I get these monthly newsletters from Adobe that tell all about the upcoming education events.  It drives me nuts that a company like Adobe, that makes such amazing products for digital design, and employs so many industry leaders and experts, would continually commit such an obnoxious oversight on their text reflection.

Do you see it?  The tail on the letter ‘y’ does not work with their reflection effect.  The reflection effect would lead you to believe that all the letters up until the ‘y’ are sitting evenly on a glossy black surface.  Once you get to the ‘y’ the effect is broken because since it has a tail, it couldn’t possibly be sitting in line with the other letters.  If it were, it would oddly be sitting higher and the very bottom of the letter would be in line with the very bottom of the other letters.  Which would make it look more like FebruarY.  They further complicate the issue by allowing the portion of the letter ‘y’ that is in line with the other letter bottoms to reflect… does that mean the tail is laying flat on this reflective surface?

They could fix the issue by using a different typeface that allows the bottom of all letters to align or they could use all caps in the current typeface. Or of course, they could eliminate the reflection effect altogether.

I know I am being a bit nit-picky but this has been going on for months and months and from a company like Adobe whose customers and employees are in the digital design, typography, web design, etc… professions, it just makes no sense.

There, I feel better now.

Gregg – http://richterwebdesign.com

Last Friday (May 7th) I took the day off from work and did what I am sure a lot of you do, went to a day long technology conference.  Yes, I know how to party.  But not just any tech conference, this was Flash Camp… put on by the good people over at Universal Mind.

When I signed up for Flash Camp, I had no idea what to expect.  Mostly for some reason, I pictured a day long session of going through various tutorials in a classroom type setting.  This was not the case.  Rather, the entire day was listening to a series of speakers on a dizzying variety of topics.  In fact, I and every other person in attendance (60-ish) could have made it through the entire day without our precious Mac’s (& I think I saw a few PC’s too, this is Seattle).

Nerds

The event was held at Adobe’s Seattle office complex and the parts of the complex I saw were awesome… outstanding venue!  And that’s saying a lot… my day job is in the Starbucks HQ building and it’s pretty freakin’ sweet too.

From there, the speakers came, one after the next.  Some were good, some were not so good and if you are interested in the specifics, here is a list of speakers and topics.  A strange thing happened though… the speakers and topics that were the most interesting and engaging had mostly nothing to do with Flash at all.  In fact, the guys who talked about User Experience & Design were probably the best of the day.  Two stood out, Carl Smith & Christian Saylor.  The most valuable pieces of information I got out of this day long session came from these two guys and their approach and advice to design, website usability, and how to properly engage both your customers (as a designer / developer) and your site visitors.

I’ll end the post with this.  I am not sure if Flash Camp was actually worth my $150-ish entry fee + day of vacation time (I only get 5 weeks per year).  However, they did offer a little piece of compensation in return.  Door prizes.  There were 5 or 6 door prizes to be had.  The catch… you had to stay until the very last minute to be eligible to get one of these door prizes, and well, I happened to be one of the lucky winners.  And just what were the door prizes you ask… well, there was some cool stuff…

#1 – Adobe CS5 Master Collection (value = $2600)
#2 – Adobe Flash Builder (value = $700)

and some not so cool stuff…

#3 – #6 A Universal Mind Hat (value = the pain and misery of having come so close to winning one of the 1st two prizes).  Below is the outcome.

My New Hat

Gregg – http://richterwebdesign.com

For any non-web developers that may be reading this, we (web dev’s) dedicate hours to the pursuit of building websites so that they look the same across IE, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc (lynx anyone?).  Take that to another level and understand that different versions of these browsers also render pages different.  A user viewing a web page in IE8 will likely have a vastly different experience in IE6… oh don’t get me started on IE6 and this of course doesn’t even cover the complete page redesigns for the various mobile devices out there.

However, until that magical day comes, there are some cool (free) tools, available at the ready.

1st up, Adobe’s Browser Lab: https://browserlab.adobe.com.  Now, I just started using this one and here is what I like so far about it:

1. Load Time. Once I enter the site and browser of my choice, the load time for the website is only a couple seconds.
2. Zoom. The ability to magnify up to 400% and get a great look at the pixels in a page on the browser of your choice.
3. Rulers. Get pixel measurements in the browser.
4. Side by side view. View 2 different browsers next to one another.
5. OS. View a browser in Mac’s OS X or Windows XP.
6. Delay. You can set the number of seconds to wait before taking the screen shot.  So you can wait for any Flash animation or scripting that is manipulating the page on load to complete.
7. Onion Skin. This allows you to take 2 browsers and lay them on top of one another so you can get a true representation of how the pages render differently.

OK, and if I had to find something to complain about:

1. OS. Need to expand the choices please.
2. Browser selection. Would like to see Opera included.
3. 1 Up View. Why does this left-align when onion skin doesn’t?  Maybe I’m missing a setting somewhere.

Another option out there is the Browser Shots org: http://browsershots.org/.  What I like:

1. Browser selection. It’s big.
2. Specifications. You can set screen size, turn JS off/on, and other great options.
3. Side by side view (kind of). Once you receive your results.  They all populate in handy little side by side icons that you can go between to your hearts content.

Complaints:

1. Browser selection. Umm, why isn’t IE6 an option when 4, 5, 7 and 8 are?
2. Speed. It’s slow.  And if you start to use this site frequently, or load the same site multiple times, you seem to get throttled.
3. View. It’s 3 clicks to view something in full size and no side by side, or onion skin comparison.

Now of course, before you deploy a new website you’ll need to actually test the functionality in all major browsers prior to launching, and neither of these tools will help you do that.  Personally, I do it the old fashioned way (only way I think), loading the website across multiple OS’s and multiple browsers and testing the website end t0 end.  But during the design and develop process, these 2 browser tools are a great resource.

Happy browsing

Gregg – http://richterwebdesign.com

Found this site the other day and it’s pretty freakin’ sweet.  The gist is basically a huge database of user submitted color pallettes.  You can ‘favorite’ them or download them as well.  What I like is the ability to search on a hexidecimal color code and up pops a whole range of pallettes with your selected color.

All of this comes to us from the good people at Adobe.

Check it out at http://kuler.adobe.com/

Kuler Snapshot

Gregg – http://richterwebdesign.com