November 14, 2003
Flash Minor Archive
Macromedia has recently posted an archive of the minor versions of older Flash players from version 5.0r30 through 6.0r79. That's three minor versions of the Flash 5 Player family and six minor versions of the Flash 6 Player.
Older versions of the Flash Player (last major release of versions 2-6) are also available for your testing pleasure.
PC users will want to download the Flash uninstallers and there are also Mac versions for the lazy.
PC-based developers may find KewBee's freeware Flash Plugin Switcher a useful utility. I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but it seems well documented and has been getting some play in the Flash developer community—any tool that eases version testing sounds like a winner to me.
November 6, 2003
Panther is My Hero
So I installed Apple's new OS X.3 release, aka Panther, this week and life is good. Real good. I mean really, really good . Mark Pilgrim describes what's new in Panther much better that I ever could (and I strongly recommend his introduction), but the take-away I want people to get right now is how much snappier the OS feels.
I honestly feel as if I've installed an accelerator giving me a few hundred MHz boost in CPU power. This may not be as noticeable on newer machines, but it makes a world of difference on my getting-long-in-tooth TiBook 550. A colleague relaying reports from other happy users notes that this may be the first OS update in history that actually makes your machine run faster rather than slower with requisite new features and the, until now, expected, concurrent performance hit.
Nearly all my dev and office apps (Macromedia Studio MX, Director, BBEdit 7, MS Office, Photoshop 7, Transmit 2.6, RDC, Amadeus II, RDC and others) continue to work without issue, but there are a couple gotchas to watch out for.
Some other quick items of note:
Zip files
Panther natively understands and can create/extract .zip files, which may allow some users to skip purchasing/upgrading Stuffit, although it appears that PC user recipients of Panther-created zip files will see excess junk in their zip archives when files with resource forks are archived in this manner. If this is likely to be a problem for you, it might be a good time to go look at that Aladdin 40% off offer.
Mounting volumes and then running away
A major annoyance in previous versions of OS X was what happened when you dropped off your network w/o first unmounting any of your network volumes. Those of us with laptops probably were burnt by this the most. I'm happy to report that Panther is smart about this type of thing and doesn't spin you off into never-never land while trying to contact your dearly departed mounts. Instead, Panther lets you know that the mount has gone MIA and asks if you want to forget about it. Yes, please!
Safari fixes
Panther brings Safari 1.1 to the party, and you may just have to go to the party to get this release (Panther-only?). Apple engineer Dave Hyatt's blog posts the fixes and feature additions in Safari 1.1 and Safari 1.1, Part 2, even whetting our appetites for just implemented features like tooltip title attribute handling and more. Todd Dominey shows off the text shadow property in Safari 1.1 to good effect, being a CSS-2 feature which he claims only Safari 1.1 currently supports.
Font Book
Apple says Font Book "lets you install, preview, search, activate and deactivate the fonts you need." May cut into Extensis' Suitcase sales; Suitcaseless designers will find this functionality welcome indeed.
With one more plug for Mark Pilgrim's introduction to Panther, keep an eye on this space for more observations and compatibility issues as I come across them, and please feel free to add your own impressions and experiences with OS X.3.
November 1, 2003
Problem JPEG
Ran into an interesting problem last week. Turns out that CMYK mode jpg files will render in Safari, but not in IE or Mozilla-based browsers. Solution, of course, is to always save your web-targeted jpg as RGB mode. I'd have thought this would have come up before...
...of course, this type of thing is often uncovered by admin tools designed to allow the non-technical to upload images. Someone unfamilar with web design might not think twice about providing a file that would have been fine for prepress. A jpeg is a jpeg, right? Wrong.
I once diagnosed a similar problem only to find that a client had unknowingly uploaded a .bmp file. In this case, the problem wasn't immediately noticed because it loaded fine in PC Internet Explorer. I'm still not sure that the client noticed that it was broken elsewhere, they were complaining about the amount of time the uncompressed bitmap file was taking to download. ;)
Stencil this in
Many new Macs come with a copy of Omni Group's excellent OmniGraffle diagram and charting tool for OS X. There's even a pro version that can import Visio 2002 xml files that your PC colleagues or clients may send, though ymmv.
The product is extensible and several kind souls have made their Stencils available for free. If you do web work or interface design, you may be interested in Charles Parcell's Web Flowchart stencils, Michael Angeles' Wireframe Palette, and Robert Silverman's GUI pallete. Great stuff, this, and kudos to the folks above for sharing!
