Recent Blog Posts
Blogs ยป Archive for August, 2007
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, or haven’t got time, …
News Wire: A Blueprint for CSS Design
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Slap in the Facebook: It’s Time for Social Networks to Open Up
Wired magazine puts out an open call to the web programming community to build a social networking service based on open standards like XFN.
(tags: socialnetworks standards xml) -
XRAY :: for web developers
Westciv has released a free bookmarklet called XRAY that allows you to inspect the style properties of elements of a web page in Safari and Firefox. While XRAY is very slick, most developers will find Firebug is a better day-to-day tool.
(tags: software css) -
Gang of Four Design Patterns - Does it stand the test of time?
A tight summary of recent discussion surrounding the classic “Gang of Four” design patterns book, and its relevance today.
(tags: programming) -
YUI 2.3.0: Six New Components and a Prettier Face
Yahoo!’s recent update to the YUI library contains some pretty massive improvements: a beta rich text editor component, a beta color selection widget, dynamic dependency loading, a beta unit testing framework, and a formal skinning system!
(tags: javascript software) -
MWI Team Blog - Progress for XHTML Basic 1.1
The W3C delivers XHTML Basic 1.1 as a Candidate Recommendation, closing the divide between the two previous specifications for mobile web markup. But with mobile devices increasingly able to cope with full …
Full Code Press: Watch the sites evolve live!
The Full Code Press site-in-a-day web olympics is on this weekend in Sydney — but you can stay up to date as the competition progresses no matter where you are in the world.
The two teams (Australia and New Zealand) will be building their web sites online, and you can watch the progress of their respective sites in real time. The web addresses of the non-profit organisations that will each be receiving a site at the end of the 24 hours will be announced at 9.30am on Saturday (Australian EST).
There’s also going to be plenty of photo coverage, video action and live blogging from both sides.
Photo and video action:
- http://www.flickr.com/photos/fullcodepress/
- http://www.flickr.com/groups/fullcodepress/pool/
- http://picasaweb.google.com/FullCodePress
- http://www.youtube.com/fullcodepress
Live blogging:
- http://www.fullcodepress.com/
- http://www.codeblacks.co.nz/
- http://wipa.org.au/
The trash talk is getting heated between the two teams, so I imagine that, despite the philanthropic nature of the event, it will be seriously competitive.
Should be fun to watch!
3 Simple Rules for Solution Management
Having a properly structured project—or more properly, solution—is absolutely vital to ensuring a development initiative’s success. In a pinch, a developer needs to be able to pull the solution from source control, force a restore of the database and any other external dependencies, make minor and appropriate configuration changes and have a building, functional solution. There are alot of nuances to making this work in practice, but the essence of keeping things manageable can be expressed in three rather simple, yet meaty, rules.
- Always use some sort of source control.
There are a number of source control solutions available to cover nearly any development situation from the lone hobbyist to huge geographically distributed teams. Exactly which one you use should be driven by your requirements and infrastructure. But developing without a source control system in place is irresponsible to your clients or employers or just yourself. You don’t even have to get involved with managing the system yourself—hosted SVN solutions are available for a few dollars a month. And several sites offer free, public source control systems for open source projects.
Why is this source control …
Nihilism, accessibility, and the preponderence of amazing co-incidences
I was feeling pretty nihilistic this morning.
Overwhelmed by having to navigate the dirty waters of capitalism trying to do what I feel is right. Not exactly cheered by the possibility of serious health ramifications from more than 20 years as a heavy smoker. Miserable about how long I’ve been single. Generally lacking in inspiration to see me through another day.
Then to read Molly’s recent post about the state of our industry and community, I became even more despondent, as I remembered how the microformats community and WHATWG are behaving like cabals in their self-interested refusal to acknowledge the accessibility issues with that they’re doing; and how so many of their leading lights are utterly refusing to accept this.
By mid-morning I had my head in my hands, sighing, there’s absolutely no point to anything.
The preponderence of amazing co-incidences
Do you ever find yourself amazed by co-incidence? How several things can come together all at once, in a way that so profoundly resonates, it seems like it must mean something more, that it can’t be just a co-incidence? And have you felt, at times, like this happens so frequently that co-incidence no longer seems like an adequate explanation; that perhaps, it indicates fate?
Well …
pTest: PHP Unit Tester in 9 Lines Of Code
I was recently working on a command line PHP tool, and didn’t have easy access to our normal PHP unit testing framework built around SimpleTest. After a few lines of non-test-driven-development, I started to freak out a bit - I guess I’ve fallen for the view that if code doesn’t have tests, it’s broken.
I didn’t need support for mock objects or complicated assertions - just a bare basic assertTrue() would do the trick. So, I present “pTest”, in 9 lines of code:
/**
* pTest - PHP Unit Tester
* @param mixed $test Condition to test, evaluated as boolean
* @param string $message Descriptive message to output upon test
*/
function assertTrue($test, $message)
{
static $count;
if (!isset($count)) $count = array(’pass’=>0, ‘fail’=>0, ‘total’=>0);
$mode = $test ? ‘pass’ : ‘fail’;
printf(”%s: %s (%d of %d tests run so far have %sed)\n”,
strtoupper($mode), $message, ++$count[$mode], ++$count[’total’], $mode);
}
Here’s a few contrived test cases to demonstrate:
assertTrue(1 + 1 == 2, ‘one plus one should equal two’);
assertTrue(false, ‘false should be true (this one will fail)’);
assertTrue(!false, ‘false should be false’);
And the sample output:
PASS: one plus one should equal two (1 of 1 tests run so far have passed)
FAIL: false should be true (this one will fail) (1 of 2 tests run …
Can forums still make money?
It appears that larger advertisers (the ones that pay) are asking ad networks to block forums from showing their ads. The larger the advertiser is, the more controlled they want the content to be. Just a few days ago I received an email blast from Tribal Fusion:
I wanted to reach out to you because we have begun to see more frequent requests from advertisers to block forums from their campaigns. These are usually premium advertisers with large advertising budgets that need assurances that their ad will run only on appropriate content. Since even moderated forums are difficult to police, they will most likely ask us to block forums from their campaigns. In the past we could not offer this functionality, but due to popular demand, as of August 15 we will be able to offer this option by request.
So can you still make money off of forums? The answer is yes. Now, personally I would never start a forum simply to make money because it will quickly become obvious to the end users and they will not stick around long. But, if you would like to at least cover cost here are some things that can still help pay the …
Are your icons working for you?
Icons and infographics are so integral to all GUIs (OS’s and online) that, like the street signs outside your window, we hardly notice them, even when we’re using them. And that’s exactly the way it really should be. The first time we see one it should help explain a concept behind a menu item, button or link — perhaps with a shopping cart silhouette next to a purchase option or a disk next to the ’save’ option. After the first time, we then tend to use them as flags or landmarks to move around interfaces we are familiar with.
However, there are time when that imagery can work against what you’re trying to achieve. Sometimes it can be as simple as emphasizing the wrong part of an interaction. In an online shopping situation, do you mark the ‘BUY’ button with coins or bills — emphasizing what the user is losing — or do you associate the process with the shopping cart or bag, emphasizing what your user is gaining. We don’t have to bug the Amazon board room to know the answer to that one.
I saw another case in point today. About a month ago I installed a new Antispam …
Dealing with unqualified HREF values
When I was building my extension for finding unused CSS rules, I needed a way of qualifying any href value into a complete URI. I needed this because I wanted it to support stylesheets inside IE conditional comments, but of course to Firefox these are just comments — I had to parse each comment node with a regular expression to extract what’s inside it, and therefore, the href value I got back was always just a string, not a property or a qualified path.
And it’s not the first time I’ve needed this ability, but in the past it’s been with predictable circumstances where I already know the domain name and path. But here those circumstances were not predictable — I needed a solution that would work for any domain name, any path, and any kind of href format (remembering that an href value could be any one of several formats):
- relative: “test.css”
- relative with directories: “foo/test.css”
- relative from here: “./test.css”
- relative from higher up the directory structure: “../../foo/test.css”
- relative to the http root: “/test.css”
- absolute: “http://www.sitepoint.com/test.css”
- absolute with port: “http://www.sitepoint.com:80/test.css”
- absolute with different protocol: “https://www.sitepoint.com/test.css”
When are HREFs qualified?
When we retrieve an href with JavaScript, the value that comes back has some cross-browser quirks. What mostly happens is that …
OSCON 2007: Open Design, Not by Committee
Ted Leung is a Senior Engineer at OSAF, and blogs at Ted Leung On The Air
Mimi Yin is a UI Designer at OSAF
(Disclaimer: I work at OSAF on the Web UI for Chandler Server.) This talk centered on the open design process used by OSAF in developing both the Chandler Desktop client, and the Chandler Server Web UI, and how open design differs from open development.
Open design is participatory, but mediated — i.e., decisions are made within the context of community discussion and participation, but with a specific responsible party for decisions to avoid devolving into design-by-committee.
Specific topics included:
- The thought processes of developers versus designers — developers think in terms of features and specs, designers think more holistically.
- How to do design in a distributed, participatory environment — use of tools such as wiki and mailing list.
- How to judge the relative merits of design proposals based on specific goals, requirements — i.e, use cases.
- Defining the ‘target user.’
- How to build a community of contributors to the design process — what is the equivalent of a ‘commiter’ in the open design process?
The talk concluded by going over next steps for cultivating an open-design community — by making objectives clear, getting people to use …
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