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Any Interest in eBooks on Adobe Fireworks (and other subjects)?

By on March 28, 2011 in eBooks, Learning

To this day, my tuto­r­ial on remov­ing image back­grounds non-​destructively using Adobe Fireworks is still by far the most vis­ited page on this site. I still receive email about it and ques­tions from peo­ple request­ing help with how to deal with their own images or more com­plex images than the ones the tuto­r­ial covered.

So, I’m throw­ing an idea out there : Would any­one be inter­ested in a rea­son­ably priced eBook on the sub­ject that would go much deeper into the issue and even include some video where I show some of the tech­niques live? If so, what would you con­sider a rea­son­able price?

Furthermore, if you’ve had images that gave you trou­ble and would be will­ing to share them with me (an any­one who will read the eBook), feel free to con­tact me and you can then send me the images and I will choose some to use as exam­ples. Any other feed­back on this idea you want to pro­vide is very welcome.

Other Subjects

If there’s any­thing else related to Web design, WordPress or any of the things I usu­ally dis­cuss here that you would like help with then share it in a com­ment or send a mes­sage directly to me. eBooks can cover a lot more ground eas­ier than a blog post or online tuto­r­ial so, any­thing that might ben­e­fit from an eBook treat­ment is some­thing I could write about.

Thanks!

10

Now is a Good Time to be a Fireworks Evangelist

By on June 19, 2009 in Adobe, Design & Development, Fireworks, Interaction Design, Prototyping

I could not imag­ine my cre­ative process with­out Adobe Fireworks. I have been using that appli­ca­tion since ver­sion 2.0 some­time in 1999. 10 years ago, Fireworks was not an obvi­ous choice but the work­flow advan­tages over Photoshop were imme­di­ately evi­dent to me and my cre­ative process never was the same. Unfortunately, it took almost all those years for Fireworks to be taken seri­ously in the indus­try. Being a Fireworks evan­ge­list 5 or 6 years ago felt like preach­ing in the desert. But not anymore.

Today, Fireworks is finally thriv­ing. After a cou­ple false starts and dud ver­sions (yes I’m look­ing at you Fireworks 8 and CS2!), ver­sions CS3 and CS4 have finally brought Fireworks to a level where many indus­try heavy­weights are now pay­ing atten­tion. It is also cross­ing over into new fields like User Experience and Interaction Design where many prac­ti­tion­ers who are not tra­di­tional Web design­ers (read visual/​graphic design­ers) use Fireworks for rapid pro­to­typ­ing and quickly iter­at­ing inter­face and inter­ac­tion designs.

It is an excit­ing time for Fireworks which proves that Adobe’s deci­sion to keep it alive after acquir­ing Macromedia was the right one. Not only that but the appli­ca­tion itself has finally started to really improve again after stag­nat­ing for a few years under Macromedia’s watch. There are new books being writ­ten about it or with chap­ters about it, new (and not so new) Web sites cov­er­ing how to use it or who is using it. Can’t wait to see what’s in store in Fireworks’ future.

If you have never tried it, do your­self a favor and do so. If you are com­ing from Photoshop, leave your pixel push­ing Photoshop mind­set at the door and embrace Fireworks vec­tor based work­flow. Regardless of Fireworks’ very capa­ble bitmap edit­ing tools, its real strength lies in its hybrid work­flow based on a vec­tor based core. Until you really give it a try, you will never know how much dif­fer­ence work­ing in a vec­tor based envi­ron­ment does for any kind of lay­out work.

15

My Top 10 Web Design Tools

By on October 12, 2008 in Design & Development

I had already started work­ing on a blog post with my top 10 most use­ful Web design tools but, like many other things these days, I had con­tin­u­ally post­poned fin­ish­ing it in favor of “more impor­tant things”. Like client work… ;-)

But I saw a post today on the Visualrinse blog that tack­led the same topic so it prompted me to fin­ish mine.

As men­tioned in the above blog post, we all have our own favorite work­ing meth­ods, tricks and tools for com­plet­ing projects and, as I have already men­tioned here before, I have really tried to refine my process in the last year or so and find the tools that really help me get my work done, espe­cially since I am a one man shop and need to tackle both the design and devel­op­ment aspects of my projects as well as man­ag­ing them and my clients. Now that I am free­lanc­ing full time, I have really started to develop a process that works for me. So here are the tools I could not live with­out in my Web design and devel­op­ment work.

  1. Mindjet MindManager Pro /​JCV Gantt Pro. I stated using MindManager in the sum­mer of 2007 and it has quickly become one of my most use­ful tools. I use it for sev­eral things like brain­storm­ing ideas, cre­at­ing pro­jetc man­age­ment doc­u­ments like a projet’s cre­ative brief, work bread­own struc­ture or tasks, site maps and more. Each project gets a “dash­board” map that links to all the other project related maps, doc­u­ments or fold­ers. From the tasks map I move to the JCV Gantt Pro addin to cre­ate the project sched­ule and deter­mine the cost of the project. MindManager is the best “knowl­edge repos­i­tory” appli­ca­tion I’ve ever tried and I now won­der what I did with­out it before I found it.
  2. Axure RP Pro. Axure is the most recent addi­tion to my toolset. It takes off where MindManager leaves off for me. As great as MindManager is for my own inter­nal processes I real­ized it did not cre­ate great deliv­er­ables for clients. Axure is the best tool I found to cre­ate site maps and flow charts but its main pur­pose is wire­frames, func­tional inter­ac­tive pro­to­types and doc­u­men­ta­tion and it really excels at it. I’m work­ing on a appointment/​calendar app for a cur­rent site project and pro­to­typ­ing it in Axure will save me a lot of cod­ing time later. There’s noth­ing like show­ing a work­ing, click­able and inter­ac­tive ver­sion of a site fea­ture to a client, even if it is fake, to work out the kinks and nail down expectations.
  3. Adobe Fireworks. The main­stay in my toolset for the last 10 years and my most used app along with Dreamweaver. I really could not do my job with­out Fireworks. It com­pletely replaced Photoshop for me for Web design and lay­out work over 10 years ago and I have never looked back. Its hybrid raster/​vector work­flow as well as Web cen­tric focus make it the most effi­cient design app I have ever used. It’s like Photoshop/​Illustrator and InDesign all rolled up into one killer app but just for the Web. CS4 will be released soon and it really will be the best ver­sion ever.
  4. Adobe Dreamweaver. Unlike Fireworks which I pretty much adopted imme­di­ately after try­ing ver­sion 2.0, it took me a long time to warm up to Dreamweaver. I had been using HomeSite which was a great code edi­tor for a long time but I had to use a sep­a­rate FTP appli­ca­tion to upload sites and was look­ing for ways to auto­mate some of the repet­i­tive work. Around the release of Dreamweaver 4 but espe­cially the next one, Dreamweaver MX (6.0), the appli­ca­tion had evolved in such a way that it basi­cally replaced HomeSite for me. Now it is a full fledged Web author­ing envi­ron­ment I couldn’t live with­out any­more. It has the right bal­ance of code cen­tric fea­tures, visual edit­ing and a lot of other fea­tures around those that just make it a true pow­er­house. The new CS4 ver­sion which is in pub­lic beta right now adds very cool new fea­tures that are already mak­ing my life easier.
  5. ColdFusion. I am more of a designer and front end devel­oper than a back­end devel­oper but I still have to wear that hat. I have tried Perl and used ASP in the past and although it was OK it got tedious for me after a while. I also tried PHP as it’s very pop­u­lar but I really don’t like it at all for some rea­son. It really didn’t click with me and I strongly dis­like the syn­tax. When I started work­ing with ColdFusion it’s like a light bulb was turned on for me. The syn­tax made sense and it could do more in fewer lines of code than ASP (and most other server-​side script­ing lan­guages) ever could. In the last few years, ColdFusion has kept evolv­ing into one of the most pow­er­ful server-​side devel­op­ment solu­tions around with many buit-​in fea­tures you need plu­g­ins for in other plat­forms. It really rocks my world and has empow­ered me to build bet­ter Web sites.
  6. Web Developer Toolbar. Although Firefox is not my main browser (Opera is… and Google Chrome is gain­ning ground), no Web designer/​developer should be with­out this utility.
  7. Firebug. Another amaz­ing Firefox exten­sion that prob­a­bly needs no intro­duc­tion. The Inspect func­tion­al­ity alone makes this an absolute must-​have. If you’re not sure what CSS rule affect a mis­be­hav­ing ele­ment, you’ll find it with Firebug’s Inspect. Not far behind is Opera’s new Dragonfly fea­ture which is still in alpha. Similar to Firebug but built right into Opera 9.5+.
  8. Genopal. Going back to designer tools, Genopal is one of those rare finds you won­der how you did with­out before dis­cov­er­ing it. Genopal is a small appli­ca­tion used to cre­ate color schemes. Nothing earth shat­ter­ing here but, it does it in a very unique way that I had never seen before. This is the most intu­itive color tool I have ever used and I urge any­one strug­gling with cre­at­ing good color schemes to try it. I use the desk­top Pro ver­sion but there’s also an online ver­sion on the site. This one is a true lit­tle gem.
  9. Studiometry. What would I do with­out this amaz­ing appli­ca­tion? Studiometry is the admin­is­tra­tive cen­ter of my world. Projects, clients details, con­tacts, timers, invoic­ing, reports and more, Studiometry tracks every detail of my pro­fes­sional work and helps me keep organized.
  10. jQuery. This “lit­tle” JavaScript frame­work has rocked my world. Like ColdFusion but on the front end, it has empow­ered me to cre­ate com­plex inter­ac­tiv­ity faster and eas­ier than I ever could before. I have tried oth­ers but jQuery just clicked for me and I keep being amazed at what I can accom­plish with it.

So the above are my own must-​haves. The list is not com­plete though so here’s a few hon­or­able men­tions for other appli­ca­tions that are cen­tral to my work :

One is Outlook 2007 for keep­ing up with not only email but client con­tacts, cal­en­dar and cat­e­go­rized tasks lists (fol­low­ing the GTD prin­ci­ples). It’s the first app I launch in the morn­ing and the last one I ckeck at night.

Another is FeedDemon, the incred­i­ble RSS feeds aggre­ga­tor from Nick Bradbury and NewsGator. In our field, fight­ing infor­ma­tion over­load has become a real issue, at least it has for me. FeedDemon helps me keep informed by fol­low­ing the myr­iad of sites I am inter­ested in but also through key­word feeds that gather infor­ma­tion about spe­cific top­ics I’m inter­ested in.

Lastly, I need to men­tion Twitter and the TweetDeck client. I’ve been a very late Twitter adopter as I didn’t “see” the use and thought it would be a waste of time. But now that I work on my own full time, I enjoy the con­nec­tion to the peo­ple I fol­low. Like FeedDemon, TweetDeck enables me to sep­a­rate my Twitter “stream” into groups. But fur­ther­more, it enables me to keep watch on par­tic­u­lar top­ics in the “pub­lic stream” by let­ting me add colomns based on spe­cific key­word searches. It took me a long time to get on Twitter but now, TweetDeck is always run­ning on my lap­top while I work on my main machine.

Well that’s it for me at this time. What are your own pre­ferred tools that you just can­not live without?

6

Google Chrome

By on September 2, 2008 in General, reviews

I just down­loaded and installed Google Chrome after read­ing the comic book that explains the details of the project. I had been hear­ing rumors about it last week but I didn’t pay much atten­tion to them. In the last cou­ple days there had seemed to be much antic­i­pa­tion (and over-​hype) about its release and what it means. I must say I was pre­pared to be under­whelmed… and, as a Web designer, think­ing, who needs yet another new browser to test sites into? But after using it for a lit­tle bit, I must admit I like what I see.

My ini­tial hes­i­ta­tion came mostly from the fact that, aside from its search engine tech­nol­ogy, I haven’t been impressed by much of what Google has released in the past. I don’t use GMail and I don’t use Google Documents for the same basic rea­son. So far, I still much pre­fer desk­top appli­ca­tions for email and office type tasks and my com­mu­ni­ca­tions and orga­ni­za­tional activ­i­ties are pretty much cen­tered in Outlook 2007. It works very well for me and my data is on my own machine where I want it. I never liked Web based email to begin with.

But Chrome is dif­fer­ent because it is a desk­top appli­ca­tion and the foun­da­tions and ideas on which it was built are very inter­est­ing. As many noted and despite a lot of over-​hype (what else is new in the tech world…), Chrome has a lot of things that were already in other browsers. My main browser is Opera 9.5 and I really have not seen any other that is as fast or feature-​rich. But Chrome is fast too… damn fast actu­ally, espe­cially with JavaScript and I really like the min­i­mal inter­face. This is a first beta and can only improve with time. Also, so far all my sites I looked at with Chrome dis­play cor­rectly and pretty much the same as Safari, FF 3 or IE7. Its text ren­der­ing seems iden­ti­cal to Safari which is nor­mal since both are based on the WebKit ren­der­ing engine.

So, in sum­mary, Google Chrome seems like a solid entry in the crowded browser world and will only get bet­ter. But, I would take the pre­ma­ture pre­vi­sions of some pun­dits that Chrome will cause the demise of MSIE with a huge grain of salt… Haven’t we heard that one before?

Won’t tech com­men­ta­tors ever learn that “reg­u­lar” peo­ple are crea­tures of habit and are unlikely to change browsers just because a new player’s in town? Don’t they get that Microsoft is entrenched in the busi­ness world for the fore­see­able future? Those who should be wor­ried by this are the other smaller play­ers IMO, like Opera and Firefox and maybe even Safari which seems to be as entrenched on the Mac as MSIE is on PCs… for now.

Anyway, only time will tell how Chrome will affect the browser wars but it is a good piece of soft­ware that brings wel­come com­pe­ti­tion and inno­va­tion. And did I say it was fast! I’m writ­ing this blog post in it through TinyMCE now which unfor­tu­nately doesn’t work in Opera yet. Good going with this one Google!

8

Understanding Web Design

By on November 20, 2007 in Design & Development

It’s rare that I sim­ply link to a post or arti­cle when i have noth­ing to add. In fact I’ve really tried to avoid that on this blog. But the fol­low­ing arti­cle by Jeffrey Zeldman on A List Apart is really worth read­ing and says every­thing bet­ter than I could:

Understanding Web Design

It’s a must read… really.

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