Galcon Labs: The sequel to Galcon and the next must have iPhone game
Phil Hassey, the creator of the incredibly popular and addictive multi-player game Galcon, for the iPhone and iPod Touch has surprised us with a new game today, Galcon Labs. The game is still really Galcon at it’s core, but there are four new game types, new music, and loads of polish on this baby. The original Galcon is arguably one of the best Multi-player games available on the iPhone.
CSS tip, declare your font family once
Here’s a CSS tip that I wish more people would follow. When setting up a font on your site, say Verdana, there is no reason to declare it on every H tag, P tag and class you are using. Throw it up in the body and be done with it. The same goes for font sizes, colours and anything else that will be uniform across the site. Once you have done this you can override it for specific tags and classes when you need too.
body {
font-family:Verdana, Arial, sans-serif;
font-size:12px;
margin:0;
line-height:130%;
color:#333333;
}
This will make your life easier and everyone else who has to work with your files will thank you. I think we should always be looking for ways to make our CSS smaller, cleaner and easier to read.
Adobe Photoshop CS4: Still no animated GIFs? Part III
So obviously our beloved Image Ready is never coming back, so how is one supposed to open animated GIFs in all this mess. A couple of years back I wrote a work around for opening animated GIF’s in Photoshop in a windows environment. I later followed up with a more detailed description on how to do it.
Keep Reading
Copyright protection scripts: What are you thinking!
I happened across an interesting website today with loads of useful information and photos. Unfortunately this site was using one of the most absurd web practices, a copyright protection script. What is a copyright protection script, it’s a JavaScript that completely breaks a users experience and fails to protect anything all at the same time. I’m sure everyone has stumbled across one at least once in their journeys across the web, especially if you like to open links in new tabs.
Photoshop Smart Objects: How and when to use them
Smart Objects aren’t perfect, and until Photoshop CS4 a mask could not be linked unless you used layer groups. They don’t always resized perfectly when using vector logos either, but one thing they are perfect for is embedding photos into your Photoshop documents. I still can’t believe how many times I end up working on PSD files full of photos without any Smart Objects. It takes seconds to create one, and saves a lot of time down the road.
Space below images in Firefox and email newsletters
One thing that is consistently presented to me by other web designers and users is space below images and usually in Firefox, but it can also happen in email newsletters. You will usually notice it when you need images to vertically butt up against each other. This results in a white line or whatever the background colour is set too appearing between two vertically stacked images. Fear not, the fix is extremely easy and you have two good options.
Adobe Photoshop CS4: Disabling document tabs
Tabbed applications work great in many instances. They revolutionized the way many of us browse the web, and for the most part I like them in my editors. One place I don’t have time for them is in Photoshop, and in Adobe Photosohp CS4 tabbed viewing of documents is the default setting. Usually when I’m working in Photoshop I have several documents open at once. I may be comparing designs, sampling colours or any other number of tasks that require multiple documents displaying at the same time. It’s one of the reasons designers usually have large displays and sometimes multiple screens. If you are like me, you don’t like the default setting, but it’s a snap to return Photoshop to it’s old self.
Facebook Development: breaking the application canvas with iFrames
I recently started developing an application on Facebook. It’s actually quite interesting although the Facebook developer interface leaves a lot to be desired. If a chat program operated the way Facebook does it would go something like this. To add a user you must first add the addUser application. Once this is completed you can add the first use through the addUser applications, but after that you must go to the first added user to add an additional user, it’s really a… but I digress. This post is about Facebook’s application canvas and specifically developing applications with the iframe option enabled.
Adium spam comments
Adium is a fantastic instant messaging program for the Mac that allows you to connect to many different chat clients like Yahoo, MSN and Google Talk just to name a few. Unfortunately if you have an MSN / Windows Live Messenger account on Adium you may be bombarded by the parasitic individuals of the web also known as spammers. I’m not sure why this only seems to happen to my MSN account, but there is a simple fix.
Adobe Photoshop CS4: Blurry edges with the Rectangle Tool
I was playing around with Photoshop CS4 and came across an odd setting. I’m not even sure what the default setting usually is, but for me it was my first time dealing with non-pixel perfect blurry rectangles in Photosohp and it really threw me for a loop. Below you can see two 60 pixel boxes created with the rectangle tool. Both boxes look the same, but upon further inspection you will see that the right box has blurry edges and the left box is pixel perfect and sharp.
