PTLens is a Windows application or Photoshop plugin that corrects lens pincushion/barrel distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration, and perspective. The application comes with profiles for many digital cameras, so check their list to see if yours is supported.
Alessandro Crugnola has created a very useful Flash Switcher extension for Firefox that allows you to easily test their pages with different flash player versions. The extension comes with all the currently published flash player plugins from the version 2 to the most recent and allows you to easily switch from one plugin to another.
Dustin Diaz continues to amaze me and educate me with his amazing ninja JavaScript techniques! This time, he has a fantastic article on Digital Web Magazine titled Seven JavaScript Techniques You Should Be Using Today. Even if you’ve been coding JS for years, you should read this - I promise you’ll learn something!
Panic - the authors of the most excellent Transmit FTP client - has just released Coda - a one-window web development tool for Mac OS X. Upon first glance, this tool looks perfect for my workflow when I develop small sites. It includes a fantastic HTML/CSS editor, has integrated FTP (think Transmit), integrated terminal, and integrated reference books.
I have always found Dreamweaver to be a bit big for simple projects. It’s quite nice for larger applications, but if I’m developing a smallish, static site, Coda looks very capable. The only downside is the cost. At an introductory fee of $79, it might be a bit pricy seeing as I already own Dreamweaver. However, if you’ve yet to buy a good web workflow app, check this one out!
N.Design is offering up a nice collection of 14×14 Mini Pixel Icons that are perfect for the web. The icons can be used for free by simply providing a link back to N.Design. If that’s not good for you or your clients, you can purchase the set for $30. Sounds pretty fair to me!
Not liking the new Adobe CS3 icons? Adam Betts has created an Adobe CS3 Icon Set Replacement that has been designed based on the retail boxes for each product. I personally like the new icons. The rather plain icons make it really easy to hit the right application from the dock.
So I woke up yesterday to an announcement that CS3 had been released! Man - I was so excited (yup I’m a geek). This is something my Intel MacBook Pro had been dreaming about for a year! So I quickly opened up my wallet and approximately $600CAD quickly made its way to San Jose. Promptly I recieved a serial number and my day of frustration began!
I downloaded the CS3 Web Premium disk image, mounted it, and double clicked the setup icon. I quickly got past the first two dialogs until I was greeted by Photoshop CS3 and Fireworks CS3 conflict errors. Now, I had installed betas of the aforementioned software, but I was sure that I had uninstalled them. So I double checked and sure enough there were not on my system.
So I started to check Adobe Support and nothing was coming up as a solution to this problem. So I poked around MXNA and finally found that this was a bit of a common problem for beta testers and found this post that pointed to a solution.
It turns out that on a Mac, Adobe now has uninstallers (maybe they have for a while - I’m not sure) and that the beta versions of CS3 needed to be uninstalled using the uninstaller, and not in the Mac familiar way of simply dragging the program to the trash. I guess I must have removed my CS3 betas by the drag to trash method.
It appears as though many beta testers did this as well because the solution Adobe had to my problem was in the form of a simple script that removed all remnants of CS3 betas. So I downloaded the script, read the instructions, and as instructed to, double-clicked on the CS3Clean program (script). But it didn’t work. Nothing happened. I was supposed to be asked for a password, then choose a bunch of options. Hmmm.
Being a bit computer literate, I noticed that the download from Adobe also had an Python script. So I fired up terminal and ran the Python script. And it worked - I was presented with a bunch of questions, and at the end, a bunch of files had been removed.
So great! I restarted my computer, and hit the CS3 install only to find the same conflict errors greeting me. WTF? So I ran the cleaning script again, and the same results.
So back off to Adobe Support, the prerelease forums, Adobe forums - no luck. It was now getting late. Time to give up and call Support in the morning.
Then something hit me. The CS3Clean script was supposed to prompt me for a password. Maybe when I executed the python script, I needed to authenticate using sudo. Alright - one more try.
sudo python cs3clean.py
The script once again reported that all files had been successfully removed. So I reboot once again and I fire up the installer….
Wow - It works! Jim is happy - MacBook Pro is happy!
So the point of this rant is to warn any of you who were Adobe CS3 beta testers:
One of my favorite Firefox extensions for quickly poking around the DOM is Aardvark. The extension ended up left behind with Firefox’s 1.5 and 2.0 upgrades, so this extension left my toolbox for a while. Now it’s back and has been released to work with Firefox 2.0! They have even added a couple of nice new features!
Fading Out Nofollows. Most blog software handles the comment spam problem by adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to anchors in the comments section of your blog. The idea here is that search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN will not follow these links during their spidering process and hence the spammer will not gain link juice from you.
The main drawback from this practice, is that it penalizes people who are posting legitimate comments on your blog. Philipp’s idea is a good one. He suggests a middle ground, where when a comment is first posted, it has the rel attribute by default. Then after a specified period of time, the rel attribute is removed. This gives the blogger some time to moderate the comments and delete the spam that happens to get through your filters (ie. Akismet).
In my opinion, I wonder how much the nofollow strategy is actually working. I am getting more spam (over 1,000 comments/day) than ever. About six months ago, I removed the rel=”nofollow” attribute altogether, and the amound of spam has remained consistant.
Treehugger has a great article on Virtualization and the positive affect it could have on reducing energy consumption. I had never considered this before, but when I am running Parallels to test my sites in IE, I am not using a second physical PC, but instead a virtual one. A year ago, I would have had both my Mac and PC fired up all day!
On a related note, if you are interested in global warming, carbon emissions and the green movement in general, the Treehugger blog site is an excellent resource.
