Download this free wallpaper at resolution 1440 x 900 (from Flickr). If you’d prefer a different size, leave a comment and let me know.
Download this free wallpaper at resolution 1440 x 900 (from Flickr). If you’d prefer a different size, leave a comment and let me know.
For images of cool distressed type and unintentionally beautiful signage, check out Treasure Everywhere.
My new Magic Mouse rocks for a number of reasons, but I’ve been dissappointed with the two-finger swipe gesturing. It’s used for easily moving through things like iPhoto frame-to-frame. It’s not remarkably complicated: just put two fingers on the mouse and swipe to the left or right. This is straightforward (and awesome) on the trackpad of your standard Mac laptop, but it’s an awkward gesture on a mouse. I can only speak for myself, of course, but I tend to grip the sides of a mouse with thumb and ring finger, leaving index and middle fingers to operate the buttons, or in the case of Magic Mouse: “where the buttons would be if it had buttons and didn’t operate on, apparently, psychic energy.” Gripping the Magic Mouse in this fashion makes comfortable two finger gesturing to the right awkward and gesturing to the left nearly impossible.
You need to take your hand off the mouse entirely. Remove your thumb and ring finger grip and let your hand hover over the mouse. Now drop your two fingers lightly back onto the mouse surface and use a very light touch to swipe back and forth. The multi-touch sensitivity is more then adequate to pick up your lighter gesturing, and not gripping the mouse gives your hand the freedom of motion necessary to move left and right with ease.
The best simile I can draw here is that by moving your hand off the mouse you’re basically treating the mouse’s surface like a virtual trackpad. This is an unfamiliar hand posture for people raised on Microsoft mice and corded Apple mice without multi-touch, so it takes some getting used to.
Incidentally, did you know that you can two-finger swipe in Safari to activate the “back” and “forward” buttons? Try it…it’s cool.
-oAk-
My trusty little design blog gets a depressing percentage of traffic to the one article i posted about my old iPhone’s occaisional problems with receiving calls. In that spirit, here’s a quick post that explains why your brand new iPhone 3Gs will not charge with the car charger from your old iPhone.
It turns out that old iPhones and most models of dock connector iPods were designed to charge with both a Firewire pin OR a USB pin on the dock connector end of the charger. The new 3Gs, for reasons I don’t entirely understand, will only charge with USB. Chances are, if you’re getting the iPhone error message that says that your trusty old third-party charging device doesn’t work with your brand new phone, the device charges with Firewire and you have to go buy a new car charger. It’s as unfortunately simple as that.
On July first my wife and I finally welcomed our first child into the world. We had a son, who we named Ian. To the (literally) tens of you who breathlessly (or not) await the burning missives here at ATCO, thanks for your patience while I’ve spent the last few weeks elbow deep in diapers and cuteness.
In honor of Ian’s arrival, I’ve put together a birth announcement. As you might expect from a designer, I wasn’t content just to buy cards off the rack. I put together this design instead. I’m “oak” so it makes sense (sorta) that Ian would be “Acorn.” That’s his logo at the top of the design.
If you are so inclined, I (and Ian) would like to invite you to download a PDF of this design from the link below.
I’ve touched on this before, but it bears repeating: InDesign is the Swiss Army Knife of PDF file size.
Behold, a section of the new Notre Dame Campus Map file that I am currently building in Illustrator:
Saving this as a PDF at the default file size results in a 2M+ file. Reducing the setting to “Smallest File Size” still comes in at around 1M.
InDesign allows you to further reduce this file size if you create a new document and place the .AI file as a standard graphic, then Export using Cmd+E. Select “Smallest File Size” from the settings menu. In this case the result takes a standard illustrator PDF from 2M to around 800K, or less then half of the original file size…all the better for emailing, especially over slower internet connections.
This works because InDesign basically creates a “flat” image of the placed graphic and then outputs it to PDF. Along the way, this process sheds extra vector data and in the case of layered Photoshop files, extra non-visible image data from hidden layers that adds complexity and file size to your PDF unnecessarily. The concept works to reduce the “weight” of any large image file.
I use this hack all the time to reduce PDF file size. In this earlier article I discuss how I use InDesign and Photoshop together to tame even larger PDFs with file sizes in the hundreds of megabytes.
oAk is a web and print designer with AgencyND, the on-campus design office at the University of Notre Dame.
I'm also a freelance designer from South Bend, Indiana.