Adobe UI Gripes

Adobe UI Gripes is an awesome kvetch-blog with plenty of screenshots of the funny things that happen when Marketing makes the decision about when the software is ready to ship. I can already think of an error message dialog I need to screen capture next time I see it.

Ridiculously Lean

Xerox brags about how much time they're going to save P&G:

Using Lean Six Sigma-based methodologies, Xerox Global Services will deliver an enterprise-wide strategy, expected to free up hundreds of minutes of employee time annually.

I can't figure out any way to legitimately read that sentence to mean "hundreds of minutes of time per employee," can you?

So it's time to get out the calculator.

Given that P&G has 138,000 employees, even if we're as generous as we can be and call it nine-hundred and ninety nine minutes, that still works out to less than half a second per employee, per year...

But how much time is really spent waiting for laserprints of regular Office documents anyway? Not much, compared to how much time a large design firm spends spooling gigabytes to presentation printers.

Illustrator team blog

Infinite Resolution is a nifty name for a blog. Via John Nack.

I hate refill streams

Painfully familiar rant at Gizmodo called Why I Now Hate Epson Printers, and the answer boils down to, they've taken the refill stream of ink cartridges to an almost DRM-ed level of insanity.

Familiar for me; I just trashed my Canon and replaced it with a $150.00 networkable black and white laser printer. At 3,500 pages between cartridges, I hope to go many years without having to suddenly run out to Staples in the middle of a print job.

The Future of the Layers Palette

John Nack, product manager for Photoshop, requests input on ways to improve the interface for managing the increasingly complex variety and number of layers in a typical design PSD. This should sound familiar:

People end up heavily overloading the few tools they've got--layer names, layer visibility, and nesting layers into folders/groups. Naming conventions work up to a point, but they're clumsy and fragile.

The Layers palette is really a simple outliner of visual data right now, and a lot of the ideas Nack proposes have to do with ways to make that outliner better able to respond to the need for a more automated, error-free design pipeline.

It is a quick and anonymous survey so I encourage you to fill it out if you would be affected by these changes. The last time I took an Adobe survey I got a personal follow-up; it seems like maybe they're finally getting on the clue train.

Brutalism

You know those full spectrum "sunlight therapy" lamps that supposedly relieve us Ice People from Seasonal Affective Disorder? Someone needs to engineer flat panel monitors so they use the same kind of light source.

Since we just sit in the gloom staring at screens all the time.

Font Explorer Pro

Linotype just launched a Pro version of Font Explorer; Jon Hicks blogged about the icon he made for it.

I like the way the current, standalone version feels; it's like iTunes for fonts, replete with a Store. But mostly I'm just rooting for Linotype to give Suitcase some pro-level competition, since Suitcase + the Adobe Creative Suite = Wristwatch Land. It's pathetic that Linotype can use "Finally an auto-activation function that really works!" as a sell line.

Hmmm, the blurb on the brochure says that "...Landor will definitely be switching..."

Best music of [Date added] is in the last [12 months]

I looked through my iTunes library to look for the best music I put into it this year. Some of this music didn't come out in 2008, but that's apparently when I found out about it. Some of this stuff is rooted in traditional musical forms, but towards the end of the list it gets a little further out there.

Most of the links are to eMusic pages where you can listen to samples.

• The Carter Family — I had a blast tracking down covers of "John Hardy" especially.


• Camera Obscura — They're all good, but I'll pick Biggest Bluest Hi-Fi.


• Rothko and Caroline Ross — A Place Between


• Department of Eagles — The Cold Nose. — That's not the record that came out this year, but the other led me to this one.


• Anouar Brahem — Le Voyage de Sahar


• Twilight Circus Dub Sound System — Horsie


• My Bloody Valentine — Loveless — My old copy was a cassette!


• Gang Gang Dance — Saint Dymphna


• Fuck Buttons — Street Horrrsing


• Method of Defiance — Inamorata — Laswell and his friends make drum n' bass listenable.


• Charlie Hunter & Bobby Previte — Come in Red Dog, this is Tango Leader


• Shining — In The Kingdom Of Kitsch You Will Be A Monster

Burnet Woods

A plastic bag within a glade.

LaunchBar 5

Looks like a lot of long-wished-for improvements are coming in the next version of LaunchBar -- support for multiple (global) clipboards is the big one for me. There are a lot of programs that provide this service, but the way LaunchBar is doing it looks very clean and robust -- a lot of data formats are supported. The ability to add an event to iCal from LaunchBar is also very cool.

Go look at the beta.

VoodooPad 4

VoodooPad 4 is out. It was already a great tool... and now it finally looks at home on Leopard.

I can't tell you how many times someone has asked me if I remembered some design project we did way back a couple of years ago, and who was the printer, or why did we have to bla-bla-bla, and I'm able to recall it instantly.

It's the best way I know to make your coworkers think you're a genius.

Of course, it only looks like magic if you are diligent about putting stuff into it, and keep your VoodooPad documents available all times.... which is why 4.0 features like document synching and "The Bucket" are cool.

TextExpander gets an update

Many programs have the ability to assign the current date or time to a shortcut. For instance, I have TypeIt4Me set up so that if I type "dd" it will insert "2008-10-30 Thursday" into whatever I'm writing. But, I've never run across an easy way to have a shortcut that expands to, for example, tomorrow's date.

But, I have now. If you are one of those people who keeps plain text files around in order to Get Things Done, then you may actually be thinking to yourself, why yes, I do hate struggling to type out future dates in year-month-day format all the time. If so, check out TextExpander 2.5.

3D for retail planning

A big data visualization exercise.

Oracle buys maker of 3D retail software

Unilever tries extended-gamut

A division of Unilever is moving away from spot colors for their packaging printing. I would guess the six "process" inks are CMYK plus green and orange, like Hexachrome, or rich blue and orange -- seems like rich blues are more sought after than bright greens.

Most of the advantages to moving to such a system have to do with cutting makeready time, and allowing more flexibility to gang up unrelated labeling together. This might be more important in markets that require a lot of regional adaptation than it is here in the U.S...

Judging by a similar trial I've seen, a six color system still leaves a lot of colors a bit out of gamut. I also have to imagine that this isn't targeting traditional flexography. Small type on a flexo label, built out of two or three inks, would look pretty bad.

This system has serious implications for the design "end user." No area of the design could have more than four different inks in it, so the ordinary human brain wouldn't be trusted to pick colors directly: familiar desktop design applications won't give you a palette with six sliders in it. If I recall, the old Hexachrome system dictated that designers go over to an RGB workflow, with separations created by proprietary software once it left the desktop.

For most imagery, the designer would never know what the exact color build was. Instead, they would only know what the values in RGB on the desktop were, and color management software would do the rest.

So the color management business would have a lot to gain by adoption of extended gamut printing.

Thanks to David Johnson for the tip.

Rules of design

From an article in Business Week about designing Coke:

Another example of working within the peculiar constraints of Coca-Cola is a Web-based software tool that Butler calls the Design Machine and describes as "the Nike ID of internal design." The tool allows designers at the company's many bottling partners to create new bottle or can label designs or even promotional posters. Because of parameters built into the tool, the final design will always conform to the global standards set by the corporate design team. The neat internal use of Web 2.0 technology cuts back on the need for top-down control from the brand managers in Atlanta, allowing greater brand flexibility.

I'd love to see what that looks like.

use your memory usage as your iChat status message

This script will let you use your iChat status message to brag to your friends about how much RAM you've got in your Mac -- or more usefully, petition the IT overlords for mercy if you're scratching to disk a little too much.

I have this triggered periodically by Keyboard Maestro, but there are other ways to get it to run every so often. Not too often, or the overlords will have an easy (if specious) excuse for why it's your own fault you're running out of RAM.

Briefly, it runs a "top" shell command and extracts the two most rhetorically significant memory usage figures, and pipes that to iChat.


set myoutput to (do shell script "top -l 1 | perl -pe " & quoted form of "

my ($unwanted, $wanted) = /(.*inactive,)(.*free)/sm;
$_ = $wanted;

")

tell application "iChat"
    set status message to myoutput
end tell


New Features In Adobe Illustrator CS3

From the Help pages:

Work more fluidly and efficiently without waiting for Illustrator to catch up with your hands and your thoughts. The underlying architecture of Illustrator has been improved. You’ll notice increased scroll and zoom times...

I can vouch for the increased zoom times, but it's a bit odd they'd tout this as a feature...

little black notebooks

I found a blog covering Moleskines, Miquelriuses, and other little blank books. You love 'em, I love 'em, and this guy loves 'em so much he has a blog devoted to them. And if you go there, you'll see the reason I'm linking to him in this post....

The blog has a prejudice for smaller rather than larger, the idea being that if it can't be with you at all times, it won't be with you when you need it.

Personally, I go for the 200 sheet SM Grid Miquelrius. Barely fits in my back jeans pocket, but it's good for about a year's worth of pensees...

Brad Bird on Innovation

This is a must-read article clipped out of the McKinsey Quarterly, an interview with Brad Bird on "fostering innovation" in the workplace. One feels the pain of recognition in every one of Mr. Bird's points:

When I entered Disney, it was like a classic Cadillac Phaeton that had been left out in the rain… The company’s thought process was not, “We have all this amazing machinery—how do we use it to make exciting things? We could go to Mars in this rocket ship!” It was, “We don’t understand Walt Disney at all. We don’t understand what he did. Let’s not screw it up. Let’s just preserve this rocket ship; going somewhere new in it might damage it.”

"Innovation" seems to be the way in which capitalism can understand and harness creativity, which makes it a
buzzword with a future.

You can tell the idea of innovation has arrived because The New Yorker this year added a themed issue around it, right between the fashion issue and the fiction issue...

Mound Magnet Part Two

New album from Lithops (a.ka. Jan St. Werner) released today. Available now on eMusic and iTunes. Highly recommended for all Mouse on Mars fans....