What is up? Change. And not so much.

In the past seven months I have adopted a cat, purchased a house, switched jobs, lost a marriage, gone skydiving for the first time, gained a roommate, purchased a car, and led an initiative to overhaul my employer's CMS -- in that order.

I'm starting to create again, but I still have a nagging itch. It's this site. What am I doing with it? Not really anything. It got me the job I needed, but it serves little purpose as a voice for me. I rely on Twitter + Facebook far too much for that. Something needs to change. But when do I have time? Somewhere, I do. But I don't feel much like sitting on the couch or at my desk to do it. Maybe I should go to more coffee shops and fewer pubs? Perhaps I need to block out a specific day and time to write?

I've noticed I'm not the only one -- many designers aren't publishing as frequently as they used to. Our communication channels are shifting ever closer to shorthand, easy-to-consume signals. Are our sites destined to become dusty portfolios slapped up alongside Tumblelogs?

Nay, I tell you! It takes quite a bit of effort to generate content, but we've all got to get better about it before the dumb channels take us over. Besides, you can't squeeze a Photoshop tutorial or a full-blown discussion about frameworks into a tweet. So this is my reminder to myself... Write, dammit! Now I'm no expert, but what do you young designers entering the field want to know O.o

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Grassroots Obama Video

Check out this original, grassroots-made music video supporting Barack Obama. The level of effort put into the design and video production is enviable, not to mention the message and impact of the video being incredible. Just... Wow.

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Set a Guinness World Record

Celebrate Download Day 2008, and help set a Guiness World Record by getting Firefox 3 on the day it drops.

As Firefox 3 nears completion, it's shaping up to be leaner, faster, and more usable. The world's best open source browser is maturing, and as part of the web community, you can get your Firefox on, and help it gain more mainstream exposure at the same time. So make it count -- don't be a slouch -- pledge to get Firefox 3! And it doesn't cost a thing, people...

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I Need A Hero...

I'm holding out for at hero 'till the end of the night / He's gotta be strong / And he's gotta be fast / And he's gotta be fresh from the fight

Ok, I know that's over the top, but I'd like to introduce you to Silas Dilworth's new "Heroic Condensed". If you're a fan of condensed, slab sans-serifs like I am, then you'll understand my enthusiasm. Available in 8 weights, and currently 33% off from its regular price, it's hard to resist grabbing this up.

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Change For Sale

The Obama Store has released 4500 / 5000 of Shepherd Fairey's "CHANGE" poster. Get 'em while they're still around.

All purchases made on the Artist for Obama Gallery are 100% contributions to the campaign and count toward your overall contribution limit of $2300. Contributions are not tax deductible for federal income tax purposes.

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Evolution of Dance by Optimus Prime

I wasn't going to post any more videos in the main content of my site, post-redesign, but this is creative enough to warrant it

Some exceptional stop motion animation going on here...

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Our Deepest Fear...

This weekend, the wife and I watched Coach Carter. I'm not prone to watching those sappy, based-on-a-true-story, inspirational movies, but it was decent enough...

As trite as that theme has become, I think it's important that people, especially the younger generations, know they are capable of many wonderful things, as long as they put forth the effort necessary to attain success and go beyond (I'm looking at you, baby brothers).

This quote from the movie, a paraphrasing of a poem in Marianne Williamson's A Return to Love, reminded me I need to do more, for myself and for the world:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. [...] Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine as children do. It's not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own lights shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

The original poem contains some other extraneous points that narrow the focus of this well-crafted passage, and don't believe they add to the intrinsic value of what's being said here. Nor do I personally believe that having this attitude requires your being a person of faith--just that you want to make the world a better place by being yourself.

I dedicate this post to my wife, my family, and my friends who are already bright beacons in an increasingly dim world. But especially to my immediate family, who I love very much, and who I hope to see move far beyond the current rough patch they are experiencing and continue growing into the strong, shining lights mentioned above.

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Conditional CSS Comments

If you haven't met previously, let me introduce you two...

Maybe you've been designing websites for a month. Or maybe you've been at it for years. You've been using CSS for presentational markup with HTML, and you know how reliably pages tend to display when using a modern, standards-compliant browser like Firefox or Safari. And then you view your layout in the dreaded Internet Explorer 6. It's blown to bits, kablooey, gobbledygook. You followed all the rules, but everything is misaligned, your margins are blown, your em-based font sizes are way off...

A brief primer

IE6 has the largest install base of any browser in the market, and many people still haven't upgraded to Internet Explorer 7 (IE7). Many of the CSS hacks used to control IE6 are ignored by or disrupt browser rendering in IE7. IE7 plays by a lot of the standards-based rules we're accustomed to in modern browsers, but it still comes up short. And in many situations, you can't leave the users of older browsers completely in the lurch (even if IE6 is 8 friggin' years old).

In the immortal words of the terrorist Howard Payne from the movie (SPEED), "Pop quiz[...] What do you do?"

You hack that sucker.

You go to A List Apart or Position is Everything, and you hack that sucker until it submits to your will. You pull out all the stops. And then... You open the page in IE7 and once again it looks nothing at all like it's supposed to. Not even like your hacked-for-IE6 version does. Now what?

My new go-to: Conditional CSS comments. They certainly aren't new. However, for various projects including this site, I have just started using them. I love them and I probably won't stop unless there is a significantly compelling reason to not use them. In principle, we shouldn't have to at all, but that is not the reality we are confronted with, and it turn we must confront said reality with a solution that won't induce hair pulling...

So what are these conditional comments? They're basically proprietary filters built into various Internet Explorers that supply IE with specific stylesheets exclusively. Other browsers completely ignored that code, so the comments themselves are not (as far as I've read) harmful from an accessibility standpoint. You can even pick and choose specific versions of IE you want to target with your conditional comments. And what do these conditional CSS comments look like? Here is a stellar example from Ask the CSS Guy.

Before you go repeatedly recopying all your CSS after you make trivial tweaks to your base style sheet, and then pasting said changes back into your conditional CSS (like I was initially doing), know that the only CSS you absolutely need to put in the conditional style sheets are the rules you want overridden. Separate the wheat from the chaff and only maintain browser-specific hacks in your conditional CSS (you know, the code that tends to be troublesome with the usual suspects).

For tff4.com, I now use conditional CSS to serve up GIFs to IE6 users instead of my pretty, drop-shadowy PNGs. Now there's no need for crippled Javascript to make alpha channels render on your PNGs in IE6--just serve them slightly different CSS! (If you aren't excited by this prospect, you're not a web geek, mkay?)

Update: It's worth mentioning (due to a lot of traffic from Unmatched Style) that since I've just started using this technique of serving up different style sheets, I haven't had the chance to get everything perfect in every browser, with IE6 still receiving the least amount of attention. The archived pages, I know, are way off for the time being. Hope to get them fixed soon!

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Still a Little Dusty...

So my site is finally shaping up and looking a bit snazzier in the darker corners. I've been fooling with this redesign in bits and pieces since July, so it's a relief and a morale booster to finally have a solid, working, layout, and somewhat clean functionality.

A portfolio section is finally up and pieces will be added little by little every week or two, hopefully until it explodes.

Browsers

IE6 compatibility is a long way off, so consider IE7, if you must use a Microsoft browser. At present, I don't have the patience for its intolerance toward web standards... Please consider Firefox or Opera or even Safari.

CMS

Also, Movable Type 4 has been giving me fits with its little peculiarities. Comments are open and working again, though the submission process is not as polished as I would like. And security...I'm waiting for the spambots to attack and for my inbox to fill up with moderation notices, if you catch my drift. Anyone with experience in getting MT4's more robust comment authentication methods actually working, please drop a line or comment.

Future Plans

As time progresses, I hope to have the sidebars for each section a bit more individualized. I'm also working on getting a more stable way of presenting my posts from Twitter (tweets, for the uninitiated). Every time their site goes down, so does the crappy Javascript include that brings the tweets to my site. Some error messages and notifications still appear in the default Movable Type format, and when I have the chance to dissect those .cgi pages, that will also change to fit tff4.com better.

Thanks for your patience!

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Firefox Code Glitch

I have a riddle for you if you have the time.

Last week I found that my site was suddenly behaving differently in Firefox. Up until this point, it looked pretty much the same as Safari. But suddenly every piece of text had inexplicably become bold, and the spacing of my block-level elements was off. Way off. After some rapid refreshing in both browsers to see if something had momentarily glitched out and become cached, I realized the bug was much more permanent.

Thank heaven for Firefox and its myriad extensions.

Over the years, there have been a few extensions that I found critical, but haven't been updated, X-Ray being chief among them. View Source Chart is another extension that keeps me from switching completely back to Safari. In order to use either of these I keep Nightly Tester Tools around for ensuring backward compatibility with these extensions that have fallen by the wayside...

So using X-Ray, I find that Firefox is rendering a bunch of these extraneous tags all over the page:

<strong><strong><div>

I thought somehow MovableType might be throwing extra code in by accident, right? But after viewing source in Safari I see that the tags that are present in Firefox just aren't showing up.

How is that possible?

My MovableType install is set to render pages statically, so I presumed that this mysterious code was being injected by some script I added to my site. PHP? Nope. sIFR? Nope. Crazyegg? Nope. Twitter? NOPE. A savvy friend even recommended shutting down Firebug and Greasemonkey to rule those out... Not the culprits, either...

As our conversation progressed, talking to my developer-friend must've dusted some troubleshooting mojo off. I went back and looked at where the errant tags began and there it was. I had found my white whale code.

It turns out that I use a secondary "blog" install to publish my linked list ("The Chipper") -- as is common on various blogs that utilize MovableType. And in one of my links, I carelessly neglected to close off a strong tag in the topmost link. These links are brought in via PHP include and somehow not closing it off caused a bunch of (properly nested, mind you) strong and div tags to be generated and injected into the page, but only in Firefox.

Safari, on the other hand, was kind enough to ignore the mistake and go about its business. Yet Firefox felt compelled to actually add in code to compensate for an unclosed tag. Or so it seems... I'm no browser geek, so that's about as far as I'll speculate. If you have a more in depth explanation of what happened, I'm all ears.

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Pardon the Dust...

Obviously, some things have changed around here... I've been redesigning my site since the end of July and it's just damn time for the thing to be up. I need incentive to get it done. So, please excuse the mess.

Yes, you will see some behind the scenes raggedness that I hope to have cleaned up by the weekend. Archive templates are still stuck on the old design and there are no portfolio pieces up as of yet. The incompleteness is not the image I want to convey, as this redesign/realign is part of a long process of self-improvement that I am embarking on. But if it facilitates my being done, so be it.

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The Design View Show

Andy Rutledge gives us a design podcast that has been sorely needed. Well spoken, relevant, and on-topic, it's something designers old and new alike can sink their teeth into. It doesn't hurt that Andy's spoken voice is as refined and clear as his written voice.

The Design View Show

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Safari FTW... Or WTF?!?

A call to arms:
OK, so it's not the noblest cause, but why is Safari still the bastard child of browsers in terms of web app support? WebKit is indeed superior in terms of standards compliance than most other browsers and it's now available on Windows, and of course the iPhone. Yet I still have so many issues with major sites.

More than a year out from the inception of Yahoo's mail beta, Safari is still blocked (unless you use the Safari 3 beta -- and that works OK until you try to modify options and such). I have ridiculous problems with gmail, like not being able to use the 'delete all spam messages' quicklink. Google Documents and chat within gmail are also unsupported. Akin to the Google spam link issue, attempts in Hotmail to use the quick-delete feature for spam are unsuccessful -- I can only get that to work in Firefox. As I type this into MovableType, it's likely that a menu feature will glitch out on me because I'm in Safari... This is madness! What am I missing? I'm sure it has a lot to do with Javascript issues, but what the hell?

I should add that, yes, I am a mac user, but for quite I while I've used Firefox exclusively. I am finding that it is really just too slow to be useful anymore, especially at work on an aging G5. All the web developer extensions in the world aren't going to eliminate my need to have pages pull up quickly and have my browser behave reliably with multiple tabs open... It seems, for now, I am stuck between a rock and lousy browser support.

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Pixelmator

Yesterday, brothers Saulius and Aidas Dailide released Pixelmator 1.0 for public consumption. Lucky for us, they were nice enough to provide a downloadable trial demo (which can be unlocked with a serial for more permanent use). It has been said that image editors are likely to become the new FTP client within the mac dev community, so I figured I'd give Pixelmator a try and see how it weighs in against the heaviest hitter, Photoshop.

First Impressions

The first thing that struck me is that at about 30MB, Pixelmator is pretty compact. A lot more compact than that torrent of CS3 you're waited three days for... I'm sure this is due in large part to the fact that brothers Dailide relied heavily on OS X's Core Image technology to handle the grunt work. Upon opening Pixelmator, you are confronted with a splash dialog box similar to that you would see in CS3, but with pretty animations of cascading text that become menu options. I jumped right in and used it to open the latest comp of my upcoming site redesign.

Pixelmator sells itself heavily on the concept of HUD-based palette systems. Unfortunately, as Gruber points out, this extends to the document window itself. This is fine on my macbook, but on both my iMac and a separate 23" Dell Monitor, this is rather annoying. Full screen mode eliminates background distractions, but I can't always work in full screen. An option to change the opacity of the document window might make a good 1.5 or 2.0 release addition.

The next thing I noticed was that all my masks were intact. Immediately this made me quite ecstatic, as I am a huge proponent of non-destructive image editing. Admittedly, I'm a geek -- I nearly threw a keg party when Adobe added adjustable filters to CS3... Alas, my joy did not last long when I took notice that my comp hardly looked like the Photoshop version of itself. All. My. Textures. Gone. That's right, the application of layer effects of any kind in PS is rendered null and void when imported to Pixelmator. Effects are not even rasterized, just ignored. Vector and Smart objects are also changed in the conversion process, but to rasterized layers. I rely solely on vector and smart objects in my Photoshop work -- out of the need to be able to re-edit everything I do, with personal and professional work. To do anything else would be senseless and a waste of time.

The Downside & The Upside, In That Order

On the above points alone, I could not use Pixelmator professionally and I feel that these will need to be resolved before Pixelmator can move beyond anything but amateur status. Same goes for Adjustment layers -- non-destructive editing is non-negotiable for me. Pixelmator also lacks rulers, guides, and what I would consider some really basic functions that make Photoshop extremely usable, like toggling layers on and off with a continuous swipe down the line of visibility buttons.

Pixelmator eschews a lot of basic functions for prettier ones, like the splash screen animation and the jumbo icon for the active tool in the toolbar. It's worth noting that many Photoshop image-editing functions are available, including adjustments, image and canvas sizing, and filters. Pixelmator's halftone filter was a fun filter to play with and in my opinion, better executed than Photoshop's. Filters are visually "chained" to the objects they effect within the document window. It's a cool but superfluous effect, and I could see it getting annoying after a while with large, complex comps.

Pixelmator's toolbar is quite similar to Photoshop's, so much so, one has to wonder if it's really an improvement. I've heard more enthusiastic reviews about Acorn's single tool palette. Familiarity extends to many menu options and hotkeys, and this could certainly enable an easy transition from Pixelmator to Photoshop or vice versa. Pixelmator also supports most if not all major file formats. The Pixelmator team was also nice enough to provide some pretty useful documentation for the beginners out there wanting to try it as an alternative to the daunting beast that is Photoshop.

Wrapping Up

In summary, I feel that Pixelmator is a well-executed entry-level photomanipulation app -- I would consider it great training wheels for beginners who can't afford photoshop. It lacks some essential middle-of-the-road features that makes switching from Photoshop a total deal breaker, not to mention the high-end features like Smart Objects. Should they show up later, though, I could probably get away with making my websites in just Pixelmator and Coda. Maybe. Any plans to make an Illustrator-killer, fellas?

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Future Steve Jobs

Gruber:

For example, at last month's iMacs/iLife/iWork special event, Jobs several times alluded to Apple having released the first version of iLife "a long time ago". It was actually just four and a half years ago, but I think in Jobs's mind, even 2003 is the distant past.

I'm convinced this is because he only returns from a utopian world in the year 2207 to give us keynotes and delicious technological goodies. Then FSJ time travels back to go get us more goodies.

Hey, a man can dream can't he?

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Bioshocked...

Or Not So Much... Depending on how you look at it.

Here's my review of BioShock. I know, I know, late to the game (no pun intended), but the wife wasn't digging me buying a $50 or $60 game. And I'm glad I played whipped and didn't blow that money (which is now going to an iPhone)...

This game sucks. Don't get me wrong, the graphics are incredible. No argument there. The texturing, radiosity, the fluid dynamics -- all are incredible. I will say I'm not that impressed with the modeling (I went to school for 3D design and animation, and GoW has much better models). Add to that the fact that BioShock doesn't strike me as new, not that any FPSes ever have, at least since Wolfenstein. But seriously, the gameplay isn't all that inventive and I found myself really searching for reasons to like it before I just gave up and admitted it wasn't as cool as I'd hoped.

There's this feeling in the back of my mind that BioShock reminds me of an overhyped movie that bills itself as "not just another action movie", when it really is, in fact, a weak action movie with some drama or comedy thrown in. I like honesty in the products I buy. I know that when I see Die Hard With a Vengeance it promises to have gratuitous gunshots, crazy friggin' explosions, and tons of expletives is supposed to have expletives along with the buddy banter. But much like "Rush Hour," BioShock is just lukewarm all around. And then there's no online component, which is a huge part of the reason I like Gears of War so much (and people are still playing the hell out of that).

To say nothing of the graphic design would be a crime. I love all the Art Deco references and type, and the in-game cartoon illustrations for the plasmids and various dispensers is pretty awesome. You don't see that kind of emphasis very often (except maybe Guitar Hero). Check out the concept art.

I just don't see why people are so in love with it. And I'm not alone...

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Gruber's Challenge

What do we call iPhone-optimized sites now?

iSites? IPOS? I know -- jeebusSites!

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Flight of the Conchords - Frodo

One of my favorite, quasi-new shows is Flight of the Conchords (FotC). It's on HBO, so if you haven't heard of it, that's probably why.

A synopsis: FotC is a situational comedy revolving around the misguided attempts of two naive and oft idiotic Kiwis, Bret and Jemaine, to make something of their band in NYC with the assistance of their equally naive and idiotic band manager, Murray. Murray also happens to be a Cultural Attach

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Mac Vs PC... The Song

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