As Iconfactory has mentioned, "Scaling vectors that are optimized for presentation at a large size will result in images that look unacceptable at small sizes. The trained eye of a designer knows which pixels to keep and which ones to throw away--automated scaling of an image does not."
R.H.I.N.O stands for "Robotism Heuristic Intelligence Navigable Operative".
The R.H.I.N.O is a battle armor created by Alex O'Hirn, a geeky scientist.
At first, it was just a robot, which got it's keister kicked by Iron Man. Alex
O'Hirn decided to make it a suit, which he than used for himself. In the 616
Universe, Alex O'Hirn was a thug stuck in a Rhino suit which gave him immense
strength. So you can see the huge difference between the 616 and the Ultimate
Universe.
What would have been cooler is having all the Slaughterhouse websites retaliate against the Burgertime guy and call him names for using up their content/bandwidth.
Adobe might go the other way and purely push Flash. I'm sure Adobe has been dying to own the Flash market.
In fact, Adobe might have bought Macromedia just for Flash. Flash for the desktop (Flex) and Flash for mobiles (Flash Lite) are the areas of big potential. The rest of Macromedia's apps -- Dreamweaver, Fireworks and the rest -- they're in a very mature and saturated market, as Adobe knows so well.
It's all mind-boggling as to what can come out of this.
Adobe + Flash. This is gonna be big. They're gonna push Flash as the lingua franca of the interactive web (while we wait on things like XForms, XAML, XUL and Web Forms 2.0) using all the cout of Adobe and Macromedia's apps. Adobe had made some progression into SVG, so hopefully everything isn't too Flash-centric. And the growth in the mobile area (Just think of the licensing for Flash Lite in the future) is also gonna be good. This reason is probably worth it alone regardless of all the potential problems and overlap.
A powerful set of integrated tools. For print, web and video. Photoshop + Dreamweaver. Director + Premier. Drools.
Some good "synergies". Adobe has been entrenched in the print area with InDesign and PDF. Macromedia is very web oriented, with many mobile and server components.
Also lots of fallouts. There's plenty of overlapping software. Dreamweaver vs GoLive. Illustrator vs Freehand. Whether they remain separate, get merged, or cannibalize each other's parts and technologies remains to be seen.
No real competitors. The only "real" competitors are Corel (with CorelDraw and its recent acquisition of Jasc) and opensource software, such as The GIMP. Maybe ACDSystems as a minor player since obtaining Canvas. With Adobe and Macromedia offering integrated suites, why try anything else. Bye bye Quark.
Adobe Flash CS? Adobe Macromedia Flash? Adobe Macromedia Flash CS MX 2006! This is gonna be interesting =)
If Microsoft fixes their CSS support in Internet Explorer 7, every single little CSS IE hack used around the world will break.
The problem is that all these years, Web developers have had to resort to these little IE-specific hacks to compensate for years of neglect on Microsoft's part. Sure Microsoft can add more security or tabbed browsing... but CSS? It'd be too risky on Microsoft's part to send out a new IE that *breaks* exisiting websites. (Although to be honest, they done it before - twice - IE:mac and later, IE for Windows. But this time they can't rely on DOCTYPE Switching anymore.)
Microsoft's mantra of backwards compatibility would be at odds with releasing a fully CSS 2.0 compliant IE browser.
The WordPress template is basically one PHP file, which seems ill-equip to handle multiple "looks". But since it's PHP, you can use If/Else statements to change the layout/content depending on the page (main index, archive, a permalink post, etc.)
Take a look at the PHP source Kubrick--one of the more popular WP themes--as an example. It uses If/Else statements to control the content and layout. It's a bit subtle, but permalink pages don't have sidebars, archive pages have meta info in the sidebar, the main page has sidebars but no meta info. So it is possible. You of course don't have to be that subtle, and you change it the way you like it. WordPress can at least handle the "different template" problem.
From the article:
EGM: What do you think that green guy is? [Points to wildman Blanka]
Bobby: He's a mutated lizard-man scientist. He was a scientist, and he was working, and he mutated himself into the ultimate lizard.
The kid's story sounds more like the origin of "The Lizard" from Spider-man. Wikipedia says that Blanka was a kid named Jimmy that survived a plane crash and was raised by animals.
The Toronto Star's coverage has more info about Alec Baldwin's participation in the launch of the Deep Lake Water Cooling system:
Hollywood heavyweight Alec Baldwin heaped praise on Canada's "forward-thinking" approach to energy today at the launch of a new system that uses the frigid waters of Lake Ontario to cool downtown office buildings.
The system is nothing short of a "miracle," gushed Baldwin, 46, the square-jawed star of blockbuster films like The Hunt for Red October and Ghosts of Mississippi who moonlights as an environmental activist.
"This is an important signal you are sending not only to your fellow countrymen but to the world," Baldwin told the gathered crowd.
"There's no project on a municipal level this size that's been attempted or has been executed before like this."
Unconventional thinking seemed to be at the heart of today's event, which looked like a Hollywood premiere, complete with a blasting techno soundtrack, fog machine, and bizarre floor show of twirling gymnasts contorting themselves around a large ring suspended from the ceiling.
This update was big news for the web design community, for other reasons. The developer's edition of IE6 (which was a modified version that contained the pop-up) revealed that Windows was able to run multiple Internet Explorer versions simultaneously by merely adding a blank text file!.
For the longest time, people thought it was impossible to run multiple versions of IE on the same machine to do testing on various browsers. It was a huge pain, and it also meant that developers were forced to use the IE version that came with the OS and not downgrade, while Netscape 4.xx to Mozilla installed fine. But now, it's possible to run IE3, IE4, IE5.01, IE5.5 SP2 and IE6 side-by-side (screenshot).
You should check out Brent Ashley's work with Javascript Remote Scripting (ie: "getting information from the server without refreshing the page")
a client-side javascript library which uses Dynamic HTML elements to make hidden remote procedure calls to the server. It only works asynchronously, but is known to work on Win9x, WinNT/2000, WinXP, Unix/Linux/BSD, and Mac with IE4+, NS4.x, NS6.x, Mozilla, Opera7 and Galeon.
There use to be a real-time chat on his website. And it's all updated without refreshing the page and uses the regular HTML gui. Very neat stuff.
The Textism site has a Word HTML Cleaner that seems to do a good and comprehensive job, from previous experience.
This utility strips proprietary Microsoft tags and artefacts from Word HTML documents, leaving basic formatting and typographic entities intact.
Fixed-width layouts are good for text-heavy sites
on
CNET News.com Turns 7
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
A static/fixed width layout isn't a bad thing, depending on when it's used. And I'm sure the people at CNet thought about the pros and cons of a liquid layout in their design process.
For a text-heavy site such as News.com, a fixed-width layout is very ideal. If you happen to have a very high resolution, the text in a liquid/expanding design would run past the optimum line length of about 60 characters or so. Sure, you can have the browser sized to a reasonable size, but it's an added hassle. With a fixed-width website, however, the line length is much shorter. Your eyes won't get as tired from traversing the whole width of a page in a liquid layout.
It's also the same reason why newspapers run multiple narrow columns, rather than having it go across the whole page.
As a side note, Simon Willison has a nice Narrow Bookmarklet that lets you convert a website's liquid design to a fixed 500 pixel width page with one click.
Marvel initiated a "web comics" version of their popular comic books a few years back called DotComics.
During that time, they had a full issues of Ultimate Spider-man and Ultimate X-Men released every month in Flash format. The UI is pretty interesting, as each comic panel is magnified as the story goes. There's advertisement in between.
I haven't been on DotComic for a while (a year or two), notably because they started having only the first half of the comic books as a trailer, and also some of their titles fell behind schedule online. Looking at it now, there's quite a few titles under the free section, and there's many more under the members section (which IIRC, is a free registration.)
But I think it's still an effective marketing strategy because I actually enjoyed these comics and read them when I otherwise wouldn't have. The writing was excellent, and the art was very nice. And I'm sure I told at least 2 or 3 people about the site. And now, I'm actually buying the actual comic books because it got me hooked.
(I just bought the hardcover version of Ultimate Spider-Man Vol. 1, which collects #1-13 and I'm still collecting Ultimate X-Men.)
Writer Brian Michael Bendis said before that the origin of most Marvel characters grew out of a fear of anything nuclear.
The Marvel universe itself, with the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Hulk, Daredevil... all of them were born out of cosmic rays, radiation, gamma rays, and radioactive materials. And, as Bendis said, whether it was conscious or not, this paranoia was probably fuelled by the Cuban Missile crisis, the nuclear arsenal of Russian and all that. And that's one of the reasons it resonated as well as it did.
And to make it relevant to today's time, Marvel did enlist Bendis (and other) to revamp a bunch of comics. The result is the Marvel's Ultimate line.
With it came new origins. But instead of the nuclear slant, the paranoia of today is corporations, government, the military, the media and the manipulation of all these groups. I think Marvel has really hit the nail with this revamp and the storylines are far more smart and pertinent, and there has been a lot more character development.
Except for the fact that the last remaining issues of finite-run Rising Stars probably won't ever be published because Top Cow is mucking around with the movie rights behind JMS' back.
Too bad. It was a good story. (Although his Midnight Nation comic book is way better.)
Anyway, JMS has moved on to Marvel. His new "Supreme Power" comic book looks at the whole "what if real super hero existed today" again. (Or you can catch his current run on Amazing Spider-Man.)
It's more of a classic pixel icon style, with an emphasis on a clear, easy-on-the-eyes, 16x16 pixel versions (as oppose to something blurry that was scaled down from a 32x32 version). =)
Change "browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace" value
on
Mozilla 1.5 Beta Released
·
· Score: 2, Informative
This works in Mozilla Firebird 0.6, and it probably works for Mozilla as well.
Type "about:config" into the address and press enter. Then find the "browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace" preference and change the boolean value from "true" to "false"
Close the browser and restart. It should work the way you like it now. =)
But they did technically update IE for Mac OS X. What would have been the next IE version was instead bundled into MSN for Mac OS X.
The sad part is that this new IE is now one of the most standard-compliant browsers around. Just look at this CSS Support Chart. Tantek (an IE:Mac developer) hints even more support. From the chart, it's better than Safari and comparable to Mozilla. But no one seems to have notice.
Which is a shame on Microsoft for hiding this great new browser under MSN. With all the fan-fare on the (not-free) MSN look and feel, the technically superiority of the new IE:Mac rendering engine gets lost.
If you actually look at the link (which compares CSS Support in a range of browsers) you gave, technically MSN for Mac OS X (which is basically the newest version of IE:Mac) clearly supports more "stuff" than WebCore/KHTML (and quite comparable to Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine as well). There's a lot of new work put into standards-support in Microsoft's new Mac browser based on the chart.
And too bad, no one has seemed to noticed.
Which is too bad considering how much work the IE:Mac crew put into this new browser. Check out Tantek's log (he's part of Microsoft's IE:Mac team) about his disappointment with the news.
IE:Mac was special in that it brought a lot of innovation to the browser arena: Find as you Type, Text Zoom, Doctype switching and many more.
"Finally, video streaming is weak on desktop . None of the big three codecs (QuickTime,
*Real*, Windows Media) have shown any *real* commitment to offering support. I think there's a *real* opportunity for one company to commit to gain the upper hand on the others with a true cross platform solution." (*Emphasis mine)
Maybe it's just me, but I think he's trying to tell Real something. =)
This is why comic books are important
on
Free Comic Day!
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"I'd never actually seen a comic in person before that, and though even then I knew they were lame, I was fascinated by the kind of stories that used both pictures and words."
...
"Truth is, I was a slow student initially, because we were always going from town to town, and the curriculum varied tremendously across locations. (I was also near-sighted, something my father didn't want to admit, so I didn't get glasses until late Junior High School.) So in a very real way, comics taught me how to read, taught me a love of language, and storytelling, and most of all, an appreciation for heroes, for chivalry and bravery and a refusal to surrender."
...
"In addition to the elements just noted, I learned my sense of morality, my sense of right and wrong, from comics. That may sound stupid and naive, but it's true, and that understanding is what propels me to this day."
...
"And there was never any question in his mind about doing the right thing. You just do it. And that, to me, became very important to my moral development. I still tend to see things in black-and-white terms, and if I come into a situation where the only way to keep my job is to do something I don't agree with on principle, I'll quit. It's cost me any number of jobs over the years, but I can't do otherwise. Wouldn't be right.
My family, of course, didn't see it that way at the time, and when my grades slipped, my father blamed it on comics, and as I sat there, he took all the comics that I'd so carefully stored and protected, kept in pristine condition, all my number one issues of X-Men and Spider-Man and the rest... and tore them in half, one after another, until they were all gone. It still makes me angry.
But the other thing about comics is that this was where I first began to appreciate the process of storytelling. I was kind of oblivious at first to the idea of writers, but over time I gradually began to figure it out, that somebody sat down and wrote down these words. And I was entranced by that."
Just who was this person? It's none other than J. Michael Straczynski, writer and creator of Babylon 5, Crusade and Jeremiah (He's currently enjoying getting a chance at writing Amazing Spider-Man for Marvel) =)
You're missing half the beauty of the design without grabbing the Toggle CSS Stylesheet favelet/bookmarklet and trying it out on the winning site.
Because of the use of proper HTML structure (Hx, Acronym tags) the site is still is very accessible and easy to read.
A minor quibble is the rampant usage of spans with a class named "none" to hide navigation divider pipes ("|") when CSS is on. Something like an unordered list might be better structurally... but that's more of a personal thing.
Slashdot Mirror
As Iconfactory has mentioned, "Scaling vectors that are optimized for presentation at a large size will result in images that look unacceptable at small sizes. The trained eye of a designer knows which pixels to keep and which ones to throw away--automated scaling of an image does not."
From http://db.gamefaqs.com/console/ps2/file/ultimate_s pider_man_boss_enemy.txt
R.H.I.N.O stands for "Robotism Heuristic Intelligence Navigable Operative".
The R.H.I.N.O is a battle armor created by Alex O'Hirn, a geeky scientist. At first, it was just a robot, which got it's keister kicked by Iron Man. Alex O'Hirn decided to make it a suit, which he than used for himself. In the 616 Universe, Alex O'Hirn was a thug stuck in a Rhino suit which gave him immense strength. So you can see the huge difference between the 616 and the Ultimate Universe.
What would have been cooler is having all the Slaughterhouse websites retaliate against the Burgertime guy and call him names for using up their content/bandwidth.
Now that's a story =)
Try using AdBlock to remove Slashdot's 1x1 spacer gif.
Adobe might go the other way and purely push Flash. I'm sure Adobe has been dying to own the Flash market.
In fact, Adobe might have bought Macromedia just for Flash. Flash for the desktop (Flex) and Flash for mobiles (Flash Lite) are the areas of big potential. The rest of Macromedia's apps -- Dreamweaver, Fireworks and the rest -- they're in a very mature and saturated market, as Adobe knows so well.
If Microsoft fixes their CSS support in Internet Explorer 7, every single little CSS IE hack used around the world will break.
The problem is that all these years, Web developers have had to resort to these little IE-specific hacks to compensate for years of neglect on Microsoft's part. Sure Microsoft can add more security or tabbed browsing... but CSS? It'd be too risky on Microsoft's part to send out a new IE that *breaks* exisiting websites. (Although to be honest, they done it before - twice - IE:mac and later, IE for Windows. But this time they can't rely on DOCTYPE Switching anymore.)
Microsoft's mantra of backwards compatibility would be at odds with releasing a fully CSS 2.0 compliant IE browser.
...at least, from what I've tried.
The WordPress template is basically one PHP file, which seems ill-equip to handle multiple "looks". But since it's PHP, you can use If/Else statements to change the layout/content depending on the page (main index, archive, a permalink post, etc.)
Take a look at the PHP source Kubrick--one of the more popular WP themes--as an example. It uses If/Else statements to control the content and layout. It's a bit subtle, but permalink pages don't have sidebars, archive pages have meta info in the sidebar, the main page has sidebars but no meta info. So it is possible. You of course don't have to be that subtle, and you change it the way you like it. WordPress can at least handle the "different template" problem.
EGM: What do you think that green guy is? [Points to wildman Blanka]
Bobby: He's a mutated lizard-man scientist. He was a scientist, and he was working, and he mutated himself into the ultimate lizard.
The kid's story sounds more like the origin of "The Lizard" from Spider-man. Wikipedia says that Blanka was a kid named Jimmy that survived a plane crash and was raised by animals.
This is just an opportunity... until EA buys the rights to an exclusive NCAA College Football license =)
The Toronto Star's coverage has more info about Alec Baldwin's participation in the launch of the Deep Lake Water Cooling system:
This update was big news for the web design community, for other reasons. The developer's edition of IE6 (which was a modified version that contained the pop-up) revealed that Windows was able to run multiple Internet Explorer versions simultaneously by merely adding a blank text file!.
For the longest time, people thought it was impossible to run multiple versions of IE on the same machine to do testing on various browsers. It was a huge pain, and it also meant that developers were forced to use the IE version that came with the OS and not downgrade, while Netscape 4.xx to Mozilla installed fine. But now, it's possible to run IE3, IE4, IE5.01, IE5.5 SP2 and IE6 side-by-side (screenshot).
You should check out Brent Ashley's work with Javascript Remote Scripting (ie: "getting information from the server without refreshing the page")
There use to be a real-time chat on his website. And it's all updated without refreshing the page and uses the regular HTML gui. Very neat stuff.
A static/fixed width layout isn't a bad thing, depending on when it's used. And I'm sure the people at CNet thought about the pros and cons of a liquid layout in their design process.
For a text-heavy site such as News.com, a fixed-width layout is very ideal. If you happen to have a very high resolution, the text in a liquid/expanding design would run past the optimum line length of about 60 characters or so. Sure, you can have the browser sized to a reasonable size, but it's an added hassle. With a fixed-width website, however, the line length is much shorter. Your eyes won't get as tired from traversing the whole width of a page in a liquid layout.
It's also the same reason why newspapers run multiple narrow columns, rather than having it go across the whole page.
As a side note, Simon Willison has a nice Narrow Bookmarklet that lets you convert a website's liquid design to a fixed 500 pixel width page with one click.
Marvel initiated a "web comics" version of their popular comic books a few years back called DotComics.
During that time, they had a full issues of Ultimate Spider-man and Ultimate X-Men released every month in Flash format. The UI is pretty interesting, as each comic panel is magnified as the story goes. There's advertisement in between.
I haven't been on DotComic for a while (a year or two), notably because they started having only the first half of the comic books as a trailer, and also some of their titles fell behind schedule online. Looking at it now, there's quite a few titles under the free section, and there's many more under the members section (which IIRC, is a free registration.)
But I think it's still an effective marketing strategy because I actually enjoyed these comics and read them when I otherwise wouldn't have. The writing was excellent, and the art was very nice. And I'm sure I told at least 2 or 3 people about the site. And now, I'm actually buying the actual comic books because it got me hooked.
(I just bought the hardcover version of Ultimate Spider-Man Vol. 1, which collects #1-13 and I'm still collecting Ultimate X-Men.)
Writer Brian Michael Bendis said before that the origin of most Marvel characters grew out of a fear of anything nuclear.
The Marvel universe itself, with the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Hulk, Daredevil... all of them were born out of cosmic rays, radiation, gamma rays, and radioactive materials. And, as Bendis said, whether it was conscious or not, this paranoia was probably fuelled by the Cuban Missile crisis, the nuclear arsenal of Russian and all that. And that's one of the reasons it resonated as well as it did.
And to make it relevant to today's time, Marvel did enlist Bendis (and other) to revamp a bunch of comics. The result is the Marvel's Ultimate line.
With it came new origins. But instead of the nuclear slant, the paranoia of today is corporations, government, the military, the media and the manipulation of all these groups. I think Marvel has really hit the nail with this revamp and the storylines are far more smart and pertinent, and there has been a lot more character development.
Except for the fact that the last remaining issues of finite-run Rising Stars probably won't ever be published because Top Cow is mucking around with the movie rights behind JMS' back.
Too bad. It was a good story. (Although his Midnight Nation comic book is way better.)
Anyway, JMS has moved on to Marvel. His new "Supreme Power" comic book looks at the whole "what if real super hero existed today" again. (Or you can catch his current run on Amazing Spider-Man.)
Plug: My old Antiseptic Mozilla Icons are available from the deviantART website.
It's more of a classic pixel icon style, with an emphasis on a clear, easy-on-the-eyes, 16x16 pixel versions (as oppose to something blurry that was scaled down from a 32x32 version). =)
Screenshot
This works in Mozilla Firebird 0.6, and it probably works for Mozilla as well.
Type "about:config" into the address and press enter. Then find the "browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace" preference and change the boolean value from "true" to "false"
Close the browser and restart. It should work the way you like it now. =)
But they did technically update IE for Mac OS X. What would have been the next IE version was instead bundled into MSN for Mac OS X.
The sad part is that this new IE is now one of the most standard-compliant browsers around. Just look at this CSS Support Chart. Tantek (an IE:Mac developer) hints even more support. From the chart, it's better than Safari and comparable to Mozilla. But no one seems to have notice.
Which is a shame on Microsoft for hiding this great new browser under MSN. With all the fan-fare on the (not-free) MSN look and feel, the technically superiority of the new IE:Mac rendering engine gets lost.
If you actually look at the link (which compares CSS Support in a range of browsers) you gave, technically MSN for Mac OS X (which is basically the newest version of IE:Mac) clearly supports more "stuff" than WebCore/KHTML (and quite comparable to Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine as well). There's a lot of new work put into standards-support in Microsoft's new Mac browser based on the chart.
And too bad, no one has seemed to noticed.
Which is too bad considering how much work the IE:Mac crew put into this new browser. Check out Tantek's log (he's part of Microsoft's IE:Mac team) about his disappointment with the news.
IE:Mac was special in that it brought a lot of innovation to the browser arena: Find as you Type, Text Zoom, Doctype switching and many more.
Just who was this person? It's none other than J. Michael Straczynski, writer and creator of Babylon 5, Crusade and Jeremiah (He's currently enjoying getting a chance at writing Amazing Spider-Man for Marvel) =)
You're missing half the beauty of the design without grabbing the Toggle CSS Stylesheet favelet/bookmarklet and trying it out on the winning site.
Because of the use of proper HTML structure (Hx, Acronym tags) the site is still is very accessible and easy to read.
A minor quibble is the rampant usage of spans with a class named "none" to hide navigation divider pipes ("|") when CSS is on. Something like an unordered list might be better structurally... but that's more of a personal thing.