dConstruct 2009 Sep 05. 090
dConstruct is a 1 day conference run by Clearleft in Brighton. I’ve never had the chance to go before and hadn’t intended to this year. I’ve never really been convinced of the value of attending the numerous industry conferences and events but when my good friend Drew offered me a free ticket it seemed like a bit of a no brainer.
I had always (perhaps incorrectly) figured that dConstruct was mainly focused on web design/development (echoed by the attendee demographic; guys in their 30’s, wearing geek t-shirts, carrying iPhones and/or MacBooks) but the breadth of topics covered by the speakers was much wider. On reflection I think this was a good thing as it encourages us to think a little more outside the box, looking at the world and the technology that inhabits it from a slightly different perspective can lead to some interesting ideas.
Highlights for me were the ‘Learning from SciFi Interfaces’ by Nathan Shedroff and Chris Noessel and the excellent presentation delivered by Russell Davies on ‘Dematerialising a Web of Data’. The presentation slide that I will remember forever is his message to the newspaper industry – “We have broken your business, now we want your machines” (haha!).
Aside from the talks dConstruct was clearly a great opportunity to actually meet the people I converse with online, finally put faces to names and make some new contacts. If you’ve never been and have the opportunity to do so next year I’d thoroughly recommend it.
Still no real competition for Fireworks Aug 26. 0914
With the recent announcement that Adobe will not be providing support for Creative Suite 3 (CS3) in Snow Leopard and my waning belief in Adobe’s ability to resurrect Fireworks my interest in alternatives has again be piqued. Back when I wrote my open letter to developers asking for someone to step forward and provide us web designers with a current and solid alternative to Fireworks I looked at Pixelmator, Acorn and Gimp (DrawIt is also worth checking out).
Unfortunately right now none of these packages offer the blend of bitmap and vector tools which Fireworks has always excelled at but a little extra time spent with Pixelmator in particular has me confident that someone, somewhere is not far from providing us with a usable alternative. With the addition of some basic vector tools and the ability to draw and export web slices we’d be pretty much there.
The most recent blog post on the Pixelmator website relating to the upcoming 1.5 release inspires further confidence, the ‘Spider’ codename can only be a reference to web features right? However Saulius from Pixelmator is quick to point out that 1.5 will not include vector tools…
…please don’t expect vector tools in Spider…
Here’s hoping the Pixelmator team keep up the excellent work, if they maintain the development pace they’ve set thus far (4 full point releases in two years) then we might see a release with Vector tools before Fireworks CS5 rears it’s head.
Web Developer - South East, UK May 27. 09
Things at Nine Four have been going well, so much so in fact that myself, Paul and Jo have decided that we need of an additional pair of hands to join our remote team on a permanent basis. If you don’t already know we’re a small but busy digital media design and development agency made up of 3 permanent staff members and a network of trusted and respected freelancers. We’ve been profitable since our inception back in 2005 and work hard for our clients to provide business led creative and technical solutions to every day business needs.
The ideal candidate will be motivated, have some good basic project management skills and match for the most part one of the two possible outlines that we’ve identified below:
1. A web developer with an understanding of the value of design, a good knowledge of PHP/MySQL based development and MVC based application frameworks. You might also tinker with jQuery and have some knowledge of web services, XML etc.
2. A web developer with a bit of creative flair, good knowledge of Flash (ActionScript), XHTML/CSS and a willingness to work with (or learn how to use) content management systems like ExpressionEngine.
Despite the home based nature of the position there is a definite requirement to be able to commute to our office here in Bracknell (Berkshire, UK) on a weekly or bi-weekly basis for studio meetings. You will also need to be able to attend meetings with clients based in the South East of the UK every now and then.
Salary will be commensurate with your experience and you’ll also benefit from company pension contributions, a decent holiday allowance and ‘very’ flexible hours.
Interested? Drop me an email () with some relevant work examples and an explanation of what you think you can bring to our team. Not interested but on Twitter? Tweet this and help us find the right person for the job!
Update: This position is no longer available.
OS X pet peeves May 22. 0922
Having lived day to day with a Mac now for a good few years I thought it was about time I documented some of my pet peeves as a one time Windows user. So here they are in the form of a brief wish list for OS X Snow Leopard. This is in the vein hope that Steve Jobs is a regular reader of my blog (pft – yea right!) and that he will do something about these very minor issues. :)
Fix the ‘Zoom’ button
Seriously what is up with that thing. As a Windows user the expected behavior of a button with a + on it is that it should maximize/zoom the application you are currently running with a single click. With OS X there is no consistency. Clicking + on a finder window reduces it in size (WTF?) and then proceeds to do nothing. Clicking + in iTunes switches between the full and minimal interface. Clicking + suggests to the user that the window will increase in size surely?
Make it easier to email files to contacts
Perhaps I’m missing something obvious, but there is simply no way to just option/right click a file and select to send it to a email recipient? On windows this is an item in the contextual menu, right click, send to email recipient, default mail client opens a new message and attaches said file. Easy. Ok so I know I can write an automator script carry out said task but that then requires a ridiculous number of clicks to execute (Right click > More > Automator > Email Files…).
Show Hidden Files
Please give us OS X users a way to have hidden files within specific folders revealed. I need to see hidden files by default on network shares and elsewhere – but not on my desktop. A simple option under Finder Preferences would be a step in the right direction.
Migrating from TXP to EE - Conclusion Mar 29. 094
Ok, so steps 1 through 5 pretty much got us to a conclusion but there was one little fact that really had me bugged about the migration. I wanted to persist the article IDs from Textpattern during the migration to ExpressionEngine because they are used in my permalink URLs. Basically I don’t want to break the internet (or my small part of it) by altering the URL structure in the switch. How did I do it?
Open ‘cp.mt_import.php’ form within ‘/system/cp/’ then at line 954 add:
$ids = array();
then at about line 1028 add:
// IDs Hack
if (strpos($parts['0'],'ID') !== false)
{
$ids[$id] = trim(str_replace('ID:','',$first_section[$i]));
}
At about line number 1765 amend the entry id value to:
'entry_id' => $ids[$id],
Now save and upload your amended import script. Back in Textpattern you’ll also need to add one new line to the top of your export script.
ID: <txp:article_id />
So your Textpattern export will now include the original article ID and the import process will maintain this (so long as you have deleted all other weblog entries prior to import).
So, that’s it. I’m all done… I migrated… now I just have to find the time to finish off the new design and implement it! Happy Migrating!!!