It’s that time of the year again. The day when everybody stays awake and people change their wall decorations (so called calendars). And the time when everybody is nice to you, wishing you a happy new year. So… Happy new year everybody! :)
tip of the day/year:
While 2007 looked pretty good in serif fonts with variable number heights, 2008 does not. The over-sized 8 looks terrible. Get a new font for it.
It’s always hard to criticize your own work. Does it look good? Are there any things I should fix? I found the best way to do this, is to set your work as your desktop background. Let it be a design mockup, 3D rendering, photo, vectorization, … This way you get a lot of chance to look at your masterpiece and decide wether you like the look of it or don’t. And when you do, you’ll notice some small details, that you wouldn’t otherwise - this could be any errors that you should fix, or points of interest that you might want to emphasize.
I used this principle a lot when doing car vectorizations. After spending hours making one (The lambo took me about 30 hours I believe) all I could see in them were lines, shapes, gradients, etc. But by using them as background, I could look at them from another perspective, a perspective others would look at it. It helped me fix those small details, that make the difference.
Just yesterday I was looking for a new background for my desktop. I was googling around, searching for a nice pic, until I remembered, I have quite a collection of nice photographs - why not use my own? So I went looking for a photo of mine that I’d like to constantly look at. I decided on this one. Before, I didn’t really consider this photo as anything special (good, but not all that), but using it as a background, I’ve realized how much I really like it.
So I guess this is just the best way to judge your work - just look at it. Don’t open it in photoshop to look for any errors. It will only make you feel bad about how many there are.
Some people may also prefer printing their art and hanging it on the wall. I do this with some vector drawings, since they’re just too plain for a decent background. As long as you look at the work in a relaxed kind of way, you’ll see how it really is. If you tear it off your wall or change the desktop background in a few hours… it’s probably bad. Back to the drawing board then.
A very short post this time, but this just too funny for you to miss :)
A month ago I wrote a post about web 2.0 and expressed my hate toward a web 2.0 design style. But what if everyone did things the web 2.0 way? Let’s see…
Apple
Coca Cola
National Geographic
Nike
MasterCard
See the full list
You’ve probably heard the news by now - Opera is suing Microsoft, saying “Hey, wait a minute! Your browser doesn’t support open web standards!” Basically, they claim that evolution of websites and web applications is being slowed down due to the fact Internet Explorer works a bit differently from the other browsers. They claim too much of the developer’s time goes into fixing code for IE and therefore want Microsoft to support open standards as well as remove Internet Explorer from default Windows installation.
As someone, who has ever done a website, I say I have to agree with Opera. I have spent quite an amount of time fixing some sites to work in IE. But Internet Explorer 7 is quite a step forward. Most IE6 problems are gone, so Microsoft is going into the right direction. And it’s the same with Opera. Version 7 has given me some headaches, but Opera 9 is mostly fine. The difference is, Opera users upgrade more regularly, while IE users don’t. But why is this Microsoft’s problem? As far as I know, they have alarmed their users about a “critical update” to IE7. What more can they do? Prevent IE6 from working all together (I wish…)?
I do realize Opera supports more open standards than Internet Explorer, but it’s not all that perfect, really. I think this quote from Kenny Graham at the web standards group describes the situation nicely:
How do you legally distinguish “standards-compliant” from
non-compliant anyway? IE is clearly the worst of the bunch, but I’m
not aware of a browser that doesn’t have any rendering bugs. Would
the requirement be “be at least as compliant as opera”? And if so,
how do you measure that? Acid2? Number of CSS selectors understood?
And which standard? IE renders HTML 3.2 pretty well, if not
perfectly, 4.01 like crap, and XHTML (as xml) not at all.
Microsoft has already had to remove Media Player from the default Windows installation, and now they’re asking them to remove Internet Explorer as well? For the end user this means his or her computer can’t play movies, nor surf the web… Great. From what I can tell, Opera is just being a bit jealous of Microsoft’s market share. But they’ve worked hard to gain it (no denying that). And as much as I agree that Internet Explorer is actually slowing web development down, I can’t believe what dirty ways people are using to bring them down - “Support my standards or I’m telling on you!”.
This is quite a common dilemma when considering photography. Should I shoot RAW or JPEG? I’ve seen quite a few articles and even more conflicts discussions on the topic. I’m fairly new to this, so these are my totally unprofessional views on it…
To clarify some terms first, JPEG is a common image format used just about everywhere. It is a compressed format, which means it’s quality may not be pixel-perfect, but the file sizes are rather small, so they don’t eat up too much space on your hard drive. On the other hand, RAW format isn’t really an image yet. This is the actual data that your camera sensors capture. So, when you shoot JPEG, your camera gets some data (RAW) from the light sensitive sensors, does some maths and creates a JPEG. You cannot get the original data back from a JPEG. But if you shoot RAW, the processing stops at the sensors and all you get is the raw data itself. This lets you in control of building that JPEG (don’t worry, there are programs out there to help you).
Now, why would I want to make JPEGs myself, and not let my camera do them? Because this way you’re in control. While creating the JPEG, your camera has to make some decisions. For example, it has to decide what is white or gray and what isn’t (so called white balance). Under different lighting, it’s hard to tell the real color of your subject. Take a white sheet of paper under blue light - is the paper white or blue? So when calculating the data from the sensors, the camera has to take the type of lighting into account. And when shooting JPEG, if it gets it wrong, there’s not much you can do about it. When shooting RAW, however, you can make this decisions afterwards, on your computer screen. Compensation for poor exposition (images being too light or too dark) is also much easier with RAW.
But all this means more work for you. So why should you bother? Well, if you’re just shooting your cousin’s birthday to keep memories you surely wouldn’t be bothered to process each photo and export it to JPEG. But when trying to make an artistic photo, you probably won’t mind all that extra work to make your photo look perfect.
Another problem (the biggest for many people I believe) is the file size of RAW files. They get much bigger than JPEGs (I’d say about 3 times bigger), which means you get less pictures on your memory card, or your hard drive for that matter. Also, RAW formats are non standard - every camera has its own. Even today, only a few programs are able to open your RAW files. And in 20 years… what do you reckon? :) So probably the smart thing to do, when shooting RAW, would be to convert your photos to JPEG when you’re happy with them.
One thing I noticed, photos shot in RAW are much noisier than those shot in JPEG. Why is this? When creating a JPEG, cameras usually apply some noise reduction filters to make the photo look better. But with RAW you don’t get these, so to get the same effect you have to apply the filters on your computer. This is again extra work, but means you have more control over these filters as well. Maybe you like some noise, or don’t like the blur effect that happens with noise reduction.
So, if you don’t plan on editing your photos, JPEG is all you need. It saves you time and disk space. Also it means you can fit more photos on a memory card. Maybe one of those extra photos is the right one and you would never have taken it, were you shooting RAW and running out of memory cards.
Me, I shoot RAW. It’s cold outside and best scenes don’t last all day, so instead of taking time to get the settings right on the scenery itself, I do it at home. This does mean I have to spend some extra cash on memory cards (currently I have two 2gb cards, but I’m upgrading soon), but it also means I have full control of my shots even after I’ve actually made them.
Along with web 2.0, “ajax” has been a popular buzzword lately. Before getting into it, I always though this was a name for some complex libraries doing all kinds of black magic.
But what Ajax really is, it’s just a simple HTTP request trough javascript. Think of it as loading a web page. You need to type in the url and you shall receive any text (e.g. plain HTML) that is under that url. What to do with that text is based on your parser / browser. You can do the same with javascript. Here is how you do it:
var ajax = new XMLHttpRequest();ajax.open("GET", "http://www.google.com", true);ajax.onreadystatechange = function () { /* do something */ };ajax.send(null);This is basically it. You have requested a website, and have gotten some text back. An everyday task really. Of course, you could set some HTTP request headers, for instance the user agent, or cache control:
ajax.setRequestHeader('User-Agent', 'My javascript');
ajax.setRequestHeader('Pragma', 'no-cache');
(but make sure you set these before sending the request)
Now, what do I do in the response function, I hear you ask. ajax.onreadystatechange function, which you set, gets called every time something happens to our request. So it gets called multiple times for one request. To put it simply, when ajax.readyState == 4, your request has finished processing and the server’s response text is inside ajax.responseText. This is a string (bunch of text) and you can do anything you like with it.
A word of caution though - Internet Explorer does not use “new XMLHttpRequest()” to generate a request, but uses “new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");” instead.
There really isn’t much more to it. You just have to incorporate it into your application. For some further reading, try these links:
And here are some questions you might want to ask yourself when developing your first ajax application:
And of course, there are some usability concerns with ajax - it breaks browser’s native controls (back, forward, reload, …), can confuse the user if he doesn’t know what is happening after clicking a link, etc.
As with every other technology, ajax can be very powerful and handy when in the right hands, but can also ruin a website when abused. But it’s very easy to begin with - don’t get fooled by the fancy name, it’s just 4 lines of javascript.
