Alex Jones: Web Technologist, Barbecue Acolyte, Information Junkie, Austinite

Photoshop CS3 Beta

Adobe has announced that they will release a beta of Photoshop CS3 today (Dec. 15). Needless to say I am awaiting the release with high levels of anticipation as it will come out as a Universal Binary on the Mac, which means a major speed boost for those of us running on Intel-based Macs. The National Association of Photoshop Professionals has some great information about the new package, including videos! Check out some of the new features and UI changes included in CS3.

I’ll post more when I’ve snagged my copy and played around with it.

Posted in Design, Design & UI & Tagged: adobe, macbook pro, OS X, photoshop

The Task Analysis Grid

The Task Analysis Grid is an interesting alternative to the standard requirements doc. I think I may give it a whirl at my next opportunity. As noted on the site, it’s a “single document allows anyone looking at it to see the entire scope of a project, figure out what’s in this release (1) as well as what we’re planning for future releases (2, 3, and 4). It’s an extremely effective artifact for getting everyone on the same page.” The numbers (1 - 4) map to priority levels assigned to each requirement.

Posted in Product Management & Tagged: Product Management, project management, templates

How to Taste Single Malt Scotch

How to Taste Single Malt Scotch has some good advice for those of us who enjoy single malts.

Posted in Food & Drink & Tagged: alcohol, food, scotch

Firebug Beta 1 Released

The beta of Firebug 1.0 has been released and comes with some amazingly useful features. For those unfamiliar with this Firefox extension, Firebug provides a wealth of tools for developers to debug, monitor or edit portions of a site. Portions of it overlap the Web Developer’s toolbar, and in several cases, Firebug surpasses it hands down. Some of the features include:

• Inspect & edit HTML & CSS within the browser to see how changes will impact the current page.
• Visualize CSS metrics, including box model shading, measurements for each edge of a box (and the ability to edit those measurements in-line) , rulers and guides
• Monitor network activity to see why a page takes too long to load, broken down by type. You can also see which items are cached or not and examine HTTP headers and XMLHTTP Requests.
• Debug JavaScript, including the ability to set breakpoints and conditional breakpoints and line-at-a-time code execution. Additionally you can view JS stack traces broken down into the functions within the stack. Use tooltips to see the value of any variable within the JS, log function calls and profile the performance of the scripts. The improved JavaScript logging is amazing in its own right.
• Explore the DOM and edit as you go (including auto-complete) with handy JS code navigation.
• Vastly improved error handling and details.

This extension will actually reduce the need for several others you may have installed.

Posted in CSS, Firefox & Thunderbird, JavaScript & Tagged: CSS, firefox, JavaScript, web design, Web Development, XHTML

IE6 and IE7 Running on a Single Machine

Microsoft has done a surprisingly cool thing – they have released a virtual machine for VirtualPC that has Windows XP pre-activated to make testing your design in IE 6 & IE 7 on the same machine even easier.

Posted in Featured, Web Development & Tagged: internet explorer, Windows