Mon Apr 18
Well, actually, it’s more like when two companies merge. Adobe and Macromedia are to join forces to create a super-graphics-company. While there are precious few details yet from either party, this is sending shock waves around the web design world. For one this nobody saw it coming - or at least I had no idea, and everyone else I’ve read anything by on this subject seems just as flabbergasted.
You might be thinking “so what?”, but to anyone involved in the web and graphics industries this is a big deal. After all, both companies have products that are rivals of each other - Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand for graphic design, Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Fireworks for image creation and editing. What’s to become of them? Fireworks has long been a favourite of mine, because of it’s (I think) easier handling of vector images and export to web facilities. Is it to be discontinued, with features being imported into Photoshop, or will they continue to develop both product lines? I doubt that, somehow.
And then there’s Flash - with the weight of the mighty Adobe behind it, will it now be used for much grander and powerful things than it has already? And if so does that mean that the big strides taken by Macromedia in the past towards making Flash more accessible and user-friendly will be undone? How about the Flash server technologies? Adobe aren’t known for writing platforms, so will that whole area be fazed out?
As you can see, there are many questions that need to be answered, and I’m sure we’ll find out in due course what the outcomes of all this will be. What I can say is that the tools I use to create websites in two years time will be very different to the tools I use today. Who knows - we might even get Flash support inside Acrobat files.
Sun Apr 17
Bored of standard select lists? Want something a little more exciting? Brought to you with the goodness of CSS and a little DOM scripting, here is a rather spiffing select list tutorial.
Fri Apr 15
Behind the offices I work in is a retail park. It doesn’t contain anything really useful for the workers in my work (the only place to buy food is Boots, which can be expensive) but at least it’s a change of scenery, and being able to nip out at lunchtime to get batteries, shaving foam, or even order a new sofa can be useful.
However the really interesting thing about this retail park is how people get to it from my work. We don’t follow the road, instead most people walk through a broken fence down the side of a carpet factory behind our offices. This is a shortcut, and takes us through some trees and onto the retail park in a few seconds. The shorcut isn’t particularly nice (in fact la inamorata refused to go that way once) as it gets muddy, and quite often there is broken glass and other signs of inner city life there. But the worn path throught the grass proves that people use it.
Reading this article from pixelcharmer.com reminded me of this shortcut. Apparently, and I didn’t know this before, landscape architects take notice of where people want to walk, rather than where they laid the paths, around an area so they can redesign according to the users needs. It’s a revolutionary idea, and one that has massive potential implications for web designers.
What if we could do the same? Allow people to click anywhere on a page to get the information they wany, then collect those click coordinates and from the data redesign the site so it meets the users desires? I’m not sure if that would be technically possible, but it does seem an interesting idea to explore. Of course I’ve always tried to think as a user rather than developer when creating websites - even more so with web applications. I don’t like text that is too small, colours that don’t give enough contrast, unintuitive navigation and all the other bugbears of “normal” users, so I try not to put them in my systems. Hopefully I get it right more often than I get it wrong.
So, next time you’re going from the kitchen to the front door, try going the way you want to go rather than the way the path tells you to. If you partner/kids/mum asks why you’re clambering over the sofa rather than going around it you can say you’re just following your desire line.
Wed Apr 6
There’s been quite a bit of broo-ha-ha recently over the slightly dubious use of hidden articles to generate some cash for WordPress. WordPress
is pretty much the number one free “personal publishing software”, used
by many people as a simple and powerful blogging tool. The story is a
bit complicated, but the response from WordPress head honcho Matt brings to light a problem that will become more prevalent over the coming years.
How are people that give away stuff for free going to keep the wolf from the door? Open Source,
and therefore most of the time, free software is - I believe - going to
become more and more important on people’s desktop computers, just as
it has been on servers for many years. How the business model would
work to make that commercially viable I don’t know.
I’m pretty lucky as I have a good job and a wonderful family that together allow me to support myself and spend time doing the things I enjoy. Hopefully that situation will continue for a long while.
Edited at April 6, 2005, 10:14 am by geektimes
Fri Apr 1
Well, it’s finally happened. The monster I’ve been threatening for a while is here among us. Yep, the all-new stillbreathing.co.uk
has finally been launched. Present at the official launch were: me,
although I missed the wild after-launch party. Anyway, take a look and
let me know what you think (although not using the contact form on the
site … it doesn’t work yet).
Edited at April 5, 2005, 11:25 pm by geektimes
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