Abobe launched there new Photopshop Express web application the other day. This is a completely online version of Photoshop power by Adobe’s Flash.
“Crop, rotate, tweak, and show off your photos here on Photoshop Express, on your blog or Facebook page. Give your friend a tragically oversized head or get rid of the mole on his cheek that’s the size of a small asteroid. It’s totally up to you.”
With an account you also get 2 GB of storage space for your photos. There is also an online test drive, I only tried out the gallery, but it is nicely animated and very slick looking. I don’t think I’ll be dumping the full version of Photoshop anytime soon, but I’m sure an app like this will be great for a lot of people out there just looking to touch up and show off their photos.
I wanted to remind everyone that tomorrow is Earth Hour in a lot of cities and places around the world. This is a World Wild Life initiative and it is to make a statement about climate change.
“Earth Hour was created by WWF in Sydney, Australia in 2007, and in one year has grown from an event in one city to a global movement. In 2008, millions of people, businesses, governments and civic organizations in nearly 200 cities around the globe will turn out for Earth Hour. More than 100 cities across North America will participate, including the US flagships–Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco and Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.”
For more details visit the Earth Hour website.
Okay, this may be super obvious for some people, but in case it’s not, here’s a neat tip. When I do borders or keylines, I usually like to make the layer on the very top.
The easy way to make a keyline is to draw a box with the rectangle tool, make sure it’s a shape layer, this makes editing it later easy. Right click the layer you just created, select Blending Options, then select Stroke. This should be pretty easy. I usually stroke on the inside; the default is outside but this will not give you sharp corners.
Okay, now you have your keyline; go back to the Layers window go to the Fill slider and bring it down to 0%. Opacity and Fill are very similar with one important difference. Opacity affects the entire layer, while Fill only affects the fill of the layer. This means our Blending Options will remain unaffected.
So why not just create a box with stroke and put it on the bottom layer? Well this works for some layouts, but what if you want patterns or shapes that overlap the box, but do not overlap the keyline as shown in the image below. This is where this technique comes in handy. The only real downside is when you use the Direct Selection Tool you end up selecting your top layer, so you may need to turn this layer on and off.
Well I’ve been posting about Super Steer Fight II Turbo HD Remix; I thought I would also mention Street Fighter 4.
Although this doesn’t get me quite as excited as the Remix version, it’s still pretty cool. I may not get to play Street Fighter 4 for awhile since this will be an arcade only title at first. I’m sure it will make it to the consoles soon after though.
The big problem for us in North America is in many areas the arcade is dead. It’s more of a place where junkies hang out than game geeks. I guess Arcades are still big in Asia, and Capcom has even mentioned that it will be hard to distribute in North America. I’m not sure I would even want to go to an arcade to play, but I will wait in eager anticipation for a console version.
There are some great screenshots at Gamersyde and some trailers of it in action at Gamtrailers. The screenshots sadly do not get me near as excited as the Remix versions though. I find the characters a little too bulky and chunky, but this is of course still a work in process.
I have been following the progress of this game for quite some time. For those who haven’t, Capcom has been painstakingly re-drawing every single Super Street Fighter II Turbo sprite in beautiful HD goodness while maintaining the original look and feel. When I look at the screenshots for Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix I often find myself wiping drool from the corner of my lip.
The game will be released on the PS3 and Xbox 360 arcade platforms. A big issue with the 360 version was the file restriction on live arcade games. Today it’s official; there will be no file size issues on the 360 version. You can also read Capcom’s official blog update on the progress of the game so far. Now the only real issue facing the 360 is a good arcade stick. I may by this game based solely on whichever console has the best fighter stick at the time of release.
I posted the original five “You Suck at Photoshop” YouTube videos because I really wanted to spread the word, these videos are fantastically hilarious. Anyway, the guy known as Donnie Hoyle is up to it again with three new videos.
I really can’t get enough of these, if you haven’t heard of them yet, check out my original post on “You Suck at Photoshop“. You can also keep an eye out for more on the MyDamnChannel YouTube page.
It took me awhile to figure out how to center Google AdSense ads. Searches showed that many other people were running into the same issue, so I thought I would share my method for centering.
At first I tried things like margin:auto, center and padding in a <div> wrapped around the ad, but nothing seemed to work. The reason for this is the AdSense box is absolutely positioned. The easy fix for this is to create a CSS class or inline style as shown below.
CSS class
.adSenseCenter {
position:relative;
width:120px;
margin:auto;
}
Container <div>
<div class="adSenseCenter">
adSense code goes here
</div>
Or quick and dirty inlines style.
<div style="position:relative; width:120px; margin:auto;">
adSense code goes here
</div>
Don’t forget that the width of the <div> must equal the width of the adSense ad. Now you can center your ads.
I create a lot of emails campaigns on a regular basis. Creating emails that work in all the mail clients can be a daunting task, if not sometimes impossible. Unlike web pages, you have many more combinations of email clients and browsers that may view your email. Add the fact that many email clients are blocking images, stripping CSS, or just outright ignoring all the great web standards we have worked towards for years, and you have a real mess.
There are some simple rules you can follow which should make life a lot easier. Testing of course is still required and many strange anomalies will pop up. Web based clients change without warning, so constant testing before every email deployment is a must. Below is a quick list of things to watch out for.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’m going to start posting a neato geeky site every now and then and the site I’m posting now definitely fits the bill. It’s The Steampunk Workshop. The sites description is…
“Wherein the craftsman demonstrates the construction of artefacts from an age of steam and brass.”
The site contains a lot of modern gadgets that are redesigned in a steam and steel era design. When the site was brought to my attention it was a link to a keyboard mod. It contains photos and a step by step guide of a computer keyboard that is meticulously transformed into an old fashioned type writer.
The site is full of videos and step by step walkthroughs of how the steampunk gadgets were created. A quick search on the term steampunk brings up an interesting Wikipedia entry on the origins of the term. It usually refers to modern technology appearing at an earlier time when the world was run on steam power. It also goes on to say that steampunk is often associated with cyberpunk, but with an obvious time period difference.
This site is definitely surf time well spent, as is the wiki entry and who knows, it might inspire you to create something yourself, I know it got me thinking.
There’s an interesting post on the MS IEBlog about how Internet Explorer 8 will render in a standards compliant way by default. If you want IE7 rendering you will have to explicitly ask for it in the html document. A List Apart has more on this topic.
Overall I think IE7 was pretty disappointing. I still have a lot of problems getting things to work properly, and I usually get things to work in Firefox and Safari long before I get them to work in IE7, not to mention that some sites that work in IE6, break in IE7. Let’s hope 8 will be different, but now web designers and programmers will have three Internet Explorer browsers to support and deal with, at least for awhile.
Interoperability is the future with more and more clients out there. I believe that hand held browsing will become a major part of many people’s lives in the very near future as WiFi becomes more widespread and cell phone bandwidth prices drop. More and more people will be accessing pages on many different platforms, so web standards and interoperability are more important than ever. Microsoft seems to understand this and is listening to the web standards experts more and more and this is good.
