72Circles

Two Faced

2007-07-16T18:10:31Z

The other day I picked up a copy of Two Faced: The Changing Face of Portraiture and I have to say it's fantastic, definitely one of the best art and design books I have bought in a long time. There are so may different styles and artists that you can't help but be inspired. The book is beautifully designed and features portraits from artists, designers, photographers and illustrators. I can't say enough good things about it, so go and buy yourself a copy.

IE 6 & 7 with Snapshots

2007-07-08T14:40:55Z

Over the weekend I have been reinstalling Windows XP under parallels and I came across a great way to get full install of IE6 and IE7 running on the same Mac system. Parallels was recently updated to version 3 and a new feature called Snapshots has been added.

"Snapshots instantly saves the state of your virtual machine, bulletproofing your VM from mishaps and system crashes."

So Snapshots basically allows you to save the state of your computer and return to that state at any given time. Here how to take advantage of that feature to run full installs of both IE6 and IE7. 1. Create a clean install of windows XP so that you have IE6 installed. I would also recommend downloading and installing Firefox 1. 2. Under parallels click Actions ->Run Snapshot Manager 3. Create a Snapshot named IE6 4. Download IE7 and firefox 2 and install both 5. Create another snapshot named IE7 Thats it your done, now you can easily switch between the two full versions of Internet Explorer. Click on the image below to view a video which shows the process of switching from one state to the next. Sorry for the terrible quality.

Calling all Coda's

2007-04-23T19:48:52Z

About a month ago I was looking around Twitter when I came across a tweet by Jon Hicks. The tweet contained a link to sign up to beta test, an application created by Mac software developers Panic. I signed up but quickly forgot all about it. A week later an email landed in my inbox containing an application called Coda, since then Coda has had a permanent place in my dock. Coda is simply a web developers dream. If you code for the web you know that in order to get the job done your going to need several applications. For me these applications consist of CSSEdit, Transmit, TextWrangler and Safari. Well now I normally just have one application running, Coda. Coda is a one window web development application that will allow you to edit, upload and preview your web page by simply moving from tab to tab. Today Coda was released for everyone to enjoy so go download a copy. I have been beta testing Coda for a while now and it has all the foundations of a great application. Coda is the most stable and fully 1.0 application I have seen in a long time. When you first download the application you may think it looks good but it's not until you fully customise the way in which the windows are split, that you can start to enjoy the true power of it. Take a look at some of the screen shots on the Panic website to get an idea of the ways you can split each panel. After you have customised the Interface to your own needs you should find that Coda really does speed up your workflow. At the moment I am half way through a full switch to Coda for all my web development. But there are still a couple of features that the CSS panel lacks which stop me from switching completely. 1) The lack of folders in the CSS styles editor, this has become a feature that I have become so dependent on while working within CSSedit. It is a small feature but one that really speeds up my workflow. 2) The other feature that I would like to see added is the option to control focus of the editor, using the CSS WYSIWYG editor. Currently if you split the CSS WYSIWYG editor and the text based editor you can get something that resembles that of CSSedit. The problem comes when you click on a style in the CSS editor, the focus of the text based editor does not move. This means that you are left to scroll and look manually for each style. As Coda matures I hope to see these features added. At the moment I am trying to use it for all my web development but every now and again I still find myself opening CSSedit. As it stands for me it has replaced Transmit, TextWrangler and Safari but it is going to have to do that little bit more to stop me from lunching CSSedit. Overall it has improved my workflow and I can't wait to see what the guys at Panic have planned for it next.