After following his Beijing Olympics photo blog back in August, I managed to convince my friend Jarek of a need for a proper place to present the pictures he takes. Without further ado, JarekJ.com is now at your service. It’s fully in Estonian, the way he likes it, but I’m sure his pictures speak the language everyone can easily understand.
I’d like to thank Jens for doing stuff with WordPress I could never pull off and staying patient while at it. We are both going to kick back now and enjoy some stunning photography and its stories.
— 15 November, 2008
We’ve spent a bunch of time with the posse on studying the ways to display photography online so it retains its proper colors. The conclusion we’ve come to for now is …
- finetune photos in Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom, Apple Aperture or any other photo editing software of your liking,
- take screenshots of them as they are when you’re happy with them,
- resize the screenshots (if you couldn’t take them 1:1 already) to a desired pixel size and optimize a .jpg files out of them, staying away from all the color profiling shit.
Considering all the color profile handling, operating system gamma and browser difference jazz going on at the moment, this is your easiest way out. For now, we hope. Yes, it’s not comfy, but at least the time and effort you’ve put into getting the colors of your photography right is justified in the most reasonable way possible.
— 13 November, 2008
Jaanus ponders on the disabled-looking entry field in Skype 4.0 for Windows beta version.
First, let me say that I actually would have liked to answer him on his blog but it required me to sign in. I really tried hard to think of ANY reason for doing that… but I couldn’t. Probably one of those ‘why-on-Earth…?’ mysteries. ;-)
Jokes aside though. The reason for applying blue-tinted subtle color to the input box background was to separate it better from the white instant messaging container background. You see, white on white simply does not work very often – it turned out the input box was not noticable enough. Using the standard Windows text box that only features a light blue single pixel border would have been even worse. Hence the inner shadow and a slightly tinted background.
Frankly, I agree that the end result is not perfect yet. I can assure you we’re working on making the input field better visible (and the entire instant messaging feature more IM-like) by using means other than painting the background.
— 27 October, 2008
After switching from Safari to Brent Simmons’ NetNewsWire for all my daily RSS needs, I have grown to like it more and more. The only thing I’m not a huge fan of is the application icon. So – in several vivid colors, as it’s in fashion this season, and free to download and use for everybody – here are my NetNewsWire replacement icons.
Download here. For replacing the original, I suggest CandyBar.
— 17 September, 2008
It’s not even funny how difficult it is to get iPhone webclip icons to render right. Trust me, I’ve designed a few icons before and producing iPhone one for this site has definitely proven to be the trickiest in terms of production.
After spending a solid three hours on this thing, I finally managed to lock down the way to produce almost crisp and pixel perfect web clip icon. Unless your design features a checkerboard pattern, I believe this is the closest you can get to taming them pixels on it.
A few notes.
First, forget about the numerous suggestions on the web to use a large image and have the iPhone OS scale it down for a smoother and nicer rendering. It might work for a photographic icon, but if you need it pixel perfect, stick to 1:1. Your playground is 59x60 pixels, so set the document canvas size to that.
Draw your icon inside the area of 57x56 pixels and keep the design aligned to the top and center on the canvas. iPhone rounds the corners for you and adds a single pixel white highlight to the top of the icon.
If you would like to create an outline to the icon, use an inset. Outline similar to iPhone’s Settings icon has an inset of 3 pixels from each side and rounded corners of 8 pixels (33 in Adobe Fireworks). Should you choose a different inset, simply increase or decrease the radius.
I’ve created Adobe Photoshop helper file with notes for you.
— 22 July, 2008