It seems all the designers over at LayerVault News aka Designer News talk about on an almost daily basis is Sketch 3 by Bohemian Coding. This product is touted as a successor to Adobe’s now discontinued Fireworks application. I am a massive Fireworks fan, in-fact, I still use it over Photoshop.
Things that Sketch 3 gets right… Ability to export SVG files Everything is a vector, so you can resize all vector items to your hearts content without them losing detail The UI is quite nice to look at It feels a lot more stable than Adobe Fireworks for most things (in the short few days I’ve been using it) Effects are all based on CSS. Unlike Photoshop which ships with numerous effects that aren’t easily replicable in CSS. Things that Sketch 3 does not get right… SVG export functionality is buggy and sometimes the result SVG file is wrong Inability to work with Fireworks PNG files (for an app pretty much shopped as a Fireworks alternative, this is a big deal) Inability to work with PSD files (they open, but they’re flattened) Grid system creation feels limited and not as flexible as Fireworks which allowed me to move individual guides around Source files for designs can’t be handed over to developers on platforms other than Mac OS who have a copy of Sketch 3 on their machine. Some argue developers shouldn’t get source designs, as a developer, I disagree as it makes getting font sizes, colours and spacing much easier Lack of option to export a Photoshop PSD file that can be imported into Photoshop and edited Understandably, Sketch is new on the scene and Bohemian Coding has significantly smaller team working on Sketch, a smaller budget and hasn’t had the luxury like Adobe to work on the product for 20+ years.
If you are getting calls from the number (08) 6228 4010 do not answer or call them back. A telemarketing company called TSA Telco Group Australia who acts on behalf of Telstra for telemarketing services is trying to call you.
They don’t leave a voicemail message and don’t seem to get the hint either. For the last month they’ve been trying to repeatedly call me. The past week they’ve been trying to call me at least twice a day.
I haven’t made it shy I love a good conspiracy theory. After the NSA revelations, I promised myself I would scrutinise and question things a little bit more. But having said that, it is important to not go overboard and proclaim you know the truth, when in reality, a conspiracy theory is speculation.
So what do Tony Abbott, a proposed metadata collection scheme and ISIS have in common? Quite a lot when you think about it. Whether or not the link can be drawn between the three or not is another story.
Recently, I encountered a REALLY annoying issue with my Mac Magic Mouse disconnecting every time it was bumped.
Sometimes when I listen to music I like to tap my desk and without realising, I tap my mouse as well (the Apple purists are probably shrieking reading that). Recently I put some new batteries into the mouse because the other ones went flat and then found I kept getting disconnected.
The issue wasn’t the batteries coming out, because letting the mouse sit and then tapping it would reconnect it to my Mac. The issue is actually the type of batteries that you use in your mouse and a subtle design flaw in the Magic Mouse battery compartment.
An interesting topic I thought would be better served as a post. Are email confirmation fields still needed in modern web forms?
Recently I was tasked with building a registration form. This form had a lot of fields in it including an email and confirm email field. I made the case for removing it because I felt another field was just a barrier to entry and in the age of “Sign Up Using Facebook” buttons anyway, the tolerance people have for long forms has dwindled.
Even though I recently purchased a MacBook Pro, I still use a Windows PC at home running Windows 8.1. There are so many quirks and issues in Windows 8 I would love to see version 9 fix and a few new features to make things better.
Start Menu
Supposedly already featured thanks to leaks from Microsoft themselves, Windows 9 will see a return of the classic start menu. The jokes about Windows 9 being Windows 7 with a different skin aren’t actually that far from the truth.
Right in the nostalgia.
The source code for what was a good portion of my childhood for the game Commander Keen has been released. The source code is available on Github right here
I am going to compile this and relive my childhood once more, because I absolutely loved this game. For a 2D side scrolling platformer it was pretty advanced for its time, nowadays we take get better game graphics on our smartphones.
After the amount of backlash it received for spreading U2’s new album forcefully upon ALL iTunes users, Apple have created a tool to remove the U2 album, “Songs of Innocence” from your iTunes library permanently.
While it was a creative attempt at trying to break a record for largest album release ever recorded, it was basically a form of malware. I am sure some people liked the new album, but many didn’t because it was a steaming pile of shit.
Usually I write my blog posts in Sublime Text Editor using Markdown and then I copy and paste into a Markdown format convertor before publishing them, but it is tedious and feels a bit crappy.
I evaluated and read up on a lot of different options until I came across Byword 2 for Mac. Even though it costs $13 AUD in the Mac App Store and then another $6 AUD for activating the premium publishing features, I dived in and decided to buy it.
If you’re like me and you’ve just come to the Apple side or you have an external hard drive (client supplied or old drive lying about) formatted in NTFS, then you will have noticed that Mac OS does not support writing (delete, update or move) to the drive and only allows you to browse and read only.
There is a product out there by Paragon which is about $30 and I have used it before and it works incredibly well, but if you can’t justify the spend, there is a free alternative. Mac OS has a secret, it can support writing to an NTFS formatted drive with ease and it works quite well too.