NY Times Tech:
Professional Photoshop retouching, as a business. I do so much of it routinely. Never thought about it as a separate discipline.
Digital Outback Photo:
DFT Ozone: Colors a la carte. Plugin for PS CS3. Complete list of DFT plugins.
ExtremeTech:
Review of LapLink PCMover, a PC to PC migration tool.
patches MySQL.
Dynamic Drive:
Kottke
mentions the new all-in-one programming setup for Mac, Coda. Looks nice. I’ll offer a different perspective on the same situation. I’ve found that since I switched to PC (to purposely miss out on all the System 9 - OS X changeover fun), I’ve never been as swiftly prolific as when I was a daily BBEdit user. Gawd, how I loved that program. After switching systems, I felt Homesite dulled my wits, never let creativity soar. In general, the squared-off rigidity in the PC interface drove me nuts. File management on PC was a nightmare until I found AutoDialogs and Avafind (don’t run those if you’re scraping by on 1gig of RAM, though). I also ran across ExplorerXP a while ago, and the tabbed interface is becoming useful at times as I try to consolidate my photo archives. When I’m in a ‘commanding’ mood, or in a rush, I use Nico’s Commander. I got used to the Norton Commander interface in DOS and using DOS batch commands back in the late ‘80’s. Treepad Plus for storing passwords, software registrations, other info. Thanks to Lifehacker, I’m fooling with Keybreeze, too (I use the backslash, not the semicolon key. Less annoying, esp. when CSS programming.).
[Woof. Talk about off on a tangent. Stream of consciousness. Back to regular programming ...]
Thank goodness for Nick Bradbury’s TopStyle. It’s my one and only html/css editing environment now. FireFTP for quick FTPs, Filezilla for the rest (CuteFTP started bugging out after I started working on hard drive tuning).
I could wish NewsGator would continue development on TopStyle, but I tell myself that often ‘more development’ just means adding effluvia to a clean, efficient program. It is an environment for ‘typers’ and not drag-and-droppers - therefore appeals to my style and taste. I play with different CSS/HTML editors when they pass under my nose, but nothing’s ever attracted me away. Doesn’t mean it is perfect. I’d like to see collapsible branching in the Site Summary, for instance. Picking through a dozen ‘index.html’ files, trying to figure out which one belongs to which subfolder, can be a real pain in the rear for a very large website.
Still, I’m watching Mac closely. Thinking of acquiring a Mac system for myself towards the end of the year. I want access to Final Cut Pro, if nothing else.
Oh ... if you are on PC, can’t afford Illustrator at the moment but need a vector drawing environment ... check out Inkscape. Not perfect, but certainly very usable for spot illustrations.
456 Berea St:
Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design (Book review).
Crucial Webhost Blog:
Master Stylesheet: The Most Useful CSS Technique. I admire the idea of specific preplanned classes to remove formatting, instead of building them later during the programming itself when an issue raises its head. Nothing earth-shattering, just a new way to think about the daily programming shtick, and perhaps a new efficiency.
TutorialBlog:
April, links for web designers. I’ve already linked a few of these, but there is bounty for all within.
Remember
PC World:
Seven Post-Install Tips for Ubuntu 7.04.
phptoys:
PHP + Apache + MySQL perfect setup.
DP Review:
Adobe updates Camera Raw and DNG Converter plug-ins.
Later: Careful. “The Camera Raw 4.0 plug-in is not compatible with versions of Photoshop earlier than Photoshop CS3 or versions of Photoshop Elements earlier than Photoshop Elements 4.01 for Macintosh or Photoshop Elements 5.0 for Windows.”
dhtml site:
10 free CSS and Javascript calendars.
Digital Outback Photo:
TIFFs in Lightroom, ACR 4.0 and Photoshop CS3. Some quirks (features?) to be aware of.
Albuquerque Tribune:
TurboTax flames out. “The company said it expected to hear from the IRS later today whether any taxpayers who used its system would be penalized for submitting late returns.”
Times Online.UK:
PowerPointless. “Now, research at an Australian university has proved that PowerPoint and the human animal are not the best of collaborators. [snip] The research, from the University of New South Wales, suggests that we process information best in verbal or written form, but not in both simultaneously.” And there was dancing in the ballrooms again.
BBC News:
Web counting tools ‘need change’. I’ll say.
John Nack on Adobe:
Uninstall CS3 Betas before installing licensed versions!
gizmodo:
Final Cut Pro is now a format prostitute. How’s that for politically correct? Anyway, avoiding transcoding is an excellent thing. God, the nightmares I went through transcoding in the old days ... bleeding red horizontal lines, smudgy blues ... blech.
ExtremeTech:
Hacking Ubuntu to Improve Performance.
dhtml site:
20 free image gallery and slide show scripts.
WebCodr:
Here’s a trick that’ll come in very handy at some point: Build A Lightweight CMS Using .htaccess.
NPPA:
Toledo Blade Discovers Dozens Of Doctored Detrich Photos. We’ve reached that sweet spot, it seems, where experienced photographers have finally climbed the learning curve of Photoshop, and can’t resist the siren song of manipulation.
Adobe shipping CS3.
And Creative Suite 3. More info.
