Alex Hardy

Aidas and Saulius Dailide have announced a consumer level image editing application for Mac OS X Tiger called Pixelmator. It is expected to ship in late July for $59.

It’s built on an array of Tiger technologies including Core Image, Spotlight and Automator. It should provide a convincing demonstration of the power of these technologies. Core Image in particular seems to be quite untapped, except to add occasional bells and whistles.

Although the application has been referred to as vaporware (due to it’s unreleased status) it’s worth bearing in mind that the Dailide brothers are founders of Jumsoft, another mac shareware company that has delivered some pretty nice apps. Money in particular springs to mind.

I think their credentials are strong enough not only to believe that the application is real, but that it will be worth a download.

In fact, you can find a video of Pixelmator on The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

I find it encouraging to see that there are still developers who have the courage to try and carve a niche for themselves, in the face of intimidating competition. Pixelmator may find a loyal following among people who would love to dabble in image editing, but can’t justify the expense of larger apps.

With its ability to import Photoshop documents, it could even present a viable option for web designers on a tight budget. Team it up with Coda, and you have a decent web development toolbox for about £80. That’s a bit of a bargain.

Freehand is dead, which isn’t a great surprise. Adobe weren’t likely to maintain both Illustrator and Freehand as two applications for the same job. It’s a shame for the enthusiastic and vocal Freehand user community, but life goes on…

… Which brings me to another of Adobe’s unwanted stepchildren: Director. Still alive, but buried behind the “see all products” link on Adobe.com.

I vividly remember one of my first multimedia design lectures at university in 1996. The tutor told us to ready ourselves, and launched Director. The stage, score, cast and scripts panels appeared, as did a sinking feeling in everyone’s stomach. At this point I’d never owned a computer and only dabbled slightly with Photoshop at college. This new app looked like my worst nightmare.

I went back to halls, stopping at the uni bookshop to buy Director 4.0 Academic. I called my folks, and told them that waiting until the second year to buy a mac was out of the question. I needed one right away.

A project or two later, and I was comfortable with it. A complex tool, but it gave up its secrets easily. From simple slideshows to shockwave games, complex applications and CD-ROMs, I used Director for several years.

The only grievance I ever had with Director was its quirky scripting language “Lingo” where common concepts had unfamiliar names (eg: Director calls an array a list) and its unhelpful help. It was quite tricky to migrate to Flash. I found it easier to liken Flash to Adobe After Effects than to Director.

These days, I don’t use Director at all. Flash has assumed its place in my toolbox. That isn’t the case for everyone though – there is still a busy community there too.

Many apps have a storied life of development, acquisition and reincarnation. Flash’s history can be traced to a small company called FutureWave and a little app called SmartSketch (later FutureSplash Animator, Macromedia Flash, then Adobe Flash).

If Adobe doesn’t want to own Director and take it forward, they should sell it to someone who does.

This is a well-worn issue by now, but I thought I’d throw my two cents worth in.

The American list price for Adobe CS3 Web Premium is $1599, which is £798 (give or take a few pennies). Yet mysteriously it is £1404.12 (inc VAT) in the UK! What’s even stranger is that if you select the ‘download’ option instead of ’ship the box to me’ on their website, it costs £1,445.95.

Let me recap: It costs more to download it than to get the boxed version!

In the UK we’re quite used to being overcharged. They don’t call it rip off Britain for nothing, but do the sums for yourself. You could book a return flight to America to buy it and have a night out with the change!

Adobe’s excuse for this appalling behaviour is the cost of localisation. Yet I look around my Adobe apps and find US English with ‘color’, ’stylize’ etc. So that is clearly a bare-faced lie. Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen states:

Our customer is not typically price sensitive. The cost of the tool isn’t what’s critical – it’s the productivity and what their output can be. They want to pay for value as long as we deliver innovative features that allow them to be more productive and creative.

Which sounds to me like “screw you guys, we’ll charge whatever we want.”

In an ideal world, designers and photographers across Europe would exercise the only power we have as customers and boycott CS3. Since that’s unlikely to happen, we can at least sign the petition on the matter.

It seems to me that Adobe has lost the plot and the acquisition of Macromedia was detrimental to the industry. They’ve turned from a company that cared about creativity to a fat, arrogant monopolist that should be taken down a peg or two.

A nice little victory for people power

The BBC’s plans for the iPlayer were put on hold earlier this year after its regulators, the BBC Trust, asked the corporation to look at whether the iPlayer should be platform agnostic.

As the article states, support for Mac and other systems will come after the initial launch, but better late than never. As someone who signed the petition on this issue I’d like to thank the BBC for responding to the public’s wishes.

BBC to open up archive for trial

The very talented Jo has done a new caricature of me for this website. Personally, I think it’s a little on the flattering side – more reminiscent of me last May when I was fit as a whippet. Still, it gives me some motivation to get back to the gym in preparation for this year’s Manchester Run.

I’ll be rattling the collection box on here very soon, so start putting your pennies aside. I’m raising money for the Cystic Fibrosis Trust this time.

… is available as a webcast.

After a glowing introduction by GDC Executive Director Jamil Molidina, Miyamoto steps up to deliver “A Creative Vision”. It’s almost comical to see the audience cheering for this humble little man who honestly, could afford to dress more smartly. He greets the audience in English, before reverting to his native Japanese.

Miyamoto discusses Nintendo’s corporate vision, to take risks in the name of expanding the marketplace. To challenge the negative perception of gaming and gamers that exists.

He also discusses his own guiding vision and principles. His mental focus is on the imagined look of pleasure on a gamer’s face, rather than gameplay specifics. He describes his humourously dubbed “wife-o-meter” where he uses his wife’s interest level to gauge whether his games will have popular appeal.

Having never played games in the past, she is now warming to them since discovering games like Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training, Animal Crossing, Wii Sports and the Mii creation tools on Wii.

The Mii tools demonstrate another of his principles: tenacity. The concept has been a pet project through many failed implementations all the way back to the N.E.S disk system in Japan. So you might say he’s been working on it for twenty years.

He wraps up with the newly released footage of Super Mario Galaxy.

It’s a rare and fascinating opportunity to see a master of his art like Miyamoto talk at length about what drives him. His simple, honest approach to giving his audience pleasure and new experiences speaks to creative fields beyond his own.

Joe Trotter, in post entitled “God I Hate WordPress”, writes:

I have a penchant for knowing - just, well, knowing - when a blog or website is powered by Wordpress. You know? Way too many links in the sidebar or header, usually styled the same way? Info all over the place? A candidly modified Kubrick theme? Referring to static pages as, omigod, Pages?

*Looks around my blog design. Hmm.*

WordPress sites tend to be a bit simple and standardised in layout, but I would have said the same of CSS-based sites in general a couple of years ago. At the time, I remembered the learning curve and put this down to designers getting to grips with new techniques.

WordPress, like Movable Type is just a database and a set of tools for content creation and presentation. It can’t be held accountable for the shortcomings of a site’s design. That would just be a poor workman blaming his tools.

Templates also have their place. They allow people who lack the design skills, or perhaps simply the time, to get a site up and running. I have valued my first few months using the standard Kubrick theme because it was a discovery phase. It removed the barrier to writing, and allowed the content of my site to develop organically.

When I released this design for my site, I made no bones about the fact that this is Version 1.0 and that I had been modest in my attempts to customise the standard layout. As I observe trends in what I choose to write about, future redesigns of this site will support that to greater degree.

If Trotter chooses to abandon WordPress as a backlash against its ubiquity, I think that’s a bizarre decision. If as he says, he seriously aspires to have a blog as highly regarded as John Gruber’s Daring Fireball, it will be the quality of his writing that achieves that. It will have nothing to do with his blogging platform of choice.

Brent’s post on site stats vs. generally accepted “truth” got me thinking.

With any project you have to begin somewhere, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable in 2007 to design a site like Refresh for 1024×768+. The minority who are still using screens at 800×600 will just have to scroll a little bit – something I’m sure they’re quite used to doing.

That’s my judgment call, and on my head be it. But what about down the line? What if a year into the site’s life my stats tell me another story? I usually design webpages from a Photoshop template that I created some time ago. It shows the available space at 800×600 without scrolling (which I have determined to be 760×420), and at 1024×768 (960×590). I think it’s time to update that template.

I looked at my Mint stats, specifically the Real Estate pepper, which lists a breakdown of the window widths visitors are using. Now, the stats for my site are immature (because the site is so new), but this post is about the exercise…

I expanded the document size to cover a screen resolution of 1600×1200, added my space markers as before, then blacked out the background. I drew in blocks of white (punching out the smaller blocks from each layer) which indicate the listed dimensions in Real Estate. I then set their opacity to reflect the usage.

What comes out is a rather interesting little snapshot of the actual use of my site, compared against the spaces I might choose to work into.

Download a GIF version (50k) or the layered Photoshop file (120K ZIP).

I think it would be illuminating to do this exercise every three months, and use it to inform redesigns of a website. I’m also tempted to make a Flash version that displays live stats from a Mint database.

Web design and development is a world of endless debates on what is the best (or perhaps the least bad) way of achieving your goals. One such topic is screen space, and arises as we work on the Refresh design.

800×600? Higher? Fixed-width? Fluid? etc…

I’ll cut to the chase: we’re going to design the site in fixed-width format for resolutions of 1024×768 (1024px) and up. This decision has certain implications, and isn’t one that I take lightly. I’ll attempt to explain myself…

A current rule of thumb says that somewhere between five and ten percent of web users are on resolutions of 800×600 (800px) or less. Some would say that’s rather a lot of people to inconvenience by making your website wider than their window.

I would say that this is a matter of optimising graphic design, not accessibility. Requiring the minority on small screens to scroll horizontally a little bit does not make the site inaccessible to them.

Furthermore, in my experience and opinion it doesn’t necessarily follow that a site’s traffic will reflect that general statistic.

Under most circumstances I’d err on the side of caution and recommend a design that was no wider than 760 pixels. This fits 800px with an allowance for scrollbars and an amount of screen furniture. That is what I have done on this website.

Stephen and I have formed a clear idea of who we perceive the audience to be for this site. At least a large part of it is people very much like ourselves. We have also considered how to approach marketing it and the kind of recognition we want it to gain. The probability that users will be on 800px seems to vary from merely unlikely to practically inconceivable.

I think it’s fair to say that we have reached the painful part of the design process. The part where you are tantalisingly close to arriving at a design that you are very happy with, but feel far away at the same time. At this point a re-evaluation of previously assumed constraints and a fresh pair of eyes may revolutionise the project.

I’ve received Ste’s fifth concept design, done some work of my own and fired it back. He’s going on holiday from Thursday and will be back in a couple of weeks. I plan on relaxing too. I think that when we get back together we’ll both be re-energised and the look-and-feel will come together quickly. Once a few key sections of the site are visualised it’s full steam ahead.

My friend and colleague Stephen Meehan has posted a set of logo designs for his rebrand of D3 Creative.

Some of them are reminiscent of ideas that fell by the wayside when developing the Refresh logo, but just because they weren’t chosen for that project doesn’t mean good ideas should go to waste!

I know that Ste would appreciate some feedback on his work, so head on over there and give him your 2¢ worth.