Month: April 2005

A cup of coffee is no substitute for a good night’s sleep.

However, two cups can perform miracles.

(I should really consider buying stock in Dunkin’ Donuts)

 

What kind of designer would I be if I didn’t post about Adobe‘s acquisition of Macromedia? This is huge, and very weird, and will directly effect us as designers.

My concerns are these:

1) The possible death of some of my favorite apps.
I’m a Dreamweaver (Macromedia) user and I’m really not a huge fan of Golive (Adobe). If Adobe now owns Macromedia, what’s going to happen to the likes of Dreamweaver? Will it simply be killed off? Will it be absorbed into GoLive?

2) Adobe will have a stranglehold on the design industry.
QuarkXpress is still going strong… but it’s increasingly losing its momentum. InDesign (Adobe), Quark’s direct competition, is arguably a much better page layout app. It seems more in tune with a designers needs while offering so many more features and options (all of which have been discussed to death elsewhere). With the disappearance of Macromedia, Quark will be the only real competitor to Adobe’s dominance over the design industry. And, if Quark keeps up its current practices, it’s not going to be around for too much longer.

3) Competition makes the products better.
As stated, I am an avid Dreamweaver user, and not much of a fan of GoLive. Still, I like to have GoLive around. It’s good to know that if Dreamweaver started to suck I could always make the switch to another application. With only one app (DreamLive? GoWeaver? DreamGoWeaverLive?) and no competition, the product could suck and Adobe would not suffer any losses because there is nowhere else for designers to turn. (As an aside… I feel that this is the exact reason why Quark began it’s suckage. PageMaker, once considered Quark’s rival, is a page layout app for beginners… not professionals… and was never really much threat to Quark (during my life as a designer, anyway). Without anything driving Quark to innovate and pull ahead, Quark just became stagnant. QuarkXpress 3.3 to 5.01 was essentially the same product. Quark just tacked on a few new options here and there. With the increasing popularity of InDesign however, Quark began to get their act together. Quark 6.5 is a better Quark than previous Quarks… but it’s still no InDesign. Yet QuarkXPress still holds the lead in page layout apps. Why? Because we fear change. Really though, I would speculate that it is because Quark has been the leader for so long. These changes take time. Not to mention that much of the output hardware is tied directly into Quark. This is falling at an ever increasing pace though…)

The one thing that I am looking forward to, is the product-wide integration. It’s a snap to go from Photoshop to ImageReady (part of Photoshop)… or Illustrator to InDesign. And obviously, Adobe has crafted their products in such a way that this transition is seamless and streamlined. Typically however, my web design workflow is Photoshop>Imageready>Dreamweaver. It will be nice to go directly to AdobeWeaver (or whatever it’s going to be called) from ImageReady, with the same ease that exists from one Adobe product to another.

I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t frightened by this acquisition. Ok, frightened is a bit strong… more like apprehensive. It will be interesting to see what happens, but as with anything that has the potential to alter my professional workflow, I will maintain vigilance until the smoke clears.

If “chicks” truly “dig scars…”
Why won’t they dig my emotional scars?

These are the things that keep me up at night.

From engadget: Mac OS 10.8 Liger

Ha!

 

 

 

Today, kottke.org talks of an utterly useless, yet completely amusing little web gizmo. It’s called HTTP in tha House. Essentially, the operator feeds it a URL, it analyses the HTML, extracts bits and pieces, and then recompiles them and spits out 16 lines of rhyming verse.

The following is an excerpt from the output I received when I entered in sambot.com. (Sometimes it helps to reload the page a few times to ensure that the randomly generated verse is at its lyrical finest)

HTTP in tha House
lyrics by: http://sambot.com/

my bloody
awesome and i think cuddy
capital r html last post
of their next album the most
application only does one thing
asylum yep you read ping
really sweet a href
for me however the highlight f

SAMBOT DOT COM IN THA HOUSE

While this isn’t necessarily new news, it is still Tiger related news and definitely worth mentioning.

There exists an application called Konfabulator (Mac/Win). It’s a really cool app. It’s lightweight, very powerful, customizable, expandable, and extremely handy… and you can read all about it on Apple’s Tiger page, under the feature listed as Dashboard. Konfabulator and Dashboard – two separate applications, made by two separate companies – are so strikingly similar in look and function that one has to wonder if this is legal.

What both applications do is allow small “mini-applications” (known in both programs as “Widgets”) to run and be accessible via certain keyboard commands. The mini-apps live on a sort of hidden layer that can be easily toggled on or off. These mini-apps can be pretty much whatever the user wants them to be. Since both are javascript based (and other web technologies too… like CSS and HTML), almost anyone can create their own Widget. If you don’t want to create your own, don’t worry about it. Dashboard will come pre-installed with a bunch (Dashboard Widget download sites are cropping up too), and Konfabulator has a ton available for download. Some Widget examples might include stocks, weather, dictionary, phone book, clock, games, calendar, calculator, addresses…

Despite the fact that Dashboard is way too similar to Konfabulator for it to be coincidental, I am still excited to see what Apple’s version is like. I’m sure Dashboard will be heavily integrated into the OS X experience… probably part of Exposé. Like most apple software, it will be slick and usable without any complications.

I don’t know what to feel for the makers of Konfabulator. Having not yet used Dashboard, I can only speculate as to their impending rivalry. Who knows, maybe Konfabulator is more sophisticated than Dashboard. Maybe the true Widget users/developers will scoff at the idea of using/developing for Dashboard. I guess we’ll find out in a short 15 days.

Next up: Tiger Mauls Quickeys

Further reading:
Macworld: Konfabulator, Dashboard controversy flows out of WWDC
Daring Fireball: Dashboard vs. Konfabulator

The first Tiger thing that I’d like to gripe about… and yes, this is a bit nitpicky… is the raw ugliness of Apple’s Tiger page. Take a look for yourself:

For a company so dedicated to quality design, I’m surprised that they let this atrocity pass. Ok… I have seen worse. But, this is Apple that we’re talking about. The Tiger page is wholly uncharacteristic of Apple’s typical standard of aesthetic integrity. Their design team rocks! But this… well, it looks like it was slapped together by an intern. Ouch…

I’ll spare you the entire rant. Click here to read me drone on and on about design structures and consistency and blah blah blah. (Gee, I really sold that well. You know it’s good writing when the author advises his audience not to read his own work.)

In an effort to counterbalance my gripe, I offer this: Isn’t the little Automator robot guy (included in the upcoming Tiger release) just the cutest thing? Look at him holding that shiny piece of tubing… I just want to hug him until his adorable little blue cyclop eye dims to a cold, dead, empty blackness. So cute!

 

Tiger will be here in a short 16 days. From now until then (and probably during the weeks following) I am going to attempt to post at least one Tiger related thought, criticism, comment, question, gripe, etc… per day. A synchronized groan of vexation rumbles through the blogosphere. Did you feel it? I nearly fell off of my chair.

Write this down. It’s important. Or, better yet, download this iCal event (should work in Sunbird too).

Mac OS 10.4 Tiger to be unleashed on Friday, April 29

I will be at the Apple Store, Westfarms Mall (Farmington, CT) picking up a copy. In the past, the Apple Stores have all had some kind of event for new OS releases. The Jaguar release was insane. I was in line for a couple of hours… I did meet some really interesting people and got a ton of free stuff (t-shirt, mouse pad, etc… Hello eBay). The Panther release was less impressive, but still fun (free stuff included Panther dog tags for some reason). Maybe I’ll see you there?

I embrace my inner dork.

I feel like hell, and I’ve been told that I look like hell too.

Great.

I hate being sick.

Please reference December first’s blog entry for further details.