Monday, October 29, 2007

Leopard

John Siracusa's Leopard review for Ars Technica is, as usual, the "Sunday New York Times" of Macintosh reporting. Highly recommended if you're looking for thorough and forward-looking GUI-to-kernel coverage.

Here's the bit that's most intriguing for folks with lots of data locked up in Adobe or Microsoft formats:
Yep, it's (finally) the end of the line for Carbon GUI applications in Mac OS X. Oh, sure, they'll be around for years and years to come, but the lack of 64-bit support is a long-term death sentence.

I can only dream about what Photoshop or Illustrator would be like if they were rewritten in Cocoa...

Friday, October 26, 2007

TaskPaper

TaskPaper is actually a lot more useful than it looks like it might be at first glance. Zero bloat. "Fiddle-proof" as Merlin Mann says....

and it's at least a little bit AppleScriptable. I'm sure Jesse will be working on making that more robust... would be nice to have a QuickSilver-like method of text entry.

Monday, October 01, 2007

Canadian Signal Word Type Height Calculator

If you're in the business of designing packaging for Consumer Packaged Goods to be sold in Canada, you may have run across the amazingly complicated formula for calculating the size of the word "Caution" as it sits at the bottom of the package, warning the consumer not to drink the Drano, or what have you. The corresponding icons for "poisonous," "contents under pressure," etc. are quite punk rock, I will have to upload those later.

hazard.gif

So, this is the kind of thing you only have to do twice before it's safer and easier to offload the entire calculation off to the computer.

#! usr/bin/perl
# a formula used to calculate size of "signal word" for Cdn cautionary copy.
# Find diameter of a circle with an area equal to 3% of the PDP.
# That's how big any required symbol needs to be.
# The signal word then has to be 1/4 that size.

use Math::Complex;
use constant PI => 4 * atan2(1, 1);
print "enter the X dimension of your PDP in centimeters\n";
my $xDim = (<\STDIN\>);
print "enter the y dimension of your PDP in centimeters\n";
my $yDim = (<\STDIN\>);
my $PDPArea = $xDim * $yDim;
my $SignalWordHeight = (sqrt(($PDPArea * .03)/PI))/2;

printf "the area of the principal display panel is %.3f cm square, and the signal word should be at least %.3f cm high.\n", $PDPArea, $SignalWordHeight;

Update: Had to escape "STDIN" with backslashes for Blogger. Remove before use.