Arcade Fire’s latest album, The Suburbs, is their best work yet. Beautiful piano work and loose lyrics keep me coming back for more. A brilliant album to put on while you’re basking in the sun on your apartment balcony.
Check it out here: http://www.arcadefire.com/the-suburbs/
I was recently building a jQuery-based slider for our upcoming website re-launch and needed to identify a series of elements numerically. Naturally I decided a number that auto-incremented would be ideal, so I build a testing stage to do just that.
After about 2 hours of testing and debugging to try find out why it wasn’t working, I changed the numerical ids to “block-one”, “block-two”, etc. This solved everything! It turns out that CSS does not allow elements’ ids to begin with a number. But classes are.
Who knew? Now you do. HTML ids cannot start with a number.
Adobe CS5 Master Collection
I feel like it was just 6 months ago since the last Adobe CS release, but they’ve just launched CS5! Hot on the tails of much debate on the Flash vs Apple, CS5 promises more flash to it’s Flash. Naturally there are always going to be improvements, but I’m not quite convinced there’s a great deal more on offer than the leap from CS3 to CS4.
The interface is the same, with only minor adjustments to some of the toolbar icons and the addition of CS Live! support. CS Live! is a tool Adobe has incorporated into the entire CS5 package which is designed to harness the collaborative power of the internet. Posting work-in-progress to others to collect feedback on a project’s direction is a tool which I can imagine many users finding very useful, however to me it adds no value.
BrowserLabs Browser Compatibility Testing
Dreamweaver has a new BrowserLab (http://browserlab.adobe.com) tool (which is available as a web-based application) and it enables web developers to test web pages in an array of browsers. The idea is hardly new but other testing solutions are messy, complicated and often expensive (requiring multiple machines and OS). As a developer I can appreciate the time it takes to test bugs and variations between browser engines and I welcome a seemless way to test browser compatibility.
Initially I was very skeptical, but after further inspection it actually seems that BrowserLab is generating images of each browser’s render, in much the same way that BrowserShots (http://browsershots.org) does. This means you’re getting a realistic representation of your website in each browser. Booyah!
64-Bit Support
Again, much of the Creative Suite 5 misses out on exploiting the growing list of 64-bit operating systems (OSX Leopard, OSX Snow Leopard, Windows Vista, Windows 7). The only 64-bit-native programs are Photoshop Extended, AfterEffects and Premier. Granted, these are the most processor-intensive programs but I certainly feel that Illustrator and Flash would benefit hugely from being 64-bit-native. Then again, I’m no software programmer.
What does it cost?
For the mac-daddy Master Edition you’ll be forking out over AU$3,900 for the full package, or over AU$1,300 for the upgrade (they curiously don’t have NZ$ prices). As always, Adobe CS is always going to be expensive, and for the last CS release (CS4) it was definitely worth it. To me, CS5 doesn’t bring enough new developments to warrant spending that kind of cash.
Summary
All told, CS5 is pretty, has a few nice new tweaks, hasn’t crashed on me (yet!) and is curiously trying to strengthen it’s Flash product with better reliability and special effects. However, all nicities aside, CS5 isn’t worth the dollars you’ll need to spend to upgrade. Download the trial (sure, if you’ve got 6gb of data cap to spare) and have a play for yourself (http://www.adobe.com/ap/downloads/).
New Balance Project 365
Make a simple website. Done.
Make it fun and interactive. Sweet.
Make a website that people visit every day of the year? Easier said than done.
Exposing your brand is the easy part – but making it memorable is a task that corporations spend millions of dollars on. The beauty of the internet age is that we can build websites that visitors themselves make the content for. Think of the competitions where you win a holiday – ‘Just write in your craziest holiday story to enter’ – by doing so you are contributing, creating and remembering. Often it’s remembering the crazy story that you made up to try win a trip to Fiji, but maybe, just maybe, it was remembering the brand running the promotion.
New Balance 365 is a website essentially promoting, well, New Balance. There’s no fancy new product. No new ‘climate  change awareness’ message. Not even a sale. Just a brand and a concept. This website encourages users to submit a short film and the best of every day gets a spot on the New Balance 365 calendar. All the film needs to do is portray a sense of balance. There are some quite creative films, so be sure to check it out!
When we see, feel or hear only half of an instant we use our other senses to fill in the blanks. Sometimes we can help fill in and manipulate those blanks with special effects. Check out this prime example of changing the scene by using only sound.