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I was listening to Gruber’s podcast the other day, and they mentioned the blue screen that appears for Leopard users after an upgrade. They attributed this to a bit of software that might have been installed (can’t remember what the name is) which can get itself installed so that it can be used by another [...]
In a word, RUBBISH. The newest MacHeist is up and running and basically it’s a really poor showing this time around. See the last time was an AMAZING collection of applications that included Pixelmator and VectorDesigner. This time around you have some of the same applications and a few random new ones as well, [...]
FontStruct is a website that lets you create fonts using an EXCELLENT flash interface right from within the website. You don’t have to start from scratch as it’s even possible to clone another font that has already been created and modify it to your needs. What I love about all of this is the option [...]
Elsewhere.brokenkode.com (powered by Asaph) is a an images dumping ground for things that inspire me and has been up and running for a week or so. I’ll hopefully get around to skinning this as well, but I’ve got to say that Dominic really did a good job on this little application and can’t wait to [...]
Late last year I made the move to a mac and while there was a bit of getting used to certain things I’ve been really very happy with everything that it’s offered me in terms of getting on with computing in general. However the thing that I’ve missed the most is Firefox with all [...]
So the guys over at Pixelmator have just released yet another update on their excellent little image editor. Now the thing that has impressed me more with this little editor isn’t soo much the actual editor, because the truth of the matter is I don’t think it has got what I need (which is surprisingly [...]
Firefox 2 is slow as donkeys on a Mac. It’s true. Even with my 2Gs of RAM I can still notice the strain, that and it’s constantly crashing for some reason (usually whenever I use Gmail. Alas I’m eagerly waiting for Firefox3 to be released which is looking a lot better for everyone. In the [...]
Today was the first time I used Awaken from Embraceware. It was a whole new experience for me waking up today to a bit of Soundgarden. Tradiitionally I’m jerked out of bet through the bitter sound of my cheap £4 alarm clock that’s been going strong for YEARS. I tell you what, I am most [...]
A lot of people have been asking me about what I think about the new WordPress admin that’s coming for version 2.4. No actually I am telling big fat porkie lies. No one has asked me what I think, but I’m not going to let that stop me. Lets talk the new WordPress admin [...]
So I got a load of help from the previous post about where I should look for more information about what kind of Mac I should go for. Unfortunately for me, I mentioned this to Graham at work, who’s a big computer hardware nerd…the man has got more computers in his house than spoons (and [...]
VectorMagic is a free online application that turns your bitmaps into vectors. It’s the work of two students at Stanford and I’ve got to say that it really does work a charm. I’ll keep an eye on this just to see if there’s any legs in online photo editing tools.
The Phiculator is a great little application, that you can download as a flash file as well (don’t know but I love applications that come as flash files). It calculates Φ (phi), the golden ratio. To put things into a design perspective, if you’re trying to make a website that is 850px wide, it gives [...]
Olav’s just released his Blueprint CSS framework. What I like about it is the overall idea and clever little things like how to implement the grid structure.
The second official release of Habari, version 0.2 is out the door. Everyone has been working real hard, always with love, always with passion. One of the things that this release includes is the user manual which is included with the release. Yes, when you download the software, you’re downloading the manual as well. For [...]
Ars Technica has a great little article about Hack Week. Novell recently has a week where they freed their developers to stop work on their daily routine and work exclusively on an open source project of their choosing. Great little idea which seems to have spawned a lot of great contributions back to the open [...]
Christian presents a great little list of things you didn’t know (or may not have known) about the Firefox web development toolbar. Anyone have something similiar for the Firebug plugin?
You know when you’re in the dark about something and then someone wakes you up and you get that realisation that things could have been better, you just didn’t know any better, because nobody bothered to tell you about it?
What am I talking about? I’m making less sense than normal? I’ll tell you what I’m [...]
I’m looking at javascript libraries and it’s honestly proving a bit of an arduous task. We’ve got Moo.fx and Moo.fx2. The first has been superceeded by the second (obviously). Both it would seem can be used with prototype.js (or the lite version), however Moo.fx2 can be used as part of Mootools, and this is where [...]
Dimension, the latest iteration in Opera’s incredibly cool mobile browser will be released on the 19th of June. For all those who are somewhat in the dark about this browser it’s one of the essential downloads for anyone’s mobile phone. The thing is the Opera guys and gals have been incredibly tight lipped about what [...]
Interesting developments over at Six Apart. Lets dig up some of the things I said back in the day about this shall we. For all those in the dark, MT was the defacto CMS you would choose if you were in the market to get yourself a blog with comments setup on your [...]
Better Gmail. Ok so it’s not as cool looking as the Google Reader theme, but it’s a definite step in the right direction. My favourite part and something I really wonder why google hasn’t sorted out instead of just giving us more and more space is icons for the attachments. Such a simple thing and [...]
Google Reader Theme by Jon Hicks. Awesome doesn’t even begin to describe this. I wish someone would do something similar for Gmail, because there is just soo much cruft and rubbish in gmail. The code is great and the functionality is great but google couldn’t design themselves out of a paper bag in most cases. [...]
20 must have firefox extensions. The usual suspects are all involved, however I didn’t know about the showcase plugin which I think is pretty slick.
Great little interview with Jakub Steiner and Andreas Nilsson over at Gnome Journal. The most interesting part of the interview was this little side project, Art Libre Iconset. An integration of Gimp, Inkscape and Scribbus would be great, not that I use Gimp (but that’s another post for another time).
Blender 2.43 was released today. To my mind (and I’ve said this many times before) is the most professional open source project EVER. This is how open source should be. Every release is golden, and this one is a keeper. From the new website, the excellent release log, feature videos and the list honestly goes [...]
Honestly, I’m amazed by the quality of the Zotero plugin for Firefox. Zotero is a little plugin that enables you to collect and store information, tag it and a whole lot more for all your research needs. Easily one of the best plugins for Firefox I’ve stumbled on in a long time (I’ve seen it [...]
It’s been a truly exciting time for Habari on the design front (not that it’s not been exciting on the code front, but I can only really properly comment on all things design to be honest). Since the last time we talked, Michael has been a busy boy with absolutely everything under the sun. All [...]
This is the first (hopefully) weekly instalment of the comings and goings on in the Habari Design Community. As this was our first week ‘out’ it was obviously a pretty wild and exciting ride with an immense amount of interest from all people around the world. What’s fascinating to me is that the people at [...]
It’s been one hell of a couple of days since we first talked about the Habari project. There’s been a slew of reaction to the news all over the internet (go to the pingback section of that post) and to be honest it’s far exceeded all expectations I could have had because I honestly don’t [...]
It’s unreal just how much faster doing this tweak actually makes Firefox load websites. Seriously best Firefox tweak I’ve done in a good long while.
Well Chris broke the news about, Habari, a new open source blogging CMS platform. While he didn’t want feel it correct to mention in the post who was involved, I’m going to step forward and put my hand up as the designated pixel pushing monkey of this motley crew.
What I find amusing is that as [...]
Easily one of the coolest gadgets I got this year was the Blackberry Pearl (or 8100 model). I’ve been playing with it for like a day now and I know it’s going to be something really special to use for a good long while.
I started writing a best of 2006 about a week ago, however I’ve had to break that down into several posts because it got far too large and I didn’t feel that I would be doing each topic justice, if I bulked all of them into one post. So for the first topic of conversation I’ll talk about the best of the Net for 2006. Word of warning, there’s a lot of images in this particular post just to bear it in mind.
Linux equivalent project is just a list of links for programmes that do the same thing. Good one to have handy, although it didn’t really give me anything new, hopefully in time it’ll expand though as a resource.
I bought a Toshiba R100 about a month ago off ebay mainly in the attempt to get myself mobile again and out of the confines of my room, you know go out there and see the people while still creating. Installed Ubuntu on the machine straight away, thought I’d share my experience.
I’m currently in Greece for a full 2 weeks. I’ve been looking forward to this break for well over a month now, hell I’ve been looking forward to this break for at least 3 months. I didn’t go anywhere during the summer period, which was probably the worst thing to do for my psyche to [...]
Democrcy Internet TV Platform - in all it’s open sourcy goodness. Just in time for the new Battlestar Galactica series (how the hell did so many months go by since season 2 ended, it really does seem like an eternity), the new My Name is Earl series and the new Lost series (still need to [...]
Following on from Part 1 of this series of posts on Ubuntu, I’m going to talk about Ubuntu and Linux’s most POWERFUL concept. Installing software through repositories. The way I understand it is that these are databases of all the latest stable software that has been tried and tested to work with Ubuntu. The [...]
Ubuntu 6.06 ‘Drapper Drake’ is a vastly superior operating system to Windows XP.
Usually people give their conclusions once they’ve established the question first and then gone through the process of explaining and proving why. I’m going to make my conclusions and therefore raise your expectations (or utter disbelief or even contempt and arrogance) [...]
I’ve been trying to find ways to increase my productivity and effectively take my life back by the horns, which for the past couple of months has spiralled out of control.
Gmail is a staple in my life. I use it and don’t think about it. I’ve not gotten to the stage where I really use [...]
Seems like the pay for model didn’t work? Can’t really say why the guys over at 21 Degrees have gone the route of giving Symphony away, but having done this blogging thing for a while, I can’t help but remember distinctly the outrage the blogosphere went through when Six Apart went and made the free [...]
Gnome Files. Part of the problem with open source is the fact that there are so many applications out there that can help you do all sorts of things, so much so you probably don’t even know that they exist. To help you along the way we’ve got the excellent Gnome Files website, which is [...]
20 Years of Linux panel at LinuxWorld from August. Yeah, it’s only been 15 years, however the guys at the panel look to the future and come up with some very interesting ideas, thoughts and suggestions.
When it comes to doing things in WordPress, any idea I come up with has usually been implemented several times over, however I think (and I really hope someone has actually done this and I simply can’t find it) but the idea for this plugin came about after talking with several of my friends who [...]
Quick thoughts on the new online service provided by Crazy Egg. I’ve been using it for about a week now. It’s another way of looking at how users interact with your site. I use Mint for my stats package; Crazyegg provides three levels of visualisation of where the majority of visitors click on your site. [...]
I definitely noticed spamming coming through, which left me scratching my head (50 in like a few hours). I guess those spammers are seriously getting their ass kicked by Akismet, easily the only ESSENTIAL plugin you want to have as a blogger of any description. Damn, was it really that bad before this plugin? The [...]
Last year when Adobe bought out Macromedia, one of the main things I complained about was what would happen to my Freehand. Well we all know what’s happening, it’s a dead duck (no news about it, and no updates since the acquisition). They’re going to continue developing the supremely bloated Illustrator. You know the one [...]
I’ve been playing around with the Gimp a bit more. Yes I know, I’ve got a massive post about this and other Ubuntu goodness. To make things slightly nicer on myself I’ve downloaded this little theme that integrates the new Tango icons from the upcoming (and has been upcoming since October of last year) version [...]
The last week has seen some movement on a couple of the open source projects I’ve been involved with in the past couple of years. I’ve already spoken about the first one but now I’m going to talk about the other project that I had such high hopes for which have been washed away and [...]
This is what I’ve been reading my feeds from for the past couple of days :).
I promised the guys on the dev team I’d keep it quiet until we had more kinks ironed out, but I’ve got to say that I’m so excited and over the moon that the new FOFRedux UI is now a [...]
Have you picked a friends for Firefox Day? I’m stumped as I’ve been shouting about Firefox from the top of my lungs for the past couple of years…
I was talking to Kyle a couple of days ago. He was expressing how he liked the summer and then we got a bit geeky and started talking operation systems. He’s recently made the jump from Windows to the land of the Apple, while I have dumped my windows box for a shiney new ubuntu [...]
While looking around the net for font viewers I stubbled across 6000 free fonts to download (scroll down a little bit). Still can’t find a decent font viewer for ubuntu though, any ideas about this and font management in general on Ubuntu?
One thing is for sure regarding the switch to Linux is that there is soo much to learn, however I am actually really looking forward to the plethora of applications that I can start using and learning and the various things I can actually start creating. I’m going to share some of the things that [...]
I’m running on Ubuntu now and I’m starting to get comfortable with the setup in general. I’m currently writing several posts about the experience so far however the biggest problem I’ve had to be honest is installing programmes to be honest, not programmes in the repositories because that was far too easy, I’m talking about [...]
You all seen the latest Inkscape? They’ve taken a page from Xara and included the colour palette at the bottom of the application. Also they’ve updated those amatuer looking icons from the previous version as well. Hopefully they’ll take a hint and use the tango icons for a unified look in web applications. I’ve not [...]
I’ve been pretty quiet this last week and there’s actually two main reasons for that. The first one is due to the fact that I’ve been extremely busy at work. Every summer it happens to me and this one is no different. I’ve been landed with far too much work to handle in an exceptionally [...]
See I know how people keep claiming how Ubuntu is the way forward for the desktop linux and how it’s been ‘made for humans’. Even though SUSE Desktop Enterprise edition hasn’t been released yet, I was keen on getting in on the action a little bit in advance, so I got SUSE 10.1 (it’s the [...]
When the Shuttle images design were released for general consumption I expected a great number of people to jump on board and help out Matt in the implementation of the code. Now I’m not sure how far the WordPress team have got with version 2.1, as I’ve heard some little bits and pieces over the [...]
In part one of this series I talked about why I’m going to be switching over to Linux. In this part I’m going to talk more about the actual additional software and what my options as a designer and illustrator actually are. There are only a handful of reasons why I would stick with Microsoft [...]
I’ve been writing this post for a couple of days now, which is a bit unusual for me, so grab a coffee because I’m about to go into a pretty long one, so long I’ve had to split the topic into two parts. For this first post I’ll be talking about Linux, open-source, microsoft and [...]
I’ll probably do a more proper review of the latest version of Flock at some point when it’s slightly more mature, but v0.7 Beta is a good stage to look at it more seriously. Also mad props to my boy Veloso for a really nice implementation of the new Flock website, very cool.
Been meaning to write a proper review about this book for a good long while. Due to many commitments it’s not been possible to really get into the book until now. “Blog Design Solutions” is a book that was released earlier this year (from Friends Of Ed) and was written by 8 guys from around [...]
I’m going to ramble on a bit more about Shuttle, simply because it’s been a pretty big part of my life the last year and loads of things I’ve wanted to talk about on this blog have been waiting for this moment in time. Everytime I would think about something cool to talk about relating [...]
To avoid any confusion and answer some questions that have been raised I’ve created this small FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) to dispell any rumours and set the record as straight as I possibly can. If you’ve got any questions put them underneath and I’ll update the post accordingly.
Before you read this I suggest you go and have a look at the 20 mockups showing the future of WordPress.
The idea of redesigning the WordPress administration panel began believe it or not in December 2004. For over a year and a half myself, Michael Heilemann, Joen Asmussen, Chris J Davis, Joshua Sigar (later joined [...]
The real reason why I decided to reboot to something more simple this time round hopefully is becoming more obvious with the latest change in the background on the front page. As the section implies the background (which occupies the most real estate on the site) will be used to throw the spotlight on specific [...]
Thought it was important to point out to everyone that the latest version of Zenphoto is out. It’s been a long time coming but I for one am glad that Tristan has found someone to help him out with this little application. So hat’s off to Tristan and Todd (you greek buddy?), they’ve done well. [...]
Perfect start to 2006, the super talented Michael Pham ofMPSoftware releases the new version of PHP Designer 2006. This is my preferred editor of choice, even though 2005 had loads of little bugs it was still great. A full review of this is forthcoming.
When I first heard about Flock I asked the obvious question of what was going to make it better or bigger compared to Firefox. There were a couple of features that made me smile, however the one tool that I was seriously very [...]
Firefox Hacks You Must Have. I’m always on the look out for new and interesting firefox add-ons. The newest one for me (which I’m sure has been around for a while) is DownThemAll.
Firefox 1.5 has been released and they’ve realigned (nooch!) the website as well. It’s not the biggest change by any stretch of the imagination, but still an upgrade is and upgrade, especially to my favourite application.
It’s only natural for people to be getting sick of the term that’s plastered on the interent EVERY SINGLE DAY. Yes, this post in part will be about the crazy little buzz word, Web 2.0. I hate that term:”(So we’ll not use it again, in the future that word will be replaced with ***** [...]
I’m really excited about Flock. For those in the dark it’s a new browser that’s intended for bloggers. The program is based off the Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine, which is what Firefox is based on. In fact the guys and gals behind Flock were part of the development team behing Firefox. Since Firefox is [...]
I’ve been waiting for this for a pretty long while. Tristan has finally released his long awaited (at least for likes of Joen, Micheal, Mathias and me) Zenphoto. If you’re interested in a simple program that seems like it’s got a bright future amongst those people not really interested in hosting their photos on [...]
Free Opera. As part of Opera’s 10 year Anniversary celebration it’s giving away it’s browser for free. That’s today only people. Read the footnotes. (via designateonline)
My previous windowz fart obviously as it would, started making me thinking about operating systems, and the like. I’ve had a couple of days to mull it over and this is something I’ve been meaning to talk about for a while now. Joen talked about why he wasn’t planning on switching in OSX anytime [...]
WinDirStat Very cool Windows stats program (open source software, which I always have time for).
Haven’t written one of these in a while, but I guess one program I use every day practically and I’m sure other people use a similar program in one form or another is the excellent Xnview.
The website says it’s got the following features:
Import about 400 graphic file formats
Export about 50 graphic file formats
Multipage TIFF, [...]
Overview
Continuing my open-source software reviews, I’ve turned my attention to the brilliant Firefox. I’m writing this review for a few reasons, mainly because I’m getting tired of telling people the same thing again and again, in spreading the word on Firefox. This makes my life a whole lot easier.
Easily my favourite and most used application. [...]
Okay so it’s NOT open source, and you’ve got to download it from the Microsoft website, however you’ll love me forever for this little nugget of a software. I found out about it via DIGIT magazine. Of course something like Computer Arts should also be saying something, however they’re corporate whores that obviously get paid [...]
I’m going to start posting reviews on software you might not know about that you really should be using, or could greatly benefit from using. There’s like 10 I’ve got in mind right now, but I’m really hoping that the list will actually increase as time goes by, since I love to use and support [...]