Christmas bargains are upon us, with indie Mac application bundles galore. Also, 24 ways is back for a third year and dConstruct t-shirts are now just a fiver!
HTML Entity Character Lookup is a little free webapp and comes a Dashboard widget too, which is super-handy.
Shrook is my OS X newsreader of choice and it’s now freeware. coComment is a long-overdue web service which helps track your comments across disparate blogs.
“Our long-term plan is to develop a ‘universal client’ by combining PDF, Flash and HTML in a single, integrated runtime.”
In recent commentary, people have lumped together Google Analytics, Mint and Measure Map as three new traffic analysis tools all competing with each other. The reality is somewhat different.
Unicode Font Info is a really handy free application for OS X. Essentially it’s a font inspection tool with full support for Unicode 3.2, allowing you to easily navigate huge fonts with tens of thousands of supported glyphs.
A question asked of me by a non-blogging friend. Other than content emphasis, he could see little difference, and thinking about it neither could I. (Which might explain why RSS, originally developed for news feeds, has been so whole heartedly taken on board in the…
Mozilla’s DOM Inspector (also available in Firefox) can seem daunting at first but is amazingly powerful. Amongst other things, it allows you to see which CSS rules are affecting any given element in order of cascade priority.
There are a number of really handy online colour tools coming to my notice. They all help the untrained or unreliable eye to come up with colour schemes and palettes based on complimentary and harmonious colours. I list five of them.
So I’ve just downloaded iTunes for Windows and it’s lovely. Straight away, here’s three things it’s got over Windows Media player: Music sharing with your local network. Quick browsing – play an individual album in your library with one click.
Andy Budd has created a lovely design for the Zen Garden. I’m giving a SkillSwap talk this Monday on Design Process – Evolution of the Wireframe. Dave Shea has reinvigorated discussion on designing with colour deficient folks in mind and points us to Pixy’s…
On his tasty new blog, Brendan Dawes extolls the virtues of Apple’s Keynote as a rival PowerPoint. But I’m not convinced.
Recently I’ve been playing around with the webcam & audio conversation features in Microsoft’s latest instant messenger client. I have to say I was impressed, particularly with the audio. And for a short time only, there is a webcam feed on this site.
Notes from the Macromedia MX 2004 seminar. In particular how Dreamweaver pleases and disappoints and how Flash video gets better and better.
Dasher is the most incredible writing interface I think I’ve ever seen. Dasher is a zooming interface. You point where you want to go, and the display zooms in wherever you point. The world into which you are zooming is painted with letters, so that any point you zoom…
I’m off mountain biking for a week. In the meantime I’ve added an archive to Clagnut and made some fundamental changes to the RSS feed, discovering FeedDemon along the way.
Photos of Venice with a new Casio Exilim S3 and discovering XnView image browser and converter.
Eric Meyer has created a rather nifty colour blending widget which calculates a palette between any two given colours. Fun (and funky JavaScript) and if nothing else, it’s useful for calculating the midpoint between two colours. Matt has posted a list of online style…
Checky is a great plugin for Mozilla that gives you one-click page validation, configurable across any of 18 different online validation and analysis services. It’s not quite as groovy as the tool in Opera which will validate local files, although Checky’s scope is…
The new W3C Validator has come out of beta and released unto the world. There is an improved UI and loads of links to the Specs, as well as help, documentation, tips and improved accessibility (accesskeys a-plenty). There also seems to have been a few changes to the…
Bownie and Chris will be showing off their music software, Rosegarden, at the Linux Expo in Olympia, London on the 9th-10th October. Registration is free on the website and on the door.
The Undetectables are a company specializing in hiding mobile phone masts in existing architecture, such as chimneys and churches; clever stuff. If p. g. wodehouse had a blog (and others) over at lying mo’ fo’. Those of you with enough time on your hands to have…
Great free, simple service to make those huge URLs nice and short. Great domain name: makeashorterlink.com.
I love the new version of TopStyle (Pro 3). Its colour picker is a piece of genius, packed with so many features (all of them useful in their own way), particularly to colour ‘blind’ users such as yours truly.
A List Apart explains a great time management system for those that can’t be bothered with time management systems. The gist is to schedule in the critical tasks of the day and fill in the gaps with all the rest (email, site maintenance, phone calls, reading ALA, etc.).…
OK this is the last plug for Macromedia, but importantly enough MX Studio (Dreamweaver, Fireworks, et al) is finally out. $199 upgrade to Dreamweaver alone is significant but given the user interface and CSS improvements it’s probably worth it.
Matt Brown, the Dreamweaver Community manager and general Macromedia ombudsman has a web log. Nothing fascinating there yet but I suspect it’s one to keep an eye on.
Some gizmos for improving your IE5 experience. Particularly helpful for developers. Google toolbar – quicker searching, page ranking etc. Validate HTML – using WDG validator. Disable style sheets – toggle CSS to check accessibility. Web Developer Accessories…
The Dreamweaver MX Preview Release came out today. It promises vastly improved support for CSS, XHTML, and accessibility (not that improvements would be hard to come by here). Apparently WaSP’s Dreamweaver Task Force consulted on the new version’s evolution, which…
