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Work related reading assignments
It's a Whole New Internet "We're going to look back at Spring 2005 as a milestone. Watch closely, ladies and gentlemen. Things are about to change in a very big way." Boy, if I had a dime everytime...
Definitive Solution to Image Replacement
March to Your Own Standard "what's up with the little grey button at the bottom of this site? It is my official Invalidation Badge. It's mere presence on every page of this site renders my entire domain XHTML 1.0 Non-Compliant. Invalid. Erroneous. Whatever you want to call it." He's letting everyone use it. I can invalidate my own code, thanks for offering though.
Hell-vetica "Are you overusing stale, over-familiar fonts and, as a result, ruining your chances of success? Why not seek out something original, says Jason Arber"
A much more detailed article on typography - Five simple steps to better typography
The Nikon RAW format issue
OpenRaw.org tries to explain the RAW problem. In a nutshell, Nikon is deciding to encrypt part of the exposure data (the white balance) of photos taken in RAW format with it's hi-end cameras. News of Nikon's decision, the response from photographer's (most threatening to jump ship to Canon) Nikon's response (which says nothing) and comments that get to the heart of the issue can be found at Photoshopnews.com
Jeff Schewe says it best in his comment:
"Long term preservation and conservation of digital photography must be the most crucial and respected principle. Proprietary and undocumented raw file formats puts digital photography and photographers at unacceptable risks and impose restrictions that far outweigh any commercial or proprietary interests of the camera companies"
Does this really paint an ominous picture for the future of photography? (how's that for a mixed media metaphor?) Although it appears that it will only effect hi-end photographers, and among them, only those who demand complete control over every nuance of their workflow, it really is just a hideous PR blunder to tell creative professionals they can't do what they want with their own creations.
It doesn't effect me, however, since I still can't afford the Nikon I want, the D70, which isn't effected by this whole thing anyway.
Web Standards Cluelessness
Web Standards Blindness "You read blogs, you practice life-long learning, have a passion for the Web and do your best to keep up with the jones'. However, my guess is that when it comes to Web professionals, you're part of a minority."
I'm running into more and more web designers who don't have a clue. Either fresh out of some design school, or working for years on the Web, these people have never heard of the Fahrner Image Replacement method, the box model or CSS Zen Garden (these things deserve links, but my point is that if you are in the industry, you should already know them).
It is true, for some of these people, it's just a job, and they don't think about work after they go home. I can't blame them, I've had enough jobs like that. But there's no convincing these people to change the way they work.
A designer told me once that he wasn't going to give up his table and frame ways because he couldn't afford to take more classes to learn the new way to work. Another told me he doesn't read any blogs because "he doesn't get into politics". Yet another designer taking a Flash class was afraid to go to a webby-awarded flash site I sent him to, saying it's "probably not a good idea to log on to these sites" because of security concerns. Another asked me if I knew a trick to fix a superscript that was messing up his line-height, but that he had to use FONT tags and no CSS "because of bandwidth and file size restrictions".
I admit, I didn't even try to educate any of these designers (nor did I slap them silly, even though they needed it). I could have told them that it's easier to learn from weblogs and a book or two, than to spend hundreds of bucks and several weeks in school, if you could find a school that teaches anything but FrontPage and Dreamweaver. It should be obvious to anyone who works on the Web that they need to spend time on it, and not be afraid of it, and if you haven't run into the hundreds of essays extolling the benefits of using CSS (never mind real standards-based XHTML), then I'm not going to be able to convince you.
But the real reason I didn't try - competition. I don't pretend to be a guru on this subject, everything I FTP up to a server isn't perfectly validatable (and posting this essay on the mess of code behind the scenes here is a huge hypocrisy), but I spend the time to learn, and the last four websites I've built validate (or come damn close). If you haven't spent the time to learn more than me, then that makes me that much better. You may not need that edge, but I do.
Some links and News
Adobe buys Macromedia. CNET, Marketwatch.
Speaking of Adobe, here's a Photoshop CS2 review.
Some interesting images captured within Google Maps' new Satellite service. More of them at Return of Design.
Long Start-up in Mac OS X
Many designers I know are annoyed by their Mac taking forever to start up. I use to be proud to open my Mac in a room full of Windows users to impress them on how fast it started up. Recently, it's become rather embarassing. I finally found the solution and my start up has gone from minutes to seconds.
Daring Fireball documents a complex diagnosis procedure to figure out how to solve the long start-ups many designers are experiencing with machines running OS X 10.3.8. He follows up with several updates that explain why font caches are at fault and offer a few other solutions.
Concisely - trash your "fontTablesAnnex" file in /System/Library/Caches/
And then hope Apple fixes this in an update we won't have to pay for (i.e. Tiger).
April Fools
I love April's Fool day on the web, although it doesn't seem to have the enthuasiasm it had in the past. While I would never perpetrate any such foolery on this site, since it's a sacred source of trusted knowledge (April Fools!) I will pass on some a few. Note some of these links are good today only.
Speaking of knowledge - there's GoogleGulp " Think a DNA scanner embedded in the lip of your bottle reading all 3 gigabytes of your base pair genetic data in a fraction of a second, fine-tuning your individual hormonal cocktail in real time using our patented Auto-Drink technology, and slamming a truckload of electrolytic neurotransmitter smart-drug stimulants past the blood-brain barrier to achieve maximum optimization of your soon-to-be-grateful cerebral cortex. Plus, it's low in carbs!"
Gapers Block starts advertising Casino Poker hosting and hot dogs with ketchup.
The Bralands The Master never fails, year after year.
Boring Boring Not just a front page parody, they've followed through on most of the ads and links.
Britannica Takes Over Wikimedia.
Linux looks to Paris Hilton for exposure