Alex Hardy

Pixelmator is available now to buy (there is a 30-day trial). This is slightly later than originally projected, but that’s life in the world of software

I remarked in a previous post that this application looked like a possible alternative to Photoshop for the casual user or designer on a tight budget. I guess it’s time to find out if that’s true.

For $59 you can’t go far wrong.

In a riveting bit of non-news, Apple and Microsoft have extended their deal which allows Apple to supply core Windows fonts (such as Times New Roman, Arial and Verdana) with Mac OS X. In a joint statement the two companies said:

Apple customers, developers and web designers can safely specify fonts knowing that their documents, presentations and web pages will appear as they are meant to be seen on screen and in print.

While this is obviously good news (ie: any other decision would be unthinkable), I can’t help but feel like an opportunity has been missed. With Windows Vista only just released, and Mac OS X Leopard almost here, is consistency through mediocrity the best we can expect in the year 2007?

Must we resort to CSS image replacement or sIFR to create a simple heading?

Granted, Verdana is OK (at small sizes) and Georgia is nice too. Arial however is a sorry substitute for Helvetica and in widespread use simply because it was cheaper. Instead of a handful of “web safe” fonts, why don’t we have hundreds? Surely billion dollar corporations can take a font licensing fee on the chin to elevate design across the web? Helvetica, Gill Sans and Futura would be a good start…

While we’re dreaming of changes let’s ban Comic Sans

I’m pleased to see two great web development applications get the recognition they deserve at this year’s Apple Design Awards.

Coda 1.0

Coda by Panic takes the award for Best Mac OS X User Experience:

Coda is a unique web development environment that offers a complete file browser (both locally and remotely), publishing, full-featured text editor, WebKit-based preview, CSS editor with visual tools, full-featured terminal, built-in reference material, and much more. Coda is the Mac’s first one-window Web development application that integrates numerous modules into one cohesive user experience.

CSSEdit 2.5

CSSEdit by MacRabbit wins Best Mac OS X Developer Tool:

CSSEdit has a polished and focused Aqua interface that sports flexible tabs, intuitive visual editors, and exhibits extreme attention to detail. CSSEdit offers real-time styling for absolutely any web page using technologies in a variety of ways.

If you are a Mac user and you make websites, I highly recommend that you check both of these out.

Meanwhile the runner-up award for best game goes to Wacky Mini Golf, reminding us that the Mac games market is still very dry. The EA and Id announcements haven’t come a moment too soon. Maybe the Mac will get Crysis. Fingers crossed…

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.

I mentioned in a previous post about Mint 2 and Google Analytics (GA) that I had signed up to the beta programme for Reinvigorate. My golden ticket arrived a few days ago so here are my first impressions as promised.

Reinvigorate is a browser-based analytics system. It appears to occupy a middle ground between Mint and GA. It has the following characteristics:

• Like both Mint and GA, it tracks visitor activity via a JavaScript include.
• It is externally hosted (like GA).
• It is free (like GA), as opposed to Mint, which is $30.
• As its Wikipedia page states, Reinvigorate is a one-man project (like Mint).
• Reinvigorate appears to track statistics in real time (like Mint) or at least fairly close. This is unlike GA where there is a significant delay of hours from visitor data being recorded to becoming available. As demand on their systems increases one should expect this to be affected.
• Reinvigorate aims to be visually pleasing, in a similar manner to Mint.

Pros

Reinvigorate is undeniably better looking than the current version of GA. A significantly redesigned Google Analytics is in the process of being rolled out to users, so that lead is being narrowed. Mint remains the slickest of the three.

I like the colour scheme and the summary dashboard is a handy touch, if a bit sparse. The new version of GA pulls more valuable information to the surface.

The 3D pie charts are nice. Mmmm pie

Cons

The interface isn’t without its rough edges, and suffers from information overload in places. Some of the visualisation tools are too complicated and worse still, inadequately explained. A polynomial chart? Wossat?

There are no stats for Flash versions. This is important information that any web designer is going to want. I’m sure this will be added before long, but at the moment is a bit of a howler. The lack of a plugin architecture akin to Mint’s “peppers” isn’t a bad thing per se but it places the burden solely with its developer to stay on top of the needs of the userbase.

Amusingly, it uses Google Maps to display geolocation data.

The most troubling aspect for me is that Reinvigorate existed years ago and closed down, reappearing this year. Since it’s free and its developer surely doesn’t have Google’s financial resources, I wonder how (read: IF) it is going to sustain itself. Should I trust my valuable data to a service that may be here today, gone tomorrow?

I’m going to try all three systems in parallel for the next couple of months. I’ll then make a final decision on which one I’m going to stick with.

[UPDATE] I just logged into Google Analytics and the new interface is live for me. Time to have a look around…

One of the best things about small developers is that they can be more responsive to their customers. The year-long waits for progress from the likes of Adobe, Apple and Microsoft do not apply. Coda has been available for a little over a week, and already we have an update.

Delivered by a slick little auto-update mechanism, we get the expected round of bug fixes and some welcome new features. Minor interface niceties and a useful keyboard shortcut to publish your changes (I’d been wishing for this myself). There are also new language modes for ActionScript, JSP-HTML and Smarty templates.

ActionScript support is a pleasant surprise; a feature I have found useful in Dreamweaver when working on Symphony. I figured that Panic would consider this to be outside Coda’s scope as a web code editor, but it seems not

Two more reasons for me to stick with DW bite the dust. This is a program to watch.

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.

Having considered the options, we just bought an upgrade license (for me) and a new full license (for Ian) to CSSEdit 2.5.

It really is a fantastic piece of work, made doubly so by the fact that it is the work of just one developer. It makes a total mockery of Dreamweaver’s CSS tools and outdoes Coda and Style Master. At least for now

Panic have celebrated their 10^th birthday and released Coda in time to submit it for the Apple Design Awards. As a long-time user of Transmit and fan of Panic, I didn’t waste any time in downloading the trial.

In a nutshell, Coda aims to smoothen your web development workflow by replacing your HTML editor, CSS editor and FTP client with one slick, unified app. It’s inexpensive at only $99 (£49.50).

My own process comprises of Dreamweaver 8, CSSEdit 1 and the aforementioned Transmit. I’m very fond of both CSSEdit and Transmit, with DW being my main stumbling block to adopting Coda.

I use only a fraction of DW’s bloat functionality. I don’t use the sites list, behaviours, FTP functionality (after a couple of bad experiences I don’t trust it)… I use it as little more than a HTML/PHP editor with colour coding and predictive input.

DW finds itself on my Mac more for the company it keeps than its own merits. I need Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash and Adobe CS3 is the most economical way to buy them. DW comes in the box, so I augment it with CSSEdit and Transmit and get to work. Ironically this means that buying Coda would be an additional expense.

If a new tool or approach makes you more productive then $99 is nothing, so I’ll note a few of my observations. I base my opinion on the functionality I need. I manage quite happily with my software trio and don’t dream of one do-it-all app, quite the opposite in fact! My favourite thing about shareware is that the best apps do one job well, rather than trying to be a jack of all trades…

Eye candy and other cute features

• The little sticky pages that represent sites are sweet, as are the 3D effects that open them. I’d like the option to turn this transition off, because I’m sure the novelty will quickly wear off.
• Tabbed windows are most welcome, but CSSEdit’s implementation is better.
• Coda remembers the state you left your project in (ie: what files were open), a nice touch.

Searching

• Search CSS in visual editing mode filters the selector list in a similar manner to CSSEdit. Disappointingly it doesn’t work in edit mode though, you have to call up the Find panel. This feels clunky.
• Search Files looks only at file names (not content) which isn’t terribly useful. It only operates in the directory that you are viewing.
• Find & Replace only works within a document or a selection. DW can also operate on all open documents, selected files, a specific folder or the entire site.
• I’d like to be able to save Find & Replace operations. I use saved F&Rs in DW to expand and collapse XML files for a Flash app I work on.

HTML editing

• Just about everything I want is here, good job Panic!
• It would be nice to be able to browse for images as you embed them.
• DW is aware of the classes and ids in your CSS files and suggests them as you code. I’d like to see Coda implement something similar.

CSS editing

• The visual tools are well thought out, but I couldn’t find a way to resize the selector list. I have one pane wasting space and one that I can’t fully see
• No simple way to add comments.
• I miss CSSEdit’s ingenious system for defining ’subfolders’ within a CSS file.

FTP

• Panic have incorporated their new Transmit Turbo engine for whizzy-fast FTP.
• The Publish All button is a cool feature for when you’ve updated multiple files and want to upload them all.
• I’ll have to experiment with this a bit to overcome my misgivings. I tend to feel like I’m losing control of my files…

If I was a freelancer on a tight budget I’d seriously consider Coda. I’ll be sticking with my current toolbox for the time being, but I look forward to future versions.

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