Roger Starnes

Apple’s newest offering to the world of tech is the iPad. Following on the heels of the iPod and the iPhone, Apple has managed to keep hush-hush on the details on their new iPad computer, and these days industry secrets are tough to hide!

The new iPad is a great in-between solution for nearly all things online. Where you might be able to browse the ‘net from your mobile device, how many times have you wished the display was easier to see? Or how often did you wish you had your home computer or bookmarks with you on a trip? The iPad seems to address many of the issues that users today seek: small size, great display, good resolution, good batter, simple to use, and most of all COOL!

Designers can take their iPad to a client meeting and show them designs, websites, and layouts, without having to clear off a table or desk. Photographers can have their photos ready to show customers and run a nice-sized slide show of their photos – with music! Web designs and sites can be reviewed full-screen and high res on a device than can be handled easily. Other beneficiaries might be: working on research for work/school; reading freshly published books online; bringing up your to-do lists while you are in your car, video chatting with family, friends, or co-workers; even keeping the ‘news on’ while you prepare for the day. There are many possiblities than a cell phone and laptop simply can’t compete with.

Here is a condensed version of features of the new iPad. There is plenty more on Apple’s site, so we’ll hit a few of my favs here…

• Size: 9.56″ H x 7.47″ W x .5″ D
• Weight: 1.5-1.6 lbs.
• Resolution: 1024 x 768 @ 132 px
• Fingerprint-resistent display
• Touch-sensitive display that adjusts to horizontal or vertical depending on how you are holding it
• Browser: Safari (default)
• Finger/hand navigation: point or tap to select, scroll by sliding your finger across the screen, zoom in/out by pinching the screen
• Mail and e-mail fully integrated
• Photos can be easily added or stored in album ’stacks’, stacks can be tapped opened and viewed easily.
• Videos can be watched without navigation squeezing into view. Videos play full-screen and only when you touch or tap the screen does the video controller appear, leaving users with the full screen for videos!
• iBooks can be collected by a free app and stored into ’shelves’ for future reading and organization. The large screen makes reading very easy on the eyes.
• Maps can be viewed through Google services, and offer all the advantages of Google Maps on your iPad. So locate places to eat, find your way, figure out where you are, and you can actually SEE where you are on a large display, not on a puny cell screen!
• Keyboard is build into the touch-sensitive screen. In landscape mode (horizontal) keyboard is very close to standard size and configuration.
• Accessories include a charger stand that will support the iPad and can be used in conjunction with a wireless keyboard for desktop use. Many more on Apple’s site.
• Price (Wi-Fi): 16 GB = $499 / 32 GB = $599 / 64 GB = $699
• Price (Wi-Fi with 3G): 16 GB = $629 / 32 GB = $729 / 64 GB = $829

Today, making contact with others for business is about being fast-paced. The days of stacking samples into your car, truck, or van, and taking a briefcase for a long meeting with a customer or potential client are gone. Now things are ‘what do you have time for?’ and taking as little as you can with you so you can move fast. The iPad could be a solution for such crisis. Now you can take most, if not all your computer with you to meet with clients and customers, leverage the display to your advantage to show your work, take notes, even share ideas that can be recorded. Seems there is great potential for this new bit of tech from our friends at Apple.

A post on CreativeBits.org by Ivan says:

The iPad will save you time and effort in design related support activities and will play a huge role in presenting your work. It will not replace your phone, laptop or desktop.

They say it’s all about presentation, and if that is true, this might be the tool for you!

It might be a while before I can run out to get my own iPad, but the features it offers are more than a little enticing!!

• Got an iPad of your own? Tell me what you think of it, good or bad. I’d like to hear about your experiences!

Launched nine months ago, the Google Chrome browser already has over 30 million people using it regularly – people who live on the web – searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. (Gee, I wonder who Google is talking about?! LOL)

Google has just announced a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at Netbook computers first, but will eventually port the operating system onto other computers such as laptops and desktop systems. This sort of computing is often referred to as ‘cloud-based computing‘ – meaning that your applications (and files) are not internal, but running virtually online. That means less upgrading, less software purchases. The draw-back is less control and ownership.

This new OS runs within a new ‘windowing system’ using Linux, with its key aspects being speed, simplicity and security. The software architecture is simple:

• For application developers, the web is the platform.
• All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies.
• And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.
• Designed to be fast, lightweight, you can launch and get onto the web in a few seconds.

Computers need to get better. They should just work. People want to get to their email instantly, without wasting time waiting for their computers to boot and browsers to start up. They want their computers to always run as fast as when they first bought them. They want their data to be accessible to them wherever they are and not have to worry about losing their computer or forgetting to back up files.

Even more importantly, they don’t want to spend hours configuring their computers to work with every new piece of hardware, or have to worry about constant software updates. And any time our users have a better computing experience, Google benefits as well by having happier users who are more likely to spend time on the Internet.

For some fun, have a look at this Graphic Novel
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/small_00.html

Excerpts for this post taken from an article posted by Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management and Linus Upson, Engineering Director for Google. Joyce Jones also contributed.

Web technology has come a long way in a few short years. I’ve been surfing the wave of these new developments as they have come along.

To see just how far we’ve come online, check-out the Internet Archive for a history lesson.

In the 90s, not much was possible unless you used a lot of imagery to make a page look ‘designed’. Today with the use of CSS, pages have finally begun to shape-up and mirror their paper-clad cousins in print media. You can add fonts, colors, graphics, positioning to page elements, and if done well, they will look pretty much the same on any browser (yes even IE).

Over the past few years, I’ve preferred to build my pages using ‘pixels‘ versus ‘points‘ or ‘%’. Why? For me, it was due to consistency. I could define an <h1> tag for a page headline as “16pt” and it might look fine for me, but on a Windows computer, the page might get horsey (and huge!).

On the other hand, if I said that an <h1> tag should be “16px“, I could almost always guarantee that regardless of computer or platform, the font and page would be pretty consistent.

Over the past few years using “em” has been the size designation of choice.

Web developers know that an “em” is a percentage of the body font size. So if you have a headline (<h1>) defined as “2.5em” that means the headline will be 250% larger than your body copy. Or if you have a caption and you want it to be tiny, you might define it as “.3em” (or 30% of the body size). So if you had body copy defined as “12px” as a rule, your caption would be just “4px” tall, and your headlines would be “30px” tall. Make sense?

But like all good things, there are potential problems. I recently noted that if I define my browser font settings so that all my fonts use a specific font and size in Firefox (which I tend to do), pages that show content based on a combination of “em” and “%” without a fixed “px” size, can really get small.

The CSS for BINGenuity.com uses “76%” as the designated size for body copy. For most folks this works fine. But for me, since I have designated specific fonts sizes for my page, this CSS style takes my 12pt font size, and then takes it down to 76% through the page’s cascading style sheet (CSS). So I get a rather small standard body copy size of about 8px.

Thankfully my eyes are pretty good (for now) and I can read things much smaller, but it is tough.

The point being made is that we need to consider users, like me, who like to define their own fonts and sizes. If we are using CSS that is based on “em” and “%” for fonts without a defacto size in pixels, we might end up with some strained user eyes.

But we can’t always be safe defining a page based on pixels either. If a user has a screen resolution set very high, a base font of “12px” might still be tiny.

So test and compare before deciding on what works best for you.

Hey! I’m over heeeeeeere!

When new media catches on, it spreads everywhere. And fast. Conversations about YouTube! were rare at first, but once we saw how quickly these videos loaded and how well they played, we wanted to tell all our friends about them!

We’ve experienced the same phenomenon with Flash, AJAX, Google, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and nearly every type of social media you can think of. We say “ooooooh! that is COOL!” then we dive into it.

Trouble is, that while we are swimming deep in the new technology we find nifty, most of our friends are doing the same (and we all keep sharing it). The result is a saturation of media.

Ad columnist for Entrepreneur.com, Roy Williams, wrote about “Advertising Trends: Publishing Past Media Overload“. In the article, he shines a spotlight on problems we face today in advertising that have only grown worse.

The more we have to look at and react to, the harder it is to see things individually. Say we go to a sports arena and have 30-70,000 people around us … ever noticed how really tough it can be to find a buddy (or wife) in the crowd?

Flip that around: in that same arena when you leave your friends (or your husband) to go grab a bite/drink/restroom break, it’s equally hard for them to see you. Getting noticed takes a LOT of effort. (And “hey I forgot my wallet” can be a painful trek back across the crowd!)

With all the new technology we have, often being force-fed to us (see how much you get hit with on your local news station’s web site!), it is no wonder those wanting your attention (and your money), have such a difficult time reaching you.

In Roy’s article, he suggests we all spend a bit more time writing headlines to get attention, then proceed to take that reader’s attention to inform them what you can do for them.

Be fun, smart, and innovative, but make sure you can back-up your headline with reality! Find what you want to get your readers to react to, and grab their attention. They are likely reading e-mail, checking in on Facebook, sending out a Tweet, checking the team scores on ESPN and doing some online shopping. Will you be seen?

Remember, there is a lot more to advertising than a pretty picture, cool graphics, or some well-written copy. It takes a balance of it all to get noticed!

Years ago, some smart and wise developers created a plug-in called Eliminate White for Photoshop.

As a designer, I frequently need to Photoshop images for compositions and artwork that require removing the background in the images, so they can be combined with other images, colors, and text. When I was able to use the Eliminate White plug-in (pre Adobe Photoshop CS1), you could open an RGB image in 8-bit color mode, make a layer out of it, and then use the plug-in filter to strip all hints of white out of the image, leaving only the pixels with color and tone. Most often this was used when taking a photo of a model on a white backdrop, and getting rid of the white background so the person did not have a halo around them.

This was often a pain because models (unless they are bald) have hair, and hair is NOT easy to clone out of a background unless you leave the model looking as if they have a round head of hair!

Sadly, once Adobe started with the CS suite for Photoshop, the new software would not support the Eliminate White plug-in any longer.

However, I recently found a plug-in by Bergdesign, that is Freeware, and it does what the Eliminate White plug-in did! I contacted the Author of the plug-in, Brock Brandenberg, and and offered to send him some money for the plug-in development. He simply stated that he had used so many Freeware and Shareware plug-ins from others, he felt obligated to ‘give back’ to others. What a guy!

The images below show how the Bergdesign plug-in works, in comparison to doing background removal with Photoshop’s Magic Wand or Color Selector.

Below is a logo we recently had to remove an all-white BG from, shown here at 400% using the Magic Wand with a selection range of 15 pixels (notice how there is a white halo around the small copy and the small text characters are filled with white):

Next is the same logo, with the white BG removed, using the Color Select drop-down at 400%, set to a range of 100 pixels (again notice how the art is showing a light white halo):

Now the same logo, using the Bergdesign plug-in at 400% with all hint of the white background eliminated!:

The plug-in also removes Gray and Black backgrounds, as well as White. You can learn more at the Bergdesign.com website by clicking here. He shows additional samples of what this great, FREE, plug-in will do for you, and you can download it and try it out for yourself!

If you do happen to try this plug-in, and like it, be sure to leave some comments on this and Brock’s site! Good luck, and thanks again Brock!