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*** DesignGeek ***
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Tips and techniques for the digital designer
In this issue:
-- Potpourri issue!
Tidbits, Neat Tools, News and Reader Feedback
covering x-Scope, textbook publishing, HyperCard, HerGeekness column,
iPhone simulator, lightbeam brushes, Parallels, flattening script,
blogs I read, and fair use
Issue 70, 3/25/08
Written by Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion
... for her clients, colleagues, random contacts and interested subscribers
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What Does She Mean by Potpourri Issue?
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Every day as I read through e-mail and surf the web I come across story ideas for DesignGeek. These get duly bookmarked in a special file on my computer. Added to this folder are brief text files I write to myself throughout the week, summarizing other story ideas like interesting client problems (and their solutions), events or new ventures I'll be doing, and so on. As time passes, this slush pile of things I want to tell you about grows ever-longer, and I know I'll never get to them all.
So once in a while I go through the full list and pull together an issue of short blurbs, introducing the best of these for you to explore on your own, and clearing out the folder in the process.
Enjoy!
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X-Scope for Designers
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Designing web sites and interactive projects requires a lot of precision measuring. Most authoring programs provide the tools you need for this, but the tools are unavailable when you're testing the final result in a browser or in a running Flash video. If you've never designed a site that looked different in a browser than it did in Dreamweaver or GoLive, you haven't designed enough sites.
I used to rely on a freeware utility called Free Ruler (OS X-only) to help me measure things "live":
http://www.pascal.com/software/freeruler/
Free Ruler puts a floating, translucent ruler, with tick marks in screen pixels, above everything else on your computer, and is simple to customize to what you want to measure. In fact I think I may have written about it in a previous DesignGeek issue.
Lately, though, I've become enamored with a replacement utility called X-Scope (OS X-only again, sorry) from IconFactory. It's not free (it's about $30 to register), but putting rulers on the screen is just one out of its many features. Its Swiss army knife-like suite of functions are always available via hot keys or a strip of icons in the OS X menu bar. My favorites include a Loupe tool, an interactive Screen mode that overlays the dimensions of browsers at different resolutions (including the iPhone), and customizable gridlines to make sure everything lines up across the screen.
The big feature with the newly-released version 2 of X-Scope is "Dimensions." Turn on this mode and your cursor sprouts X and Y grid lines with a constantly updating pixel readout of each line's length. As you move the cursor, Dimensions adjusts the lines to show what it's measuring, detecting blocks of content and measuring the space in between them, such as button to button, paragraph to margin, and so on. The pixel dimensions can be copied to the clipboard with a keystroke.
X-Scope Dimensions Video
Watch the video to see X-Scope's Dimensions mode in action:
http://iconfactory.com/graphics/software/xscope/xScope.mov
X-Scope Info/Download
There's a free tryour available, too:
http://iconfactory.com/software/xscope
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The Grim Truth of Textbook Publishing?
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Many of my clients are textbook publishers, designers or compositors; so I thought I knew a little bit about the field. But when I read this article (reprinted from Edutopia magazine) written by someone with deep experience in the industry, I could hardly believe my eyes. As a former public school teacher (way back in a previous life), it was one of the most depressing things I've ever read.
I suppose this is why my friends who are teachers (or who are home schooling their kids) are always cobbling together their own source materials instead of using a textbook.
The Muddle Machine: Confessions of a Textbook Editor
http://www.edutopia.org/muddle-machine
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HyperCard(ness) is Alive and Well
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Anyone here remember Dark Castle? Cosmic Osmo? Inigo Gets Out? These were ground-breaking, best-selling Mac games in the late eighties and early nineties, all artwork done by MacPaint virtuosos in black and white, and all created with HyperCard, Apple's intuitive "programming" language that used stacks of cards as the key concept.
Learn more about the creativity of these early artists in this free web-based book, itself purposely Hypercard-looking:
When Multimedia was Black and White
http://smackerel.net/black_white.html
When I first read it, it reminded me of when my daughter used HyperCard to create her own "Inigo-like" game for a science fair project, back when she was seven or eight years old. (She's in grad school now, so that was many years ago!) Instead of Inigo's cat, Nicole's protagonist was an alligator with googly eyes. Alas, as I upgraded computers over the years, I must've deleted all traces of her game, because I can't find it anywhere, and I've looked through piles of floppies, Syquests, and Zips. I know this is one of the topics my kid will bring up during psychotherapy at some point. ("My mother deleted my stack! That's why I can't trust anyone!")
HyperCard was dropped by Apple many years ago. The last version they released only runs in Classic, and even then, just barely. However, if you'd like your own kids to get the same thrill out of creating their very own game as Nicky did (or you want to give it a go yourself), hie thee over to Runtime Revolution to check out Revolution Studio.
Runtime Revolution
http://www.runrev.com/
Revolution Studio is a cross-platform (Mac/Windows) application builder that appears to use the same metaphor as HyperCard: Stacks of cards (screens) with a library of drag-and-drop items to make them interactive. For all I know, they purchased HyperCard from Apple, because it looks like what HyperCard would be in 2008! Watch their free video tutorials (link on the left of the page) to see what I mean.
Brian Thomas, the author of the seminal interactive project, If Monks Had Macs (first released as a Hypercard stack in 1988), updated his 24-volume opus as a Revolution Studio project not too long ago. You can purchase the runtime version for Mac/Windows here:
If Monks Had Macs
http://www.rivertext.com/monks.html
He even wrote up tips for other Revolution Studio developers here:
http://www.revjournal.com/features/rivertext-monks.html
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My New Column on CreativePro.com
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The editor of CreativePro.com, a web portal for the graphic design industry, is a long-time DesignGeek subscriber and fan. She has occasionally reprinted stories from DesignGeek on their web site. (Always after asking permission first, and suggesting a generous fee. So of course I'm a fan right back!)
Now, though, she's convinced me to author new content just for their site in the form of a monthly column. "HerGeekness Says:" debuted on March 3, along with the launch of their new web site design.
If you like DesignGeek, you should check out the HerGeekness column. It covers the same type of cross-platform, cross-media tips and techniques as I do here, except -- are you ready for this -- I can include screen shots! Woo-hoo! And readers can comment on my stories. And I can reply to their comments, saying things like "You don't know what you're talking about! What a maroon!" and so on. Fun times.
Here's the debut HerGeekness column (March 08) on creativepro.com:
http://creativepro.com/article/hergeekness-says-screen-share-with-your-clients
I chose to write about screen sharing with your clients. (If you look closely, you can see a picture of me in my video cam feed in a couple of the screenshots.)
Look for a new HerGeekness article to be posted around the beginning of every month... check the Features section for links to all of them:
http://creativepro.com/articles/class/features
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iPhone Simulator for Web Designers
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In a recent issue of the weekly e-zine, "Creative Techs QuickTips" (more on this below), author Craig Swanson described a way web designers and site owners could proof their sites as they'd appear and function when viewed on the Apple iPhone, without needing to actually use the iPhone itself.
As Craig said, it's important to do this because a) "After only eight months, iPhones now account for a remarkable 71% of all US Mobile Browser web traffic;" and b) designing for the iPhone requires "much more than simply designing for a smaller screen size."
The Apple-authored simulation program is apparently buried deeply within the iPhone SDK (software development kit), which is free to download. Though you need to sign up for the free Apple Developer program first, you don't actually need to develop Apple software. They won't make you take a programming test, in other words. ;-)
iPhone Simulator story
You can read the full tip and SDK download instructions here:
http://creativetechs.com/iq/test_your_website_on_apples_iphone_simulator.html
Now, what's "QuickTips"? It's a weekly HTML e-mail with a couple short tech tips, often accompanied by video, primarily for creative professionals. If the tip goes longer than a paragraph or two, a link brings you to the full tip on their web site, such as the iPhone one above.
QuickTips is written by the staff of Creative Techs, a Macintosh training and consulting company that serves customers in Seattle. I'm one of thousands of non-Seattle groupies who subscribe to their weekly e-mails ... sign up, it's worth it! Just enter your e-mail address in the subscribe form in the iPhone story above.
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Light Beams Brushes for Photoshop
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Every single day someone, somewhere, posts a new free set of custom brushes for Photoshop. And then e-mails me about it, hoping I'll write about it in DesignGeek. (Why do they seek promotion of a free product? Besides just getting the word out, probably because their site has Google Ads, so increased traffic = potentially more AdSense revenue for the site owner. Completely understandable.)
I seldom have time to check out the links they send me, let alone write them up. But this brush set I came across on my own, and it's really fun!
Obsidian Dawn's Light Beams Brush Set
http://www.brushes.obsidiandawn.com/sets/light-beams.htm
After opening a medium-to-dark image, making your foreground color white, and choosing one of the 26 light beam brushes from the Brushes palette, just click on the image. Ta-da, it looks like a beam of light is cascading into your subject. Each click of the brush (don't drag) creates another beam. As with all her brushes, they work on Mac or Windows, in Photoshop v7 or later and in Photoshop Elements.
Stephanie wrote up some usage tips for the light beams brushes here:
http://obsidiandawn.com/blog/2008/02/13/light-swirls-photoshop-brushes/
And instructions on installing brush sets:
http://www.brushes.obsidiandawn.com/tutorials/installing/index.htm
Stephanie has many other free brush sets you can download from her Obsidian Dawn site. I encourage you to visit and browse around. And if a Google Ad on her site looks intriguing, click on it! She'll earn a buck or two.
(But ... keep in mind that Google puts the ads there based on keyword context -- the site owner has no control over it. So don't be surprised if you end up at the page I did after clicking one of her Google ads, another "Brushes" link: http://www.torringtonbrushes.com/).
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Parallels Success Story
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Like a lot of design studios, we're cross-platform, though our Macs outnumber the PCs. As I trade up from older G4s and G5s for Intel Macs, I would love to sell off the Windows boxes too, and migrate the contents of their hard drives to virtual disks running inside OS X via Parallels. The dream is to have fewer, more powerful and flexible computers, each workstation able to run OS X and Windows XP or Vista at the same time.
I'd put the extra money into sleek new flat-panel screens, at least 24" each.
I posed this to my local Apple-authorized support shop. I asked their opinion of my planned migration #1: Move the contents of an iMac G5 running Tiger and the contents of an old Dell Dimensions (256 Mb RAM, USB 1.0) running XP Pro to a single Intel Mini running Leopard.
Ha! They said. No way! They said. But, I whined, what about that free importer utility from Parallels that lets you "suck in" the contents of a Windows boot drive into a Mac, over the network? Parallels says that all the user files, applications and settings, and XP itself, is converted to a Parallels virtual machine, ready to run on the Mac exactly as it did on the Windows box. (I really wanted to do this, as the Dell had a Windows-only business program I had paid a consultant to install and configure years ago, and I wouldn't be able to install or customize it on my own.)
My support shop said that the utility, called the Parallels Transporter, "is a nice idea," but seldom worked as described.
Well, they're a great shop, but in this instance they were wrong. (Or, it could be their experience was with Parallels 2.0; I was using the new 3.0 version for the migration.) It actually worked FLAWLESSLY. It took less than a couple hours for Parallels to bring about 40GB of Windows files into the Intel Mini over our slowpoke Ethernet network -- I thought it was going to be an all-day thing. When I started up Windows XP on the Mini (through the Parallels app), it didn't even ask for the original XP Pro install CD, which I had at the ready.
Once the Windows desktop appeared, the first program I ran was that business one. It, too, worked flawlessly. I was able to get on the network, get on the web, print to my printer, everything. I am thrilled! (And the 24" flat panel monitor looks great.)
Parallels Desktop 3.0 for the Mac (also available for Windows)
http://www.parallels.com/
Parallels Transporter (free download)
http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/features/transporter/
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Reader Feedback:
A Better Way to Ensure PDF Comments Print
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In the last issue of DesignGeek, I described a way to ensure that any comments you add to a PDF appear on the printout, even if the person you sent the PDF to chooses "Document" (Instead of "Document and Markups") in Acrobat or Reader's Print dialog box. My way required you to "refry" the PDF by printing it to the Adobe PDF virtual printer. Doing so merges the comments into the PDF itself.
Within a couple days after sending out the issue, helpful readers e-mailed me to tell me about a better way to do this: Flatten the comments. You can do so with a Javascript, which gives you a Flatten Comments command under the File menu in Acrobat. All the readers pointed me to one of Lori DeFurio's blog posts on AcrobatUsers.com from last year, which describes the technique and has the Javascript you can download:
Ensuring that Your Comments and Stamps Print
http://www.acrobatusers.com/tutorials/2007/flattening_comments/
One of the readers who mentioned Lori's post said, "I use this trick all the time and it works great, especially the toolbar method explained at the end of the tip."
Another reader reply came from Rick Borstein, an Adobe muckety-muck (Business Development Manager specializing in the Acrobat/Legal Market) who also happens to be a long-time friend of mine here in Chicago. Rick runs a great blog called AcroLaw: Acrobat for Legal Professionals, which I subscribe to, but somehow missed a post of his where he described a whole bunch of ways to make sure comments print (one of these being the JavaScript method) :
Ensuring that PDF Comments Get Printed
http://blogs.adobe.com/acrolaw/2008/01/ensuring_the_pdf_comments_get_pr.html
I'm in awe of both Lori (who I finally got to meet at the Miami InDesign Conference a few weeks ago) and Rick, and their extremely helpful Acrobat tips they offer on their blogs. I learn a ton from both (yes, including AcroLaw, even though I'm not in the legal field -- you never know when you might need to redact something!). So I'm not surprised that both of them wrote this up already. Thanks, guys.
And a tip of the hat to all you wonderful readers who clued me in to a better solution. Keep that feedback coming!
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Follow My Bloglines
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Speaking of blogs ... About three years ago, I was like a lot of casual blog readers. I had a couple of them bookmarked, and I'd visit them once in a while. But I paid little attention to the RSS Feed link (that orange icon) in their sidebars, since I really didn't want to subscribe to any more content. I have enough incoming content to read, thank you very much. Besides, I didn't understand what an RSS feed was, to tell you the truth.
But one day, I was reading a fascinating blog post somewhere (can't remember whose), and the author was obviously deeply immersed in the world of blogs, since he quoted from other ones all the time. My curiosity was piqued ... I really admired the writer, and I wondered what sort of blogs he himself thought worthy enough of subscribing to? Maybe I might like some of the same ones.
His "blogroll" (a linked list of his favorite blogs) appeared in his sidebar. There were only about five or ten listed, but the last link said "View all the blogs I follow." I clicked it, and it led to me to his page at Bloglines.com.
And life has never been the same.
On his Bloglines page, a narrow frame on the left listed almost fifty names of the different blogs he followed, all arranged in categories. Clicking one of the blog names resulted in the large right-hand content frame filling up with the most recent posts from that blog. I could quickly click different blogs in his list to see the latest posts from them on the right. If a post was just a summary, I could click the title of the post, which would automatically open the full post from the blogger's actual site in a new window (or browser tab). And man, did this guy know about some great blogs. I learned so much in the hour I spent there, it was incredible.
I was very impressed with Bloglines itself, and remain so to this day. It's a free service, you just sign up and bang, you have your own Bloglines URL. When you come across a good blog on the web and want to subscribe to it, you just click an "Add to Bloglines" button and it automatically gets added to your subscription list, even if you don't have the Bloglines window open.
When you have a few minutes to see what's new with the blogs you've subscribed to, you just go to your Bloglines account page in your browser. (This I love ... I really couldn't stand any more content being downloaded to my computer. I like having it all on the web.) The number of new posts that authors have added since you last looked is listed to the right of each blog name. If a post contains a videocast or audio podcast, you can run it right there.
Bloglines has many more features, but I'll let you discover those on your own. For now, I want to "pass it on" ... here's *my* public Bloglines page, if you want to see the ones I follow:
Anne-Marie's Bloglines Subscriptions
http://www.bloglines.com/public/HerGeekness
Don't faint when you get there, I know there's a ton! I don't look at my Bloglines sub page every day, and when I do go there, I seldom click every link or look at every post. So some of these might be defunct, for all I know, But most of these are okay -- I did a little clean up before writing this article.
You'll notice that I subscribe to Lori and Rick's blogs, mentioned above (they're in the Adobe Blogs category). The "Fun" category has blogs that have nothing to do with my work. Other categories are self-explanatory. If you want to subscribe to any of these blogs yourself, set up your Bloglines account first so you can add them as you go.
By the way, when you go to my Bloglines link above you're not seeing *all* the blogs I follow; I've used the Private tag on the ones I'm too embarrassed to share with you -- heh -- so they only show up when I log into my own Bloglines page. I'm telling you this in case you too set up an account for yourself ... don't share your Bloglines before checking the public URL, and if some appear there that you don't want to share, mark them as Private.
If you know of a blog that I should check out, let me know!
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A Fair(y) Use Tale
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If I take a screenshot of your program or your web site and include it in a DesignGeek story (assuming I get around to doing an HTML version of this thing), without getting your permission first, can you sue me for copyright infringement?
Why, yes you can. People can sue for anything. But would you win, is the real question.
That comes down to "fair use." What can you do with other people's content without getting their permission first? Many people believe that there is a law somewhere defining this, a law that lays out the parameters of fair use ... "it's okay if it's for educational or non-profit use," or "as long as the excerpt you quote is less than a paragraph long and is properly attributed, then it's fine" and so on. Not true ... the concept is recognized by the courts, but there are no hard and fast rules about it, as far as I know.
The Media Education Foundation put together a wonderful video primer on copyright law and the concept of Fair Use. How could a legal primer be "wonderful?" Because every word uttered is a clip from a Disney movie! Oh, the irony.
A Fair(y) Use Tale
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJn_jC4FNDo
Makes me want to go out and rent The Little Mermaid again ....
To learn more about what the Media Education Foundation actually does, visit their web site:
Media Education Foundation
http://www.mediaed.org/
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DesignGeek is a free monthly publication written by Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion, a cross-media designer and authorized Adobe and Quark training provider. She owns Seneca Design & Training, Inc. in Chicago, Illinois (http://www.senecadesign.com/).
Anne-Marie also writes InCopyFlow (for InDesign/InCopy workflow users), free subscription at
http://senecadesign.com/designgeek/incopy.html
... and writes InDesign tips at the blog she co-hosts with David Blatner, InDesignSecrets, at
http://indesignsecrets.com
To subscribe to DesignGeek or read archived issues, go to its home on Seneca's site:
http://www.senecadesign.com/designgeek/
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Contact Seneca by phone at 312-946-1100 or e-mail at info@senecadesign.com
Copyright 2008 by Seneca Design & Training, Inc.
Please forward without cutting. Please contact Seneca for reprint permissions. We don't guarantee accuracy of articles. Company or product names mentioned in DesignGeek may be registered trademarks, we use the names in an editorial fashion with no intention of infringement.
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