March 14, 2008 – 11:46 am
Have you ever been working with a client, and they tell you the web site you are building looks funky in their IE5 800×600 browser? You immediately tell them that NO one is still using IE5 or 800×600, but they look at you with that unconvinced, skeptical or just confused daze.
Maybe I am just slow but I never realized until today that W3C schools, the source of all things true and good about XHTML and CSS, publishes monthly statistics for Browser, Resolution and OS statistics. This is great info and valuable ammunition for that pesky, slow-to-upgrade client:
Browser Statistics
Resolution Statistics
OS Statistics
I checked out the PicLens, Firefox plug-in last week and WOW! It’s waaaaay cool! Basically it turns Google Images, Flickr, Photobucket or a few other photo sites into really cool, full-screen interactive galleries. Here is my review:
Pros:
- The resolution/quality is amazing. They must have some sort of filter that sharpens the images because even small images look quite crisp blown up.
- You can quickly scan through hundreds of photos just by dragging along the scroll bar
- Very cool eye candy
Cons:
- It’s just eye candy. I was very surprised to find that once you are in PicLens, there is no way to link straight to a given photo on the site it appears on. Or at least if there is, I haven’t been able to find it in 1 week of using it quite frequently.
For example, I was sketching a moose for an illustration and used piclens to browse Google images for moose pictures. Once I found one I liked I wanted to jump to that actual site to see if they had any others. No can do! I’ve sent this suggestion to PicLens so hopefully it is something they can add in a later version. Until then this is cool eye candy with no real use.
3-27-08 - Update: So I did end up finding out how to jump straight to the images you are browsing in PicLens. Ike Yospe reminded me that I hadn’t updated my blog about that so here goes… There is a tiny arrow up at the top left (next to the logo for the site you are browsing) that when clicked will take you to the page the image is on. BOOOOOO PicLens! This was obviously an afterthought and just thrown in without much care of whether anyone ever finds it. It’s quite disappointing considering how amazingly intuitive the rest of the app is. How about a simple text link that says “view this image online” or something to that effect. Heck put it in the same spot as the arrow, I don’t care. But make it noticeable. Otherwise PicLens remains in my opinion eye-candy and nothing else…
There is an interesting article on Wired about a theory that the popularity of iPods (and similar devices) combined with their high resale rate and portability may have caused the spike in crime rates that has been seen over the past few years.
“The Urban Institute, a Washington think tank, first raised the subject of an “iCrime wave” last September, and held a panel discussion Tuesday to explore it further. The researchers don’t blame iPod maker Apple Inc. or any other device maker for crime, but they do say consumers should demand technologies that would render stolen gadgets useless.”
It’s an interesting concept although there aren’t any statistics (at least not in the article) that actually correlate the rise in crime with the the amount of stolen personal electronic devices.
Take a gander at the article if you are interested.
All web designers have had to explain to a client or colleague the “web-safe font” problem. For the first 2 or 3 years that I designed sites, I basically rotated between Arial and Times when it came time to choose a font for a new design. Around 1999 or 2000 Verdana also became popular as a substitute to Arial.
If you are working on a site design and are tired of the same old fonts, you may find the following list useful. It’s not huge, but these are web-safe fonts (i.e. fonts that will show up correctly on most if not all operating systems) with their PC and Mac names:
PC Font Name
Mac Font Name
- Arial, Arial, Helvetica
- Arial Black, Arial Black, Gadget
- Comic Sans MS, Comic Sans MS
- Courier New, Courier New, Courier
- Georgia, Georgia
- Impact, Impact, Charcoal
- Lucida Console, Monaco
- Lucida Sans Unicode, Lucida Grande
- Palatino Linotype, Book Antiqua, Palatino
- Tahoma, Geneva
- Times New Roman, Times
- Trebuchet MS, Helvetica
- Verdana, Verdana, Geneva
- MS Sans Serif, Geneva
- MS Serif, New York
February 27, 2008 – 6:08 pm
Are you an Adobe user? Like making videos? Got a quick 30 seconds?
Create a video for Adobe telling in 30 seconds or less why you use or love the Adobe product you do. Post your vid to youtube and tag it with “30onair” and Bob’s your uncle - you’re an Adobe star.
You can see the other videos here:
http://www.30onair.com/
I’ll be making my vid(s) within the next day or two and you know I’ll be posting them here as well!
February 26, 2008 – 5:35 pm
Google Alerts can be a pretty cool tool especially if you are looking to track the popularity of a client, product, topic, yourself, or pretty much anything.
http://www.google.com/alerts?hl=en
You simply enter in a topic, your email address and a few simple settings and you’ll receive email telling you when Google indexes a site that talks about that topic. You can specify how often you want to receive emails (daily, weekly or as it happen) and what type of sites you want Google to alert you about (all, blogs, news, etc.)
I’ve used this for my Tornadostream project to find out when people are blogging about it. It’s a pretty nifty little tool!
December 28, 2007 – 9:52 am
Each year I create a CD with some of my favorite artists/songs of the year. Here are the songs on my “Best of 2007″ CD.
January 1, 2007 – 11:56 pm
Hmmmmm. What to say in my first post.
Well let me explain a little bit about myself and this site. My name is Jesse Harding. I am a web designer. I have had other design web sites like jharding.com and frogblade.com. These were great sites. Wonderful in fact.
So why the new site? Why the new address? Honestly the address mainly came from my desire to beat out Jesse Harding Pomeroy as the number one result when Googling “Jesse Harding”. It’s just kind of creepy to share a name with the youngest serial killer ever.
I also wanted a better way to keep my portfolio updated with my most recent work. WordPress was the perfect solution.
Anyway - welcome to the site! Hope you enjoy.
Hi, I'm Jesse Harding. I'm a designer from