As Firefox 3 nears completion, it’s shaping up to be leaner, faster, and more usable. The world’s best open source browser is maturing, and as part of the web community, you can get your Firefox on, and help it gain more mainstream exposure at the same time. So make it count — don’t be a slouch — pledge to get Firefox 3! And it doesn’t cost a thing, people…
]]>Ok, I know that’s over the top, but I’d like to introduce you to Silas Dilworth’s new “Heroic Condensed”. If you’re a fan of condensed, slab sans-serifs like I am, then you’ll understand my enthusiasm. Available in 8 weights, and currently 33% off from its regular price, it’s hard to resist grabbing this up.
All purchases made on the Artist for Obama Gallery are 100% contributions to the campaign and count toward your overall contribution limit of $2300. Contributions are not tax deductible for federal income tax purposes.]]>
Some exceptional stop motion animation going on here…
As trite as that theme has become, I think it’s important that people, especially the younger generations, know they are capable of many wonderful things, as long as they put forth the effort necessary to attain success and go beyond (I’m looking at you, baby brothers).
This quote from the movie, a paraphrasing of a poem in Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love, reminded me I need to do more, for myself and for the world:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. […] Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. It’s not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own lights shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
The original poem contains some other extraneous points that narrow the focus of this well-crafted passage, and don’t believe they add to the intrinsic value of what’s being said here. Nor do I personally believe that having this attitude requires your being a person of faith—just that you want to make the world a better place by being yourself.
I dedicate this post to my wife, my family, and my friends who are already bright beacons in an increasingly dim world. But especially to my immediate family, who I love very much, and who I hope to see move far beyond the current rough patch they are experiencing and continue growing into the strong, shining lights mentioned above.
]]>Maybe you’ve been designing websites for a month. Or maybe you’ve been at it for years. You’ve been using CSS for presentational markup with HTML, and you know how reliably pages tend to display when using a modern, standards-compliant browser like Firefox or Safari. And then you view your layout in the dreaded Internet Explorer 6. It’s blown to bits, kablooey, gobbledygook. You followed all the rules, but everything is misaligned, your margins are blown, your em-based font sizes are way off…
]]> A brief primerIE6 has the largest install base of any browser in the market, and many people still haven’t upgraded to Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). Many of the CSS hacks used to control IE6 are ignored by or disrupt browser rendering in IE7. IE7 plays by a lot of the standards-based rules we’re accustomed to in modern browsers, but it still comes up short. And in many situations, you can’t leave the users of older browsers completely in the lurch (even if IE6 is 8 friggin’ years old).
In the immortal words of the terrorist Howard Payne from the movie (SPEED), “Pop quiz[…] What do you do?”
You go to A List Apart or Position is Everything, and you hack that sucker until it submits to your will. You pull out all the stops. And then… You open the page in IE7 and once again it looks nothing at all like it’s supposed to. Not even like your hacked-for-IE6 version does. Now what?
My new go-to: Conditional CSS comments. They certainly aren’t new. However, for various projects including this site, I have just started using them. I love them and I probably won’t stop unless there is a significantly compelling reason to not use them. In principle, we shouldn’t have to at all, but that is not the reality we are confronted with, and it turn we must confront said reality with a solution that won’t induce hair pulling…
So what are these conditional comments? They’re basically proprietary filters built into various Internet Explorers that supply IE with specific stylesheets exclusively. Other browsers completely ignored that code, so the comments themselves are not (as far as I’ve read) harmful from an accessibility standpoint. You can even pick and choose specific versions of IE you want to target with your conditional comments. And what do these conditional CSS comments look like? Here is a stellar example from Ask the CSS Guy.
Before you go repeatedly recopying all your CSS after you make trivial tweaks to your base style sheet, and then pasting said changes back into your conditional CSS (like I was initially doing), know that the only CSS you absolutely need to put in the conditional style sheets are the rules you want overridden. Separate the wheat from the chaff and only maintain browser-specific hacks in your conditional CSS (you know, the code that tends to be troublesome with the usual suspects).
For tff4.com, I now use conditional CSS to serve up GIFs to IE6 users instead of my pretty, drop-shadowy PNGs. Now there’s no need for crippled Javascript to make alpha channels render on your PNGs in IE6—just serve them slightly different CSS! (If you aren’t excited by this prospect, you’re not a web geek, mkay?)
Update: It’s worth mentioning (due to a lot of traffic from Unmatched Style) that since I’ve just started using this technique of serving up different style sheets, I haven’t had the chance to get everything perfect in every browser, with IE6 still receiving the least amount of attention. The archived pages, I know, are way off for the time being. Hope to get them fixed soon!
]]>A portfolio section is finally up and pieces will be added little by little every week or two, hopefully until it explodes.
]]> BrowsersIE6 compatibility is a long way off, so consider IE7, if you must use a Microsoft browser. At present, I don’t have the patience for its intolerance toward web standards… Please consider Firefox or Opera or even Safari.
Also, Movable Type 4 has been giving me fits with its little peculiarities. Comments are open and working again, though the submission process is not as polished as I would like. And security…I’m waiting for the spambots to attack and for my inbox to fill up with moderation notices, if you catch my drift. Anyone with experience in getting MT4’s more robust comment authentication methods actually working, please drop a line or comment.
As time progresses, I hope to have the sidebars for each section a bit more individualized. I’m also working on getting a more stable way of presenting my posts from Twitter (tweets, for the uninitiated). Every time their site goes down, so does the crappy Javascript include that brings the tweets to my site. Some error messages and notifications still appear in the default Movable Type format, and when I have the chance to dissect those .cgi pages, that will also change to fit tff4.com better.
Thanks for your patience!
]]>Last week I found that my site was suddenly behaving differently in Firefox. Up until this point, it looked pretty much the same as Safari. But suddenly every piece of text had inexplicably become bold, and the spacing of my block-level elements was off. Way off. After some rapid refreshing in both browsers to see if something had momentarily glitched out and become cached, I realized the bug was much more permanent.
Over the years, there have been a few extensions that I found critical, but haven’t been updated, X-Ray being chief among them. View Source Chart is another extension that keeps me from switching completely back to Safari. In order to use either of these I keep Nightly Tester Tools around for ensuring backward compatibility with these extensions that have fallen by the wayside…
]]> So using X-Ray, I find that Firefox is rendering a bunch of these extraneous tags all over the page:<strong><strong><div>
I thought somehow MovableType might be throwing extra code in by accident, right? But after viewing source in Safari I see that the tags that are present in Firefox just aren’t showing up.
My MovableType install is set to render pages statically, so I presumed that this mysterious code was being injected by some script I added to my site. PHP? Nope. sIFR? Nope. Crazyegg? Nope. Twitter? NOPE. A savvy friend even recommended shutting down Firebug and Greasemonkey to rule those out… Not the culprits, either…
As our conversation progressed, talking to my developer-friend must’ve dusted some troubleshooting mojo off. I went back and looked at where the errant tags began and there it was. I had found my white whale code.
It turns out that I use a secondary “blog” install to publish my linked list (“The Chipper”) — as is common on various blogs that utilize MovableType. And in one of my links, I carelessly neglected to close off a strong tag in the topmost link. These links are brought in via PHP include and somehow not closing it off caused a bunch of (properly nested, mind you) strong and div tags to be generated and injected into the page, but only in Firefox.
Safari, on the other hand, was kind enough to ignore the mistake and go about its business. Yet Firefox felt compelled to actually add in code to compensate for an unclosed tag. Or so it seems… I’m no browser geek, so that’s about as far as I’ll speculate. If you have a more in depth explanation of what happened, I’m all ears.
]]>Yes, you will see some behind the scenes raggedness that I hope to have cleaned up by the weekend. Archive templates are still stuck on the old design and there are no portfolio pieces up as of yet. The incompleteness is not the image I want to convey, as this redesign/realign is part of a long process of self-improvement that I am embarking on. But if it facilitates my being done, so be it.
]]>I should add that, yes, I am a mac user, but for quite I while I've used Firefox exclusively. I am finding that it is really just too slow to be useful anymore, especially at work on an aging G5. All the web developer extensions in the world aren't going to eliminate my need to have pages pull up quickly and have my browser behave reliably with multiple tabs open... It seems, for now, I am stuck between a rock and lousy browser support.
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Yesterday, brothers Saulius and Aidas Dailide released Pixelmator 1.0 for public consumption. Lucky for us, they were nice enough to provide a downloadable trial demo (which can be unlocked with a serial for more permanent use). It has been said that image editors are likely to become the new FTP client within the mac dev community, so I figured I'd give Pixelmator a try and see how it weighs in against the heaviest hitter, Photoshop.
First Impressions
The first thing that struck me is that at about 30MB, Pixelmator is pretty compact. A lot more compact than that torrent of CS3 you're waited three days for... I'm sure this is due in large part to the fact that brothers Dailide relied heavily on OS X's Core Image technology to handle the grunt work. Upon opening Pixelmator, you are confronted with a splash dialog box similar to that you would see in CS3, but with pretty animations of cascading text that become menu options. I jumped right in and used it to open the latest comp of my upcoming site redesign.
Pixelmator sells itself heavily on the concept of HUD-based palette systems. Unfortunately, as Gruber points out, this extends to the document window itself. This is fine on my macbook, but on both my iMac and a separate 23" Dell Monitor, this is rather annoying. Full screen mode eliminates background distractions, but I can't always work in full screen. An option to change the opacity of the document window might make a good 1.5 or 2.0 release addition.
The next thing I noticed was that all my masks were intact. Immediately this made me quite ecstatic, as I am a huge proponent of non-destructive image editing. Admittedly, I'm a geek — I nearly threw a keg party when Adobe added adjustable filters to CS3... Alas, my joy did not last long when I took notice that my comp hardly looked like the Photoshop version of itself. All. My. Textures. Gone. That's right, the application of layer effects of any kind in PS is rendered null and void when imported to Pixelmator. Effects are not even rasterized, just ignored. Vector and Smart objects are also changed in the conversion process, but to rasterized layers. I rely solely on vector and smart objects in my Photoshop work — out of the need to be able to re-edit everything I do, with personal and professional work. To do anything else would be senseless and a waste of time.
The Downside & The Upside, In That Order
On the above points alone, I could not use Pixelmator professionally and I feel that these will need to be resolved before Pixelmator can move beyond anything but amateur status. Same goes for Adjustment layers — non-destructive editing is non-negotiable for me. Pixelmator also lacks rulers, guides, and what I would consider some really basic functions that make Photoshop extremely usable, like toggling layers on and off with a continuous swipe down the line of visibility buttons.
Pixelmator eschews a lot of basic functions for prettier ones, like the splash screen animation and the jumbo icon for the active tool in the toolbar. It's worth noting that many Photoshop image-editing functions are available, including adjustments, image and canvas sizing, and filters. Pixelmator's halftone filter was a fun filter to play with and in my opinion, better executed than Photoshop's. Filters are visually "chained" to the objects they effect within the document window. It's a cool but superfluous effect, and I could see it getting annoying after a while with large, complex comps.
Pixelmator's toolbar is quite similar to Photoshop's, so much so, one has to wonder if it's really an improvement. I've heard more enthusiastic reviews about Acorn's single tool palette. Familiarity extends to many menu options and hotkeys, and this could certainly enable an easy transition from Pixelmator to Photoshop or vice versa. Pixelmator also supports most if not all major file formats. The Pixelmator team was also nice enough to provide some pretty useful documentation for the beginners out there wanting to try it as an alternative to the daunting beast that is Photoshop.
Wrapping Up
In summary, I feel that Pixelmator is a well-executed entry-level photomanipulation app — I would consider it great training wheels for beginners who can't afford photoshop. It lacks some essential middle-of-the-road features that makes switching from Photoshop a total deal breaker, not to mention the high-end features like Smart Objects. Should they show up later, though, I could probably get away with making my websites in just Pixelmator and Coda. Maybe. Any plans to make an Illustrator-killer, fellas?
For example, at last month’s iMacs/iLife/iWork special event, Jobs several times alluded to Apple having released the first version of iLife “a long time ago”. It was actually just four and a half years ago, but I think in Jobs’s mind, even 2003 is the distant past.
I'm convinced this is because he only returns from a utopian world in the year 2207 to give us keynotes and delicious technological goodies. Then FSJ time travels back to go get us more goodies.
Hey, a man can dream can't he?
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There's this feeling in the back of my mind that BioShock reminds me of an overhyped movie that bills itself as "not just another action movie", when it really is, in fact, a weak action movie with some drama or comedy thrown in. I like honesty in the products I buy. I know that when I see Die Hard With a Vengeance it promises to have gratuitous gunshots, crazy friggin' explosions, and tons of expletives is supposed to have expletives along with the buddy banter. But much like "Rush Hour," BioShock is just lukewarm all around. And then there's no online component, which is a huge part of the reason I like Gears of War so much (and people are still playing the hell out of that).
To say nothing of the graphic design would be a crime. I love all the Art Deco references and type, and the in-game cartoon illustrations for the plasmids and various dispensers is pretty awesome. You don't see that kind of emphasis very often (except maybe Guitar Hero). Check out the concept art.
I just don't see why people are so in love with it. And I'm not alone...
iSites? IPOS? I know — jeebusSites!