. The effect produces something similar to a photo realistic painting, and is pretty cool. If you don’t have the capability with your digital camera or want to play around with an existing image here is a fun tutorial that lays out a few tricks you can deploy in Photoshop to achieve a similar effect.

Here is the results of my attempt…it came out pretty good, one thing not mentioned in the tutorial i learned, is you might need to switch the direction of your gradient in the last step.

original (burnt out truck i photographed):

modified:

How to fake HDR: tutorial
Check out some real HRD pictures: Flickr HDR Gallery

These are some of the excellent new Apps I discovered via friends and cohorts last week. They are mostly Mac based…because we use Macs and hopefully you do as well, but fear not we don’t discriminate, nor do we desire to engage anyone in a lengthy moronic argument over platforms. Just enjoy these applications, and if you can run them do so.

1. Coda
Holy death nail for Dreamweaver Batman, take a look at this new awesome application from Panic Software, the creators of the most excellent Transmit FTP software. Coda is what Mac hand coders have been waiting for “One Window Web Development”. It combines a text editor, css editor, ftp program, and a preview window into one VERY slick application. I have been using the demo for a long weekend, and I am totally sold. The best part…it is a very reasonable price for such a perfectly designed piece of software. If they had included a wyswyg panel for those who want that I’ll bet they could have knocked Dreamweaver completely off the map, however I’m guessing they will probably have more street cred for not including that feature with the hard core design gang. the software rocks, and sports some powerful collaboration features, for…collaborating. Visit their slick site to learn more, and just buy it. now.

Panic Software: Coda

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2. Mail Appetizer
This great little plug-in for Apple Mail will pop up a small notification window with a brief summary of the incoming message upon it’s arrival, and show you the contents. this is helpful as you don’t need to switch to mail to see the message unless it’s your boss and you need to respond immediately.

Bronsonbeta: Mail Appetizer

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3. Color Oracle
The good Mark Wyner is an accessibility champion and he dropped this neat app on me for checking to see what your website will look like for those who have common color vision impairments. This is a group that is often ignored, and it is good to keep in mind that not everyone can see your pretty link colors.

Bernhard Jenny, Institute of Cartography: Color Oracle

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4. iShowU
This program allows you to capture and record anything on your screen, and you can include audio from your microphone, or existing audio on the mac itself. This is handy for presentations or saving something to show someone who is not currently available.

Shiny White Box: iShowU

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5. DVD screen grab
This isn’t an application, but a simple apple script. I was trying to take screenshots of a DVD for a work project, and of course Apple DVD Player has screen capture disabled…to satisfy some retards at the movie industry palace of wealth and greed no doubt. Anyway this is a quick easy workaround for this problem.

Low End Mac: DVD screen grab

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Bonus! Vecteezy:

Looking for some free vector art to jump start that Monday morning dead battery of an imagination? This new site offers plenty of FREE downloadable vector files for you to pilfer and add to your design masterpiece…or that damn crappy flier the boss is stomping on your nuts about needing five minutes ago.

Vecteezy Website: Vecteezy

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Comments are open, let us know what cool new Apps you’ve discovered recently!

The main reason I am “blogging” this event (besides the fact there isn’t enough other useless drivel out there about it already) is because I know for a fact my good friend Mark Wyner is trolling Technorati right now to see if anyone is writing about his presentation or as he stated it to me “talking shit”. So call this an experiment to see how long it will take Mark to notice this particular post (Vegas bookies have it about 30 min). Others have already noted and repeatedly blogged that Mark has many tattoos and also is a “big dork”. Mark reads everything you right about him…so if you call him a “big dork” he will find you and probably “kick you in the nuts”. Mark’s presentation “Experience Design as the Sum of it’s Parts” was basically (very basically) an examination of how the design process has evolved into a design experience progressively over the years, and how designers deal with these different platforms etc. You can learn more about this lunatic web genius and what he does from him directly as he loves to talk about himself and is always looking for an unsuspecting listener. Notice this picture of Mark and how BIG he really is, he barely fits behind the podium…Imagine trying to fit in a Honda next to him for the ride into town from Beaverville or wherever the heck podunk suburbia he lives…and you will know the beginning of my pain.

I decided to visit Webvisions this year as I happened to be traveling to Portland anyway, knew Mark was speaking, and had heard wonderful things about the conference from him. I was excited to possibly see some of my more recent design heros, Dan Cederholm, Jeffrey Zeldman, and other pioneers of this religion of CSS Web Standards design hoopla. I scanned the paid workshops and selected one on Ajax, was a bit disappointed to see none of my American Idols (of design) listed as speakers, packed up and headed off to the great rain belt of the northwest.
The first thing I attended was a “workshop” (something you pay extra for) on Ajax. This was a bit disappointing as the presentation was rather scattered, and we started off the workshop by asking everyone what they wanted to learn about Ajax. I refrained from mentioning I wanted to learn about Ajax and why i should use it, which I felt was pretty obvious. We were then giving some random examples, borrowing acode from a great third party javascript library Prototype. In the end we learned some basic things I pretty much already knew, but received some hopefully helpful code samples to use. I attempted to get the presenter to demonstrate some of the widgets he had created, but was left hangin’ after another question came up.
After attending the entire conference I am a bit confused as to why we had to pay for the workshops, as many of the free sessions had much more experienced speakers, and were far more informative. The speakers in general were all over the map, I actually attended one lecture by a girl who had never given a presentation, and was painfully nervous. Her presentation was on “sexy CSS stylesheets”, and it randomly had some good information, however it suffered from her continuously referencing other peoples style sheets while trying desperately to work her presentation hardware. I could just choose to write nice things, but I was really pretty disappointed with this conference overall, and the seeming randomness of the speaker selection. I’ll list quickly here some of the ones I felt were well done.

Web Application Page Hierarchy Luke Wroblewski
This was a solid presentation from Luke on Page Hierarchy, basically identifying the important elements of the page, and figuring out how to give each element the right amount of visual strength to make the overall page function optimally. He provided some great examples of page makeovers he had done, and was a well paced engaging speaker.

English: Web 2.0’s Universal Language Kevin Smokler
This was a very interesting session dealing with a simple concept that is often overlooked. Communication, and how important it is in this day and age to really make sure your product description does just that…describe the product as quickly and concisely as possible. Kevin had some excellent examples as well of some completely insane product descriptions that were simply baffling. Kevin was a lively speaker, who was very articulate, and forced us all into a good audience participation type discussion at the end.

The two keynote presentations were stimulating and well done. First up was a presentation on information overload (something about sucking on a firehose) by David Pescovitz of Boing Boing. He brought up some great points about the direction of data collection and how the recent massive increase in data will affect us all. Friday’s presentation was by the two guys responsible for the sensational podcast video series “ask a ninja”. They discussed their rise to fame and offered some pretty well worn info on how to profit from a successful video series online throwing to the wolves some of their peers as examples of success and failure. I’m not knocking their presentation hard, just stating the most important part really is the fact that they have a great content idea, not any great new way to profit from one.

In closing this ramble, I’d like to say I probably missed a few other good presentations (i wish ((wish might be a strong word)) now I would have paid for the flash video demo instead of the Ajax one) and hopefully the organizers of Webvisions 2008 will be able to lure some of the big design names they have had in the past. One more irrelevant suggestion…lose the lame marketing hype “Rockstars of Design”, I totally didn’t see anyone puking backstage…