Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for August 21st, 2007
FullCodePress: Pre-built vs Custom?
One of the most interesting outcomes of last weekend’s FullCodePress international site in a day event was that each team chose a wildly different approach to tackle their client’s site.
The Aussie team chose to use a pre-built, open source CMS (Drupal) while the CodeBlacks (Team New Zealand) chose to build their site from scratch.
Initially my thoughts were that the CodeBlacks had bitten off way more than they could chew. When I stuck my head into their room at the 11th hour (actually, the 23rd hour) the team was huddled nervously around one screen, while their programmer scratched his head and began doubting himself. However, full credit to the team’s programmer, Mark Rickerby: despite having had no sleep and being under enormous pressure he managed to resolve whatever technical issue it was that was holding them up, and his team came out victorious.
In the post-mortem, the New Zealand team asserted that a custom build was the right solution for their client; given the scant resources that would be devoted to working on the site, and the general low computer literacy of the organisation, the back-end admin screens needed to be as simple as possible — more simple …
SitePoint Proposes Four SXSWi 2008 Panels
Planning to attend South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) 2008 in Austin, TX? Team SitePoint had a great time this year, and we’re eager to repeat the experience!
Voting for the 2008 panel discussions has just opened, and SitePoint has four in the running:
- The Great Web Development Debate: Standards vs. Practice
- Design Contests vs. NO!SPEC
- Simply JavaScript: How Simple is Too Simple?
- Workin’ For Da Man: Finding Job Satisfaction Without Risking Your House
Help Team SitePoint get to Austin by voting for our panels! If we get them approved, our popular “Books for Beers” policy from this year will no doubt make a return!
Real 3D in Photoshop CS3 Extended
Republished from last Friday’s Design View
Although it hasn’t received a lot of attention, perhaps the most ambitious and potentially most useful new feature to come to Photoshop CS3 Extended is the ability to interact with 3D files (note: not included in the standard Photoshop CS3 version).
Let’s not underestimate what they’re tackling here. Teaching a 2D image program to think in 3D is an ambitious undertaking. Photoshop was already a behemoth, and if you’ve ever browsed the endlessly cascading menus of an application like 3D Studio, you would probably begin to sweat uncontrollably at the prospect of shoehorning it into Photoshop. I’m thinking something akin to jamming the Taj Mahal into Heathrow Airport.
Sensibly, at least for these first baby steps into the world of 3D, the Photoshop team have kept their ambitions relatively modest.
Firstly, they haven’t attempted to include any 3D modeling tools within Photoshop. All models must be constructed and imported from third-party modeling programs, including Google’s SketchUp (.kmz), Autodesk’s 3D Studio (.3ds), Alias, Maya, and Acrobat 3D. Fortunately both Maya and SketchUp currently have free versions that will allow you to get your feet wet without selling your legs.
If you don’t consider yourself a modeler, …
