Archive for January, 2010
As a Mac user, I only recently downloaded Google’s Chrome browser.
The Mac version of Chrome doesn’t run extensions sadly. You need Windows Vista/XP SP2+ to access these goodies, at least for the moment.
Despite its lack of extensions, Chrome quickly became my default browser.
Although there are certain sites it had trouble with, I agree with Google’s promo blurb about Chrome. It does start-up and load lightening fast. And the search from the address bar feature is way better than typing into Firefox’s tiny search portal.
Developer Tools for Chrome
The best feature for developers is the Developer Tools found under the page icon to the right of the address bar.
Use this by pulling it up on the site you want metrics for. Check in Resources to see how long each element takes to load what the file size is.
Easily view CSS, HTML code and test JavaScript with an integrated debugger.
An article in Mashable says that Dev Tools is virtually identical to Safari’s Web Inspector. That may be true, but I can’t get Safari to play nice with Flash, so I have abandoned it.
And Firefox has some great extensions, such as Firebug and Web Developer, but that I find Firefox loads so slowly in comparison to other browsers.
What is your default browser? What do you think about the recent news – stemming from the Chinese hacks on a vulnerability in Internet Explorer 6 and Windows XP – that France and Germany have advised citizens to abandon Internet Explorer?
My first Kuler colour palette - Dettah iceroad. Made from a photo on Flickr.
Harmonious colour schemes can make or sink a project, so it’s best not to just wing it.
I have seen websites transformed from blah to beautiful with a simply tweak of css colours.
So when I spotted kuler, Adobe’s web-hosted application for generating color themes, I figured it might be worth checking out. It was.
Its Air app, kuler desktop, is great for instant colour browsing – you can search by key words and it will find thousands of suitable swatches for whatever mood you want (how many swatches it finds depends on how many users have tagged using that word). You can also flip through highest rated, newest, most popular and random.
Grabbing colours is a cinch, through copying html colour code or downloading an Adobe Exchange file.
Check out this Layers Magazine tutorial on how to integrate files into Creative Suite.
But if you have time, have some fun with the colour create and your own palettes. To do this, you’ll have to go to the kuler site.
Click on ‘create’ and choose from one of the six rules for colour harmony and begin to play with the sliders on the colour wheel.
The most fun feature for me was ability to upload or use Flickr photos to create palettes – my first palette is in screenshot above, it’s the colours extracted from a Dettah iceroad photo on Flickr. The warm and cool colours work well together, should I use this scheme on my new website …
After finding the term “gigavision” in this month’s Wired magazine’s Jargon Watch, I had to read more about this technology – using computer chips as sensors, which allows pixels to be packed 100 times more densely than with CCD or CMOS captures.
There doesn’t appear to be much online about this gigavision yet – even though an article in Wired’s Gadget Lab suggest devices with the chip will be available early this year.
Gigavision will be targeted for cellphones, and not the upper end of imaging (yet).
Cheap Naked Chips Snap a Perfect Picture in New Scientist predicts these chip will “pave the way for cellphones and other inexpensive gadgets that take richer, more pleasing pictures than today’s devices.”
These chips are not set to replace CCD and CMOS sensors in the immediate future, but it’s interesting to see the rise of more hi-res/3D/interactive multi-media pieces.
With the rise of ever cheaper and better quality digital imaging, can film survive? I donated my last film camera years ago, and don’t miss the darkroom chemicals at all!
Will people still want to view movies in 2D once 3D becomes cheaper and more available?
