Recently I’ve been doing a lot of web design and development. I know many people use Adobe’s big gun photoshop to design a site. So I thought I’d try it again - specifically for web design. However I won’t be using it again for web work!
Firstly I had 2 sites to design. I started out by making a typical gradient background and rounded corner content area in the middle. This too far to much work compared to my usual tools. The gradient was too bad, but making a nice round rectangle is a bit of a pain. Sure you can just use the rounded rectangle, but how do you interactively change the radius of the corners without having to redrawing the whole box?
Limitations of Photoshop for web work
It’s designed to edit photographs, not draw artwork
The problem here is that most of web design is creating boxes, lines, backgrounds and playing around with text and styles. Only a little is doing fancy photo editing work. So while Photoshop does this, it’s not it’s forte.
It’s layer based and doesn’t support individual objects
Photoshop has come a long way in non-destructive working, but after working a lot on applications that support each individual objects as well as layers it becomes very powerful.
What’s the alternative?
I’m currently designing my sites in Adobe’s other big gun ‘Illustrator’. It has a higher learning curve than photoshop but I find it far better for this type of work. Better again is ‘Fireworks’ formerly from Macromedia now Adobe. It’s designed specifically for this work. Try doing rounded rectangles in it - now that’s cool.
I’ll be posting more about these two apps for web design next.
I recently headed to Tasmania for work so I spent a day at Cradle Mountain doing some timelapse photography. Being the Easter weekend there were many people, many of whom stopped to ask me what I was doing. I guess seeing someone with a dolly and tracks slowly creeping along looked kinda strange.
Time lapse video is quite fun and interesting. To take it to the next level I’ve been working on a small and portable dolly rig that moves the camera very slowly. It consists of a dolly and track and a small servo motor that moves a wheel a very small amount at variable intervals. I’m continuing to develop the dolly and will be posting some more information on how I’ve built it. Firstly here’s an example of Sydney harbour.
I finally thought it was time to get our home TV, DVD and media stuff sorted. I looked into a few options and eventually chose to power the whole thing with the Apple MacMini.
Desirable features
TV (including HDTV) live reception
Recording HDTV
DVI (or HDMI) out to connect to our LCD screen
DVD playback
Music library (iTunes or iPod)
Play podcasts (including Vodcasts)
So the obvious solution was an Apple Mac Mini running Front Row with some sort of TV tuner.
First impressions were wow, that keyboard is great. It’s so thin and a great way to sit on the sofa and do the occasional thing. The diversity stick lets me watch one channel while recording the other. The included aerials with the diversity stick aren’t that great and it’s best to plug in different ones (even the cheap kind work better). So now between vodcasts (video podcasts), recorded HDTV without commercials (see below) and we’ve got a great on demand solution. It’s nice that what we record isn’t re-encoded in anyway, but just a direct copy of the the broadcast stream, this means that there is absolutely no loss of quality.
Why not the AppleTV
We really needed a solution that included live broadcast digital TV and recording it. If that was available on the AppleTV then it might be an option. With Front Row and iTunes we can still download movies from the iTunes store and even stream trailers from within Front Row.
Tips
A must is the application and scripts that come with etv-comskip which allows you to automatically detect and skip commercials while watching back previously recorded shows. It seems to be working quite well in general, but I’ve still got one show it hasn’t worked on.
PyeTV adds another menu option in the Front Row main screen that allows you to stay in Front Row and watch both previously recorded TV shows and live TV. It installation isn’t as reliable is I’d hoped.
I finally thought it was time to get our home TV, DVD and media stuff sorted. I looked into a few options and eventually chose to power the whole thing with the Apple MacMini.
