Anne Kowalski

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Grasshopper on Flower

Taken with my new Canon Rebel XTi digital SLR camera. I have no idea what kind of flower it is.

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Designing the “Future Of” Sites

Digital Web Magazine published an article last month about the start-to-finish design and branding of Carson System’s Future of Online Advertising website. I always enjoy reading case studies about design and branding; it gives me new ideas for how to approach problems. It is also interesting to see the amount and types of ideas that get tossed and amount of revisions that are made before the final product is completed and published.

It is one thing to say “the design must be attractive and communicate to the target audience” but something quite different to actually see an example from start to finish. Most design books and articles only give the design specs and the finished product, none of the in between stuff.

Monday, September 17, 2007

Optimizing PNG Images for Older Browsers

Sitepoint had a great article in their newsletter today on how to optimize PNG images to avoid a gray background in older versions of IE. (I've linked to the original post on their forums.) The end result is that the transparent part of the images will display normally in IE7/Firefox/Safari/Opera etc and degrade gracefully for those still using IE6 and below. No hacks, not extra code, no conditional comments - just a minor adjustment while creating the image.

You will need Fireworks - according to the author this technique isn't possible in the popular image editing programs Photoshop, GIMP, or Paint Shop Pro. In a nutshell, you set the file format to PNG-8 with alpha transparency, and the end result has semi-transparent colors. The better browsers will recognize the semi-transparent colors, and display the image properly. The older versions of IE will treat the semi-transparent colors as fully transparent colors, and render the image like a GIF. (The image may appear thinner/choppier, but will have a transparent instead of gray background.)

Sunday, September 16, 2007

OneNote Mobile and Windows Mobile 2003

I saw that OneNote 2007 has Pocket PC integration, so I decided to give it a try. However, the minimum requirement is Windows Mobile 5, and my Dell Axim X3i is Mobile 2003 SE. Luckily for me, someone created a workaround for people with Mobile 2003/2003SE Pocket PCs. It is available by download from Handango for $6.50. Much cheaper than a new device. This patch worked very well for me. If you decide to buy the full version, make sure you follow the instructions in the help file. It requires a couple of reboots of both device and PC before you can sync your notes. The mobile version of OneNote is quite limited, just like Word and Excel. If I want notes on the desktop to show up in the Pocket PC, I have to copy or move the pages from whatever notebook they are currently in into the OneNote Mobile notebook. It doesn't automatically sync the current notebooks into the Pocket PC. Also, there's no drawing enabled - just straight text input, with inserting pictures or recordings. But you can view pictures and drawings that were created on the desktop. Now my next thing is figuring out if there's any way of doing desktop PIM integration without using Outlook.

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Open Source Alternatives

Open Source as Alternative is a web guide for open source alternatives to popular commercial software packages. Some of the suggestions are a stretch (such as Thunderbird as an alternative to Outlook), but they're free. Nothing to lose by downloading them and trying them out. What I particularly like is how they also list the compatible operating systems right on the page.