The solution seems to be typing in the numbers lots of times into the different text fields until it works, and changing the anchor point sometimes. It seems to be worse for larger objects?

I hate Photoshop. Other options are cool, but just aren’t quite there yet.

(I also hate it when people do that link-on-random-words thing, but you just have to click on them all anyway! – it’s one reason still have the status-bar visible in my Safari.)

I almost gave up and tried using Illustrator instead, but the performance would be terrible, having to deal with hundreds of vector layers for this interface design I’m working on…

Trivia: Why was the first release of DMX Assistant labelled 2.0? Because this was 1.0:

(I never actually released it though. Is it still legitimate to call the first public release 2.0? Google Chrome’s on 17, so I can do whatever I want too.)

DMX Assistant

You can now trigger Scenes with MIDI Control Change or Note messages – this enabled you to use a simple MIDI controller to control a simple lighting system, or for a show control system (like Qlab) to trigger a more complicated lighting system.

MIDI Friend

While I was working on the DMX Assistant MIDI update, I had a problem – I always had to have my hardware MIDI controller (a Korg nanoKONTROL) around with me to send MIDI messages to test things with. There’s some useful tools already out there (like Snoize MIDI Monitor) for analysing MIDI going through your Mac, but I couldn’t find any easy way to simulate a MIDI control without using a whole big app really designed for other purposes.

I quickly hacked together a little app that had a “Send MIDI” button and a slider or something. Because it was so useful, I deiced to put in the extra effort and turn it into a releasable product. For some extra fun, I decided to play around with custom interface design (I love my motion-blurred tab transition animation!)

It currently only supports Note, Control Change and Pitch Bend Change messages, but I plan to add more in the future (let me know what would be useful to you!).

You can find both DMX Assistant and MIDI Friend for sale on the Mac App Store. Feel free to ask me any questions and let me know what you think!

I’ve prepared a press pack filled with screenshots of both DMX Assistant and MIDI Friend.

The rig had 15 Ehrgeiz LED Fusion bars (each with 20 individually controllable RGB LEDs) and a range of par cans, fresnels and blinders on 24 dimmers.

For control, I chose to use GrandMA onPC with a 2Port node. (Much better than Light Jockey, which I used last time). The iOS remote was quite fun while focusing! For easier live operation, we also used a Jands Stage 24 in wide mode to get 48 executor faders, using the DMX input of GrandMA. That’s more faders than a GrandMA full-size!

I programmed a range of effects on cues in HTP mode and some speed masters to allow easy on-the-fly control. With 48 faders, there was no need to ever change pages! I also created a simple Quartz Composer composition on my MacBook Pro to control a GrandMA executor with audio input from the drums.

I’m quite impressed that we basically created our own console, sort of equivalent to a GrandMA full-size, for a tenth of the price!

(Well it is missing lots of things – like encoder wheels, executor buttons, touch screens, etc. But for our purpose at least, none of that was an issue – it was great! Still quite difficult to learn and teach others how to use though.)

You can set DMX values to output to any of the 256 Art-Net universes, separated into ‘Scenes’ (submasters) if you wish. All the Art-Net universes being broadcast around your network are visible in the scene list, so you can inspect what your lighting console or other device is sending, and to HTP merge into a new universe for output.

You can find out more about it and buy it on the Mac App Store.

I’d love to know what you think!

Here’s a little bit from my Google profile trying to show where ‘Australia’ is. (No, that marker is not anywhere near where I’ve ever lived)

* I’m not sure if this was around before Xcode 4 or not – I only just found it now.

Let’s have a look at Coda. Buying direct from Panic is US$99 (around AU$99). On the app store, it’s AU$119.

Another example is Omni Graffle Pro. At the Omni Store, it’s US$199, or even better, as a student I can get it for US$119. On the app store it’s AU$249 – more than twice the price that I can get direct.

I think I’ll be avoiding the Mac App Store as much as possible, especially for more expensive professional apps.

Why doesn’t it say ‘Closed’, as the store isn’t actually open yet…

I’ve created a new page with all my free design resources for download (all 2 of them!… there should be more coming sometime though). On that page, you can find some new whiteboard vector textures. I made them by slowly brushing off whiteboard marker from my whiteboard. It creates the dirty cracked look, as seen in the ‘Stock’ graphic above. There will be many more of these whiteboard ones to come (I’ve got a stack of .JPGs to process).

I hope you find them useful!

Now that I’ve disabled Comic Sans, I’ll never have to suffer through it again!
(at least not on my computer)

On your Mac, open Font Book in the Applications folder, find Comic Sans, and click the checkbox disable button down the bottom. If that isn’t satisfying enough, you may also enjoy deleting it completely. (although I think I have to say I wouldn’t recommend that.)

One of the main changes is the background images. The last version was designed before more people had huge screens…

For this latest design I tried to make the backgrounds more tile-able (well, at least not too bad), by using large pixel-style designs. This had the added benefit of compressing the files much better. As a result, the page is now 75% smaller! (and significantly quicker to download) UPDATE: …and bandwidth usage has also reduced ~75%

Another goal of this design was to improve the portfolio page (something I’ve been planning on doing since I first created this site). It is now a bit more organised, has some more detail, and looks nicer. I chose a darker graphic for the background so the bright images and text would stand out more.

There’s also a bunch of smaller improvements to the About and Contact pages. The ‘About Me’ copy is now much better written, and the contact page is less cluttered.

One of the things I’m not 100% happy with yet is the home page. It’s starting to fell a little cluttered, and not clear what visitors should do next. There’s no clear “Call to Action” or anything. I suppose that’s because I don’t really have one at the moment. (I’m not looking for work — too busy with study)

Overall, it’s a huge improvement that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, and I’m very happy with it!

So… what’s next?

Now, my contact form is just plain old straight. (But the super fun fun button is still there!)

I’ve also had a little spam problem. Originally, I just had a field hidden via CSS, that asked not to be filled in. If someone disobeyed the instruction and filled in the field, then they must have been a stupid spam bot. This worked at first, but not anymore.

To fix this, I simply swapped around the ‘name’ attributes, so spam bots will think the hidden field is actually the subject field, and be lured into filling it in. Let’s hope this will work!

Thank you Akismet for that pie chart. Why does my blog get so much spam?

After doing a bunch of work in Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign, I opened up my iStat Menus Memory panel, and found that my Mac was using 2.3GB of swap files! (I’ve seen it use even more than that sometimes). My 4GB of ram isn’t enough, so it had to save some things on my hard drive as well.

This can slow down your computer, and uses up hard drive space!

Even after quitting all the  programs I had open, the swap files just stuck around.

When I restart my computer (after writing this blog post), my Mac will clean out all it’s swap files, and I’ll gain a bonus 2.3GB of hard drive space! (which means a lot, when you’re the sort of person that just keep finding ways to use it all up)

The quick survey, where people select what dates their available on, narrowed the whole month into 1 day we’re all available!

(In only a couple of hours — no hundreds of emails back and forth, ‘reply-all’ing everyone!)

The McFarlane Prize is for Excellence in Australian Web Design. It’s judged based on accessibility, usability, the design, and the code behind it all. I submitted DouglasHeriot.com when it wasn’t even finished yet (it still isn’t, but it was even less-finished than it is now), and didn’t ever expect anything to come of it.

It was 6 months ago now when I got an email:

They said they were going to publish a book of the top 50, and I had 2 days to send in a few things! I sent them everything they asked for, and then didn’t hear anything back for another 0.4712 years (~6 months!) I assumed it wasn’t happening, as it was originally supposed to be ready in a fortnight, in time for the announcement of the winner.

Today, I got another email, saying that I can now get my free copy of the book!

You can see a preview on the publisher’s website. (I’m on page 42-43)

I can’t wait to see it!

You can also buy the book for AU$89.95.

Another reason I don’t use Windows. Actually, to be fair, Mac isn’t immune to random errors either (but usually a little less random)

Bonus points — How many times can you spot the Microsoft logo?

I don’t really want to unsubscribe from Smashing Magazine, but I think I have to — I don’t have enough time to read most of it anyway.

Here’s an article that I came across that pretty much sums up my opinion on posting too much:

http://writetodone.com/2009/01/17/7-reasons-posting-less-frequently-can-increase-your-blogs-popularity/

In related news, my RSS reader shows a record-breaking low in unread items, after pruning back my subscription list. That feels a lot more satisfying than seeing 200 or so. (Although it’s not as bad as someone I saw with tens of thousands of unread items…)

Method #1 — Add Anchor Points Tool

This is a pretty bad one. My first solution was to just use the Add Anchor Points Tool to add a bunch of points just before the end, and then drag them around to where I really wanted them to go! Not fun.

Method #2 — Join

My next idea was to just make a new path, then join the 2 together. It works, but you don’t get to see the bit in the middle until the end. This is especially annoying if you want to make it curvy.

Method #3 — The Pen Tool

This is the proper way, that I eventually found by accident, and then in the help files as well. It’s like what I was originally doing in Freehand, but slightly different. Instead of using the ‘Direct Selection Tool’ (white pointer) to select the end point, you use the regular Pen Tool to select the endpoint first, then you can keep drawing like usual!

Why didn’t I think of this earlier? Am I the only one that didn’t know this already?

There’s 10 days missing!

I can’t really explain it all, but there’s a pretty interesting article on the Panic Blog that does it pretty well.

It finally matches my website! It still needs a bit of work, refining the style of the sidebar, (and maybe even adding some animation to it, like my old theme).

So much stuff has happened in the last year since I wrote a post. Sometime soon (maybe) I’ll write something about it…

Update: Oops… I forgot to update the copyright notice to 2010. To fix that, I replaced it with some PHP code to always display the current year, so I never have to remember again! echo date('Y');

You can download a larger version:
Wollongong NYE 2009 (3.8MB)

It’s a panorama made up from a couple of 15 second exposures. The RAW files were batch processed in Photoshop, then stitched in Autostitch.

<!DOCTYPE HTML>

…compared to the old HTML 4.01 one…

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"
        "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">

It starts out the same… but doesn’t have any of the version information. It’s also much easier to remember (has anyone memorised the old one?)

Is it time yet to use the HTML 5 Doctype?

Hold on a second… did I just say HTML 5 doctype? Nothing in it says anything about a version, let alone version 5. According to the draft HTML 5 Specification, the doctype “is a mostly useless, but required, header”. Its only purpose is to convince browsers to render the page in standards mode. From the draft HTML 5 Specification:

DOCTYPEs are required for legacy reasons. When omitted, browsers tend to use a different rendering mode that is incompatible with some specifications. Including the DOCTYPE in a document ensures that the browser makes a best-effort attempt at following the relevant specifications.

So, where does that leave us now?

To answer the previous question first, yes, we can use the new doctype now. Even Google does on their home page.

If you use the ‘new’ HTML doctype, then you are just saying that the page is HTML (not XHTML or something else), and you want the browser to render your page in standards mode. It doesn’t mean you’re using ‘HTML 5’ — will the doctype change again for HTML 6? Who knows? …but I don’t think it will.

— but you might still want to be careful. On client sites, I would still use the HTML 4.01 Strict Doctype (not XHTML, but that’s another story…). On personal sites, I will use the new HTML doctype — it’s still relatively new, so you need to be prepared to change things if it causes unknown and unpredictable side-effects (but there shouldn’t be).

Could we have been using the <!doctype html> doctype before ‘HTML 5’ even existed? All that really matters is that the browser knows that you’re serving HTML, and it renders the page in standards mode. So, I suppose we could have.

Everything went pretty smoothly, except this blog…

The FTP connection kept on failing, and not uploading all the files. Some files got half uploaded, and things just didn’t work out nicely. The whole process took forever, because of the huge number of files (it takes longer to upload a lot of small files than one big file). When I thought it was finished, I later found out that not all the wp-admin files got uploaded properly.

By then, I was really frustrated with the whole thing, so I just deleted all the wordpress files (except wp-content of course) to start all over again. I was going to just upload the whole archive file together, and un-compress it on the server, but uploading that failed half-way as well.

In the end, I just uploaded all the files almost one-by-one, which wasn’t fun (it was more like 5 at a time, because that turned out to be reliable as well). Maybe I should stop being such a cheapskate, and use a paid web host instead… with reliable FTP.

That’s not all…

Another issue I had was I found that if you tried to visit my blog during all this, you were served a page with a bunch of random WordPress PHP code printed out. Imagine if it printed out your hard-coded database password or an API key or something similar. That could turn out badly. How should you upgrade websites securely? Maybe next time I will change the .htaccess file to block all requests and show an “upgrading…” page. Is there a better way of doing this?

Spraypaint Brushes Set 1 (18 MB)

(Sorry — I don’t have a nice beautiful download button. I could make you wait longer, but I think it would be better if I just give you the brushes!)

UPDATE: You can now get them along with some other goodies from my stock resources page too.

Here’s a little demo picture. It’s not the nicest looking thing ever, but it demonstrates the kind of textures you can create with the brushes:

To make these, I just spray-painted a couple of pieces of paper, and scanned them at 900dpi. My scanner isn’t the best, but it isn’t too bad. The brushes aren’t super sharp at the largest size, but they do all go up to around 2500px diameter.

Stay tuned for set 2! (the back side of the paper has some interesting textures as well…)

Right now, I have lots of work to get done, so it will be a few days before these are ready to give away. Make sure you subscribe to the feed if you want to be notified as soon as they’re available.

Once you’ve installed it, you can run the demos, including a platform game!

To create it, I took hundreds of photos and added in the glowing lightsaber in each one. I used flash to create each shot by joining together all the corresponding frames and adjusting the time for each one.

The final video was in HD 720p and put together in Final Cut Express. Unfortunately, the original photos weren’t taken in HD because I was afraid of the large file sizes, so it’s not as good quality as it cdould have been.

After using iChat and Adium on my mac for so long, I decided to try the real Windows Live Messenger…

You may want to see the large size to get a closer look at its ugliness.

My photo of an alarm clock finally got over 1000 views on Flickr!

Because the audience of this is mainly web developers, and all web developers shouldn’t be using Internet Explorer, I decided to totally not support internet explorer, and have fun with new CSS styles! (This is a very rare opportunity)

My version is based on the old one (copy/paste code, then modified) which means I have released it under the MIT license.

It still has has a lot of work to do (like adding javascript tooltips on the help messages).

All it needs is 1 line of CSS (no dummy objects either!)

#theobject { position:absolute; top:0; bottom:0; left:0; right:0; margin:auto; }

After testing on all of my browsers, I tried it on browsershots.org, which lets you see screenshots of your webpage on many diferent browsers. You may have guessed, the only problem is that Internet Explorer ≤ 7 doesn’t support it (grr). The sort of good news is that Internet Explorer 8 (still beta) DOES support this, so this technique may be usable in the (hopefully not to distant) future.

You can view my test page.

Paparazzi uses WebKit, so it will look the same as in Safari. This means that if you want to take a picture of something you must log in for, such as a wordpress control panel, you can!

You can download Paparazzi from www.derailer.org/paparazzi/.

You may enter HTML/DHTML or CSS in any text field. Javascript is not allowed.
Do not use HTML/CSS to cover MySpace advertisements. 

Who wrote that? A real web-designer would know that DHTML and Javascript are the same thing. It also doesn’t say you can’t use “DHTML” to cover the advertisements (because they think it must be different to javascript ).

I hope to upload my website within a few days — maybe on the weekend.

This is the best panorama I’ve ever made. It is made up of 25 long exposure (2 sec) images. After hours of stitching and enhancing, I finally finished this 15000 pixel wide (yes! Fifteen-thousand) masterpiece.

I stitched it together with Autostitch on my 4 year old PC because the program isn’t free on Mac. It did something weird when I stitched all 25 photos at once. I then decided to stitch them in 4 smaller sets them stitch the 4 together. It finally worked in the end after about 4 hours of rendering, blending and option tweaking.

I don’t plan to do another one of these in a while!