Currently viewing the category:
"Software"
So I finally figured out why my Macbook Pro was barfing and otherwise misbehaving when I plugged in an external display.
When I first got the MBP, I used the Migration Assistant to pull all my files over from my Hackintosh desktop. It did a pretty good job of pulling over all my apps, settings, and files. But it also pulled over some Hackintosh kexts for the mutant display drivers people use to get Hackintoshes to work.
So I found ‘em and removed ‘em. The MBP has been happy as a clam since then.
So a couple of weeks ago, Doug had an accident involving his wheeled garbage container. I would call it a ‘trash can’ but to me, ‘can’ implies something made of metal and most trash bins today aren’t.
Tommy drew the above to depict and reinterpret the actual events. Because I was in a rush, I scanned my version of the drawing and finished it in Photoshop.
What exactly happened to Doug’s fingers? You’ll have to ask him yourself. Tommy’s version gets the big picture correct, but is off in some of the details, like what Doug was wearing.
I found Mike Laughead’s site the other day, and loved the work. I also appreciated the description of his process.
For a good while I’ve been torn between styles that feature line work, and styles that are more shape and color based. Mike’s process bridges those competing aims well.
So I played around with his process in ArtRage the other night. In ArtRage, you have to make a stencil of a layer to ‘lock transparent pixels’ the way Photoshop does. Unfortunately, this means you’re looking through a transparent red field the whole time you’re painting in the lines.
Occasionally during the course of the many iterations we go through for our interface designs, someone will wander up and wonder, in passing, how well it will work for color blind people?
Because of this, we try to have at least two differentiators (e.g. color and shape) for most of our little icons.
But sometimes you need a way to proof and check your image. Vischeck has a very handy Photoshop plugin just for that purpose. And it’s free!
Notice the cyan-green range dropping out.
So the other day, Doug was migrating his files and settings to a new computer. When it came time to move his Photoshop workspaces he had carefully customized, he had a little trouble finding the actual file, since there’s no ‘export’ option and there are no hints internal to the application. So, based on a suspicion and a hunch, I dug around and found where they live.
Unless you’ve done some serious customization to the places Windows keeps things, your workspaces should be here :
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Adobe\Photoshop\9.0\Adobe Photoshop CS2 Settings\WorkSpaces
Replacing “USERNAME” with the name of your user account.
On the topics of applications, one of my new favorites is Launchy, a keystroke launcher. Sometimes typing is faster than pointing and clicking. That’s the idea here – press ALT+SPACE or whatever combination you set in the preferences and a little window pops up. As soon as you begin typing it begins guessing what you’re looking for based on the items in your Start Menu or whatever watched folder you’ve assigned.
It’s especially handy if your Start Menu is a mess, like mine used to be.
ColorPic is a handy color grabber. It’ll pick colors from any window, wherever your mouse pointer is pointing. Not perfect, but handy and free. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to save the palettes in any conventional palette format, but in the app’s directory there’s an XML file if you need some portability for the palettes you create in ColorPic.
Get it here.
On the topic of palettes though, Adobe’s Kuler Flash app is great.
