Monthly Archives: February 2008

Rotate and animate dynamic text fields in Flash

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Embed font in Flash to allow for rotation and animationBy now you’ve seen the Dylan Messaging viral campaign. It’s a pretty hip use of Flash. I was pretty sure I knew how the effect was done, so I was running some Flash experiments to test out my theory. Everything was just as I expected until I hit a snag. How do you rotate or otherwise animate a dynamic text field in Flash?

If you’ve ever tried this, you have probably discovered that containing the dynamic text field in a movie clip will work with default font settings, but only for X and Y animation. In order to be able to rotate, skew, or add effects, the font must be embedded. Now you know.

OmniGraffle maybe the best tool for wireframing a web site layout

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OmniGraffle web site diagramming and wireframe applicationI know it goes against every good web design how-to book on the market, but I rarely start with a real pencil and paper. In fact, I rarely sketch out wireframes even digitally. I just go for it.

Part of my design resolution for this year has been to start sketching and wireframing before opening Photoshop or Illustrator. On that note, I’ve started tinkering with possibly the best known application for wireframing a web site, OmniGraffle from OmniGroup.

A lot of us Mac fans have had this diagramming application in our toolkit for a while, as it used to come installed on Apple machines. It has taken me years to warm up to it after poking at it here and there for sitemaps and such, but I’ve finally come around to deciding that wireframing in OmniGraffle will be a permanent part of my workflow.

Learning OmniGraffle was pretty darn easy. It’s one of those apps that you can learn in 10 minutes if you’re used to using pallettes and inspectors. Recently, I discovered that it also supports layers, which is even better for my wireframing needs. Once you’re ready to jump into the main design phase, OmniGraffle can export PDF vector graphics, PSD, or plenty of other formats.

The only complaint I have is that the shortcut key combinations don’t match the Adobe shortcut combos, and since I live and die by toggling the grid and snapping, it will take a while to get used to the new combos.

Illustrator CS3 crashes on “Place…”.

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I finally dove in and upgraded to Adobe CS3. Unfortunately, Illustrator was crashing whenever I called the “Place..” command.

I found a fix pretty easily though, and an official Adobe TechNote at that.

Adobe Creative Suite 3 products crash when you save, open, or place a file, after installing the Version Cue CS3 3.1.0 update (Mac OS X v10.4.x – 10.5)

Hex color picker for mac copies well to Photoshop

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Yea, I know it’s been a long time. Busy is a great state for a little shop like ours. Onward.

Apple Color PickerI like the little Digital Color Meter that comes with the Mac (Applications>Utilities), but it falls short when trying to copy colors from the screen and paste them into Photoshop’s color picker. Digital Color Meter’s copy function (Shift+Command+C) copies the hex value of the underlying pixel, complete with quotes and the pound sign. Photoshop’s color picker wants just the 6 character hex number, no frills. In fact, it will reject the paste command altogether if there are more than 6 characters.

IconFactory xScope

The IconFactory have a sweet little silver bullet in xScope that has cured this little woe, and laid rest to a few others I didn’t even know I had. Not only will xScope copy the hex characters without quotes and with or without the pound, but as RGB values, RGB percentages, HSB, as well as NSColor (whatever that is).

But wait, there’s more. That’s just one of the 7 tricks xScope does. There’s on screen dimensions, rulers, screen resolution overlays, guides, frames, and a crosshair tool. Check out the xScope page at the IconFactory site for the whole deal. xScope is $26.95, and of course there’s a demo version. It’s easy on the eyes, and worth the cheddah for something I’ll use daily.

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