Thursday, December 13, 2007
Worked from home today. Still got gunk in the lungs but sore throat and headaches are mostly all gone. Usual oatmeal breakfast. Got a lot done for work. Fixed the news index page. Caught up on 3 days of e-mail. Chatted with Susie about HTML e-mail. Posted and announced updated draft schedules. Prepared a response to Kensington. Began coding a new page discussing spam—our computer services section of the website is overdue for a data refresh. Canned soup for lunch. Dinner at home with Patrick: chicken soup with Chinese transparent noodles. Turned on Flickr stats. Woo! Love their mid-1990s "under construction" graphic you get when you turn it on. Visited the webkins home page out of curiosity. Read the 2007 zeitgeist linked from Google Blog. Learned about picnik, a web service that enables you to edit photos in your web browser. I like that it seems to work with a bunch of photo sharing providers. I especially like that in a lot of places you have a lot more keyboard control than you expect from a Flash interface. For example, when your focus is on a slider you can use the arrow keys to increase or decrease the slider value. You can press Tab to move among controls. You can press Spacebar to activate a button that has focus. This kind of control is missing from most Flash applications, and picnik has done such a great job here following standard UI design that I immediately felt comfortable. The Create tab in the picnik interface has a bunch of cool features like Holga-ish and HDR-ish to create special effects. Perhaps best of all is that you can try it out without giving them even your e-mail address. Click the Get Started Now button on the home page, then click one of the demo photos, and immediately you're editing! If I had had to sign up I most certainly would not have bothered, but the demo photos made it two-clicks easy to see what they were all about. There's lots to like at picnik, and I'll be keeping it in mind when a need calls for it. There's an Auto-Fix button on the main interface which didn't work well for me, but there's a second Auto-Fix button under Exposure which worked better for me on the demo Seattle Pike Place Market photo. I don't know why there's two different Auto-Fix buttons with different algorithms, but there you go. On a separate note, I'm looking for an HTML/CSS debugging tool that works like this: I hover over text with my mouse, then a tooltip appears with the name of the typeface used for that text. It doesn't have to work exactly like that; something like that would be sufficient. I asked the geek squad on Saturday (Ryson and Scandy) but even though they all had iPhones and were clearly geekier than me they didn't know of exactly such a tool. Yes, tools exist that let you examine the CSS easily, but you would still have to dig to get the name of the typeface. Often I just want to know what font is being used because, for example, it renders poorly in my browser and I want to avoid it (I suspect but have not confirmed this happens when designers use a specific font (Helvetica?) for web pages on a Mac and don't realize that it looks awful on a standard PC), or I want to create a Photoshop mockup using the same font. If you know of such a tool, please let me know. Continued composing some thoughts on the problem of e-mail spam and sending URLs in electronic communications. I had started this months ago, never finished, and picked it up again today. I'll post it here when it's ready.