Six Snappy Snap Apps for Mac
After much debating about purchasing the recent MacHeist 3 Bundle I broke down in the last 30 minutes of the promotion to order the bundle of software advertised as 14 Mac apps worth around $500 for $49. To be honest I didn't know much about MacHeist or many of the apps they were promoting but the thought of trying out Espresso among the mix of apps appealed greatly. To my delight, it wasn't Espresso that captivated me. Instead, an unassuming screen capturing utility called LittleSnapper caused me to forget the other 13 applications in the set.
There's also been a fair amount of buzz about Skitch lately. The combo of the two got me thinking about what else might be out there for capturing, editing, saving and sharing images. At the urging of Peyton Crump, our fearless Design Director from our Durham, NC office, I took to task comparing the two apps. Soon enough, I realized a comparison among a wider breadth of apps might be useful. Thus, this post was born, a comparison of six screen capturing utilities. From a bare minimum of features to some truly groundbreaking ones, these tools are listed by order of complexity (features not ease of use): Screengrab!, Paparazzi!, Web Snapper, Skitch, LittleSnapper, and Evernote
Please note this less of a comprehensive review of the products than it is a glance at some useful aspects of each.
Advice, Trends, and Resources for People Entering Web Careers in 2009
Many have us have spoken to people who will soon be entering careers in web design related fields this year, and this led us to have discussions with each other about what we thought was important for those people to know. Each of us had different advice to share based on each of our own unique perspectives, so we thought it would be helpful to put it into a blog post. Some of the questions we wanted to respond to were:
- What trends have you noticed in the past year?
- What advice do you have for people entering the field?
- What are some resources to help people get started?
Brian Talbot
Advice: Don’t Grow Up Just Yet
Many of the students I’ve taught and worked with want to hit this field’s ground running, but tend to be confused and overwhelmed by all of the various titles, processes and disciplines involved in working on the web these days. If you’re feeling this way, remember that you don’t have to pick a definitive career path or niche in the web just yet (if ever)! Instead learn about and try all of these disciplines as your work allows. You can always dive deeper into those that really strike a chord. Until then, don’t sweat those fancy terms or titles too much. And here’s a secret, some of the strongest web professionals are “generalists” instead of “specialists” in a particular area.
Advice: Work Smarter
Find ways to automate repetitive tasks for yourself – its usually an enjoyable problem to solve for yourself and will reward you with more efficiency. Finding and tweaking a series of applications and services that help you achieve is crucial. Some of my favorite set-ups include:
- LittleSnapper + Dropbox + A Dedicated Flickr Account = A quick and great way to organize (with tags) design inspiration across multiple computers and to share online.
- TextMate + Some Awesome Bundles + Your own templates + TextMate Projects = The start to a lean and mean front-end development area (for extra points, dive into things like Shell Variables)
- Delicious Subscriptions RSS + Delicious Network RSS + Flickr Design Inspiration Sets and Groups + select blog/site RSS Feeds all in Google Reader or Feedstitch = A good, portable start to having your ear to the ground on what’s happening around you (for extra points, you could add Twitter to this in EventBox.)
Doug Avery
Trend: Tuning Out
I’ve heard more and more designers this year talk about cutting back on blogs, Flickr feeds, and magazine subscriptions, in an attempt to to overcome the noise of “inspiration.” Sometimes, consuming design is a convenient excuse for procrastination, so be careful about how much you’re watching vs. how much you’re doing.
Advice: Try It
You can have a huge stack of Readymades and an RSS reader full of A List Apart articles, but if you’ve never built any of the stuff they’re talking about, you’re missing out. Take some time to play around with new ideas, techniques, or plugins whenever you can. It’s fun, it relieves stress, and you often learn more than you expected to.
Resources: Firebug & Designers Toolbox
For buildout, you should know about Firebug, the smart little tool that makes diagnosing layout woes a snap (and has the muscle to fix much bigger problems down the road). And in general, you should know about Designers Toolbox, a one-stop shop for print sizes, templates, web element PSDs…you name it.
Continue reading "Advice, Trends, and Resources for People Entering Web Careers in 2009"
Making Quicker Interface Decisions With Design Patterns
A Brief Explanation of Design Patterns:
As web design matures and evolves, the collection of web design best practices grows with it. There are best practices for readability, markup, accessibility, usability, on and on and on. As designers, we look to keep our design approaches creative and fresh while at the same time knowing when not to screw with these established practices. These "practices," especially in the realm of user interface design, are often referred to as "design patterns."
A couple of the many definitions for a design pattern:
- A generally repeatable solution to a commonly occurring problem.
- An optimal solution to a common problem within a specific context.
Common user interface questions for which design patterns are well established:
- When I want to filter content on a page, what are the most usable approaches I can take?
- If I want to rotate through features, images, or news articles on a page, what are some proven solutions?
- What are the most effective ways to include error messaging in my web forms?
- What are the most common approaches to designing rating systems?
You get the idea. These, and hundreds of questions like them, have been hammered out, time-tested, and answered by many designers, developers, and ultimately, web users. They may get tweaked, and they will improve and evolve, but the most solid current solutions are well documented and readily (and visually) available for your perusing.
Solid Design Pattern Resources:
Fix It Fast: Rapid IE6 CSS Debugging
IE6: We all hate it, and we all have to work with it (well, most of us). The most frustrating phase of buildout is often the final struggle with this Browser From Hell, but maybe (just maybe) we're struggling too much. When I help friends with IE6 bugs, I'm sometimes surprised at how long they've been stuck on a single problem, or how they've painted themselves into a corner with hacks and fixes. Then I remember that I used to be like that, grinding away for hours at simple float issues, or pulling my hair out over list spacing.
Why do we have so much trouble learning to debug for IE6?
We don't know! There are a lot of bugs out there, and it takes a while before you can intuitively spot them. If we can't identify a behavior, it's easy to throw up our hands and say "Augh, it's just BROKEN!"
We don't want help! Many a designer has spent hours on a problem simply because they didn't ask for help or Google it. With a language as straightforward as CSS, you can eventually solve most problems just by blindly changing stuff (over and over), but changing stuff doesn't mean you're learning.
We're not sure how to start! Debugging is a weird process: At any point, you could come across THE SOLUTION, which would be GREAT, and it always seems like it's JUST AROUND THE CORNER. This constant bait-and-switch means that we don't settle into a solid process for debugging, which, in the end, means debugging can take much longer than it should.
So, is there a way to shortcut through some of the hair-pulling and learn good debugging right from the start? MAYBE. The following is my cycle of preventing, catching, and fixing bugs in IE6. If I could, I would email it to myself in 2004, but until I figure out how to do that, posting it here will have to do:
Design Share 2: More With Less
Delivering on our promise to make the Design Share into a series we recently wrapped up the second event. We stuck with our original format… mostly. Each presenter was still tasked with a 5 minute limit on their presentations with just under 10 minutes slated for question and answer. In short, we rotated speakers every 15 minutes. Based on feedback from the previous event we reduced the number of presenters from 6 to 4 resulting in an hour worth of presentations. At the end of the hour we added a 20 minute, panel-style Q&A. All in all, making for a nice sampling of work in a single evening.
2009