August 31, 2008 • 4:27 pm 1
The Mac blogosphere’s been buzzing with low-information speculation about upcoming new MacBooks and refreshes to the iPod Touch, and a bit of rumor concerning the long-awaited eventual end-of-lifing or replacement of the Mac Mini.
TidBITS, the venerable Mac blog, published an April Fools’ piece in 2005 that has turned out to be eerily prescient in hindsight.
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August 15, 2008 • 8:55 pm 0
As a Mac guy, I love stuff that seamlessly fits into the OS X experience, so I snapped up Panic’s Coda — like their Transmit FTP software, it’s so damned elegant, especially if you’re a write-it-from-scratch person. I’m using it to (slowly) put together the new Marks & Pixels site.
Slowly, because I’m not really a coder. As much as I enjoy tinkering and staying up-to-date on web dev technology. I’m Captain Photoshop, grinding out page mockups all day long, keeping in mind the limits of code and browsers.
I generally start by defining a quick grid using Guides, starting with the body width, header and footer, main nav and masthead areas, and then establish a modular grid for columns and blocks for the main content area. After that, it’s usually a matter of creating a lot of text blocks, some divider lines here and there, a few gradients, some radio buttons, checkboxes, form fields.
Colour palettes, type choices and the “design-ier” aspects follow.
What’s annoying about this is that you’d think, given the vast numbers of people like me using Photoshop in this manner, there’d be an easier way to either create or reuse elements like this; you end up dragging and dropping whole nested folders from one PSD layer stack into another’s window, just to reuse a form widget or something, which is just time-consuming and counterintuitive.
A surprising amount of displayed information on the web — particularly a financially-oriented site like WallStreetSurvivor.com — is tabular. Photoshop doesn’t have any sort of facility for creating tables; I usually end up doing them in InDesign, which has totally sweet, fine-grained controls over things like borders, text alignment and alternating fills. I export a PDF, then bring it back into Photoshop as a Smart Object, which lets me tweak the sizing as much as I want with no loss in resolution.
Still, it’s annoying because when the inevitable revisions are handed back, you have to go back into InDesign to modify the table design, re-export the PDF, then do a Replace Contents in Photoshop to get it to update.
I know that Photoshop really wasn’t designed for this, and it’s a miracle that I get so much done in it at all. It seems ripe for a mashup, but Photoshop’s codebase is ooooooold (heck, I started out on version 2.0, which fit on a _single floppy disk_ back in the day). Still, how hard could it be for Adobe to create..the Magic Mockup Mashup Machine.
In related news, I’ve been testing out a piece of software from an Italian developer called Balsamiq; the very simply named Mockups. There’s a Flash version that runs in the browser and an Adobe AIR app for the desktop. It, very simply, creates rough-looking mockups of web pages, with a library of standardized elements (form fields, media players, Cover Flow elements, buttons, navs, etc.) that you can drag-and-drop onto the canvas. It doesn’t produce any code, but it’s a pretty neat tool and it has some hooks into popular enterprise wikis; it’d be great if it integrated with Basecamp. It still has a way to go before it is truly useful, but even at this stage it’s a great tool for batting concepts around without the distraction of overly detailed designs.
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