While browsing the Veer catalog & wondering what to do with a gift card I’d received for Christmas, I found Phaeton. It’s easily my favorite type purchase of the year, and at $49.00, it’s worth every penny. I count 670 characters that include decorative banners, swash capitals and some nice little glyphs to accent words like ‘the’ or ‘and.’
I had a blast using it for my “I Love Oatmeal” post. To be honest, I could have just as easily titled it “I Love Phaeton”. Nothing but praise for Kevin Cornell & Randy Jones for their work in developing this lovely typeface. You know you’ve done good work when something you’ve created directly inspires others to create.
My first impression is that it looks great. The aluminum lower half & sleek sharp edges are an improvement both in aesthetic and feel. It isn’t as tall as my mighty mouse, but I think that the lower profile make scrolling and swiping gestures easier. It is also a little heavy, though I’m not bothered by that. You’ll have to install a software update and configure your bluetooth before getting into tracking & scrolling speeds in system preferences. All this is pretty standard, and takes about 5 minutes with the computer restart.
The Good Stuff
The iPhone-like scrolling is definitely a step in the right direction. It adds a fluid, loose feel to scrolling up and down hundreds of lines of code and large graphic files. Also, like the iPhone, you can scroll and stop the motion by placing your finger back on the mouse. It makes getting to where you want to go quick & easy.
Exposé
I use my Mighty Mouse to access Exposé and Spaces hundreds of times a day. There is currently no way to configure a Magic Mouse for either of these really useful features. While you can go into System Preferences > Exposé & Spaces and set an active screen corner to access spaces, it’s probably not going to cut it for me. Though, I remain hopeful. Consistent with how Apple rolls out products and software, I bet there will be some updates that will eventually provide the ability to set gestures to access Exposé & Spaces. If not, you may be able to sell me your unwanted / outdated Mighty Mouse for a nominal fee.
The best solution I’ve found in setting up Exposé & Spaces comes from @SecondBar. Do yourself a favor and check out Better Touch Tool. You can set swiping or three finger tap & click gestures to activate the key command of your choice.
Update: 01/14/10
I may be a little late on this, but I recently saw MagicPrefs. Be sure to take a look at that as well. Happy multi-touching!
Earlier this month Apple Insider reported that there might soon be an update to the Mighty Mouse and here it is. The primary issue with the now outdated mouse was the fragile, finicky roller ball locking up on Friday afternoons at 4:45 PM while trying to wrap up a project.
Apparently, the best way to solve the problem is to scrap the roller ball all together. 360° scrolling, screen zoom and iphone-like swiping sound great. I can’t wait to test one of these out.
Creatives benefit greatly from the powerful tools Adobe Creative Suite offers. I am not a software developer and realize that a lot goes into making software both powerful and stable, but that doesn’t seem to matter to me when I lose a substantial amount of work because of a crash. While mocking up this site in Photoshop I experienced frequent crashes when rearranging layer levels before abandoning the graphics to a code-on-the-fly approach.
It is important to provide helpful information outlining a crash. However, after multiple crashes I find it can be cathartic to use the problem description field as a quick venting therapy session before spending the next hour trying to recreate lost work. To make light of what at times be a real bummer, this Adobe Crash Reports Flickr Group is a place to share screenshots of our creative crash report problem descriptions.
One of the features that makes Virb the interweb’s slickest social media networks is its profile customization section. You can select one of their elegant skins and create your own color scheme, or use the advanced tab to access the HTML & CSS directly, which is what I chose to do. The intuitive interface and clean, no-nonsense markup was clearly designed by noobs for noobs. To keep it simple, I started with my favorite Virb-sanctioned skin, Gazette by Ryan Simms, and spent about an hour editing on the fly.
The final product (shown right) ain’t half bad. I was thrilled when Virb co-founder & CEO, Brad Smith asked if he could take the code and use it on his profile. Earlier this week, I noticed @BluePerez tweeted:
I thought it’d be nice to offer the code for download. Keep in mind that the code was knocked out in a 60-minute hack session. Implement at your own risk and, by all means, feel free to modify it. I get the sense that is what Virb profiles are all about anyway.
In the future, I’d like to find the time to improve the skin and develop it from scratch. Heck, it’d even be cool if Virb decided to enlist a few CSS designers to develop profile skins and release one per month into their already excellent lineup. Joining forces with all their friends in the greater online design community could really generate a lot of buzz.
When setting the font-family property in CSS code, it is common to throw Helvetica and Arial in together along with a few additional sans-serifs as backups without giving it much thought. This nice little graphic breaks down a few of the key differences between the two typefaces.
Happily, I seem to have made it through my OS X upgrade to Snow Leopard relatively unscathed. One issue I had was with Firefox crashing shortly after launch before any page fully loaded. I checked out the Mozilla support forums and saw quite a few posts on the need to upgrade and/or uninstall Adobe Flash Player. I tried all that, tried upgrading from Firefox 3.5.2 to 3.5.3 and still had the same problem.
I finally found a solution here. I needed to rebuild the font caches by starting OS X in Safe Mode, then restarting my computer normally. It worked like a charm.
The Paravel team has been overhauling our Austin owned and operated music blog, Austin Town Hall, bits at a time for months and we’re happy to unveil the new version today. Boasting a new sidebar, featured section and a polished up new style, we think V2 is just dandy. Read more about the site and all the new features here.
While browsing the Veer catalog & wondering what to do with a gift card I’d received for Christmas, I found Phaeton. It’s easily my favorite type purchase of the year, and at $49.00, it’s worth every penny. I count 670 characters that include decorative banners, swash capitals and some nice little glyphs to accent words like ‘the’ or ‘and.’
My first impression is that it looks great. The aluminum lower half & sleek sharp edges are an improvement both in aesthetic and feel. It isn’t as tall as my mighty mouse, but I think that the lower profile make scrolling and swiping gestures easier. It is also a little heavy, though I’m not bothered by that. You’ll have to install a software update and configure your bluetooth before getting into tracking & scrolling speeds in system preferences. All this is pretty standard, and takes about 5 minutes with the computer restart.
Earlier this month 
