can't use it

Prevent gradient banding with limited palette

cemre — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 21:38:49 +0000

Adding a small amount of noise on gradients as a texture has been fashionable for quite a while, but only recently I discovered that they have a nice by-product: they prevent banding while being exported with a limited palette:

This is especially useful as it lets you disable dithering on the overall image (which sometimes causes small text to get illegible) and dither only the gradients.

HTML Emails: Yahoo overwrites link color

cemre — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 21:22:55 +0000

If you do e-mail marketing work, you probably noticed Yahoo! Mail overwriting link colors with their blue. They do this to display users supplemental information and ads.

By chance, I found out that having any tags inside the , such as a , avoids this. So wrap your text links in to retain the colors you set for the links.

Different stroke/fill opacities in Adobe Fireworks

cemre — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 03:36:23 +0000

Fireworks doesn’t officially support setting different opacities for fills and strokes, but here are two workarounds:
- Stroke less opacity than fill: Use effects / Photoshop live effects / stroke, set opacity accordingly
- Fill less opacity than stroke: Re-create the solid fill using gradient fill with 2 same colors, then use gradient fill’s opacity sliders to decrease fill opacity. This will not affect the stroke.

Emotional baggage of printer software

cemre — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 12:09:31 +0000

Mom bought a canon printer and she installed the software herself. Now she has 6 icons on her desktop:

Canon MP250 series user guide
Canon My Printer
Canon MP Navigator EX 3.0
Canon Easy-PhotoPrint EX
Canon solution menu- this starts automatically on every boot and asks if I want to go to a web page that has free high-quality ready-to-use printable material or register my printer online (why?)
Canon MP250 series online registration

I wonder what’s the motivation behind filling the desktop with these icons. Isn’t it a good enough user experience if my printer prints properly? Why does the printer need constant visibility and attention?

Meanwhile, I got a prompt saying the solution manager has an update and if I want to install it. Having been away from the Windows world for so long, I forgot computing on Windows was actually a pretty dreadful experience, giving constant attention to keep the computer in working condition.

(Although I have to admit that Adobe tries really hard to bring this model to Macs: “you must close all software and restart your computer after installation” installers, update managers that take up space in your tray although they don’t need it, extention managers with slow useless fancy UIs, I-wonder-who-uses-it Adobe Bridge etc…)

I’ll research about this compulsion of printer/scanner manufacturers and if they are doing this just because they can or if they have some metrics behind their crap apps (I doubt).

If they want to provide top-notch UX for Windows 8, Microsoft has to somehow dictate PC and peripheral manufacturers not to overload systems with crappy software. Do you ever remember buying a new Windows computer and having a true “clean” installation?

Automatically convert all CSS rgb colors to hex colors

cemre — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 03:57:16 +0000

If you copy pasted CSS from firebug’s inspector, the colors turn out as rgb(a,b,c). To fix your file and revert all colors to #aabbcc hex format, use this PHP script:

$string = << (put your CSS here) EOD; $pattern = '/rgb$(\d+),\s*(\d+),\s*(\d+)$/e'; $replacement = '"#" . dechex(\\1) . dechex(\\2) . dechex(\\3)'; echo preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $string);

There usually aren’t any ‘$’ characters in CSS but if you have them, escape them while putting the CSS in heredoc :)

Type Mirror in Processing

cemre — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 03:47:07 +0000

Something I pulled up in half an hour for a class presentation.

Click here to download it!

The marketing page of Tumblr did confuse the hell out of me.

cemre — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 21:40:54 +0000

feedwordpress imports “A” as article content

cemre — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 05:15:01 +0000

If you’re using feedwordpress to syndicate content from another blog and the RSS2 feed comes up as only “A”, and only the summary appears in the excerpt section, try using the ATOM feed.

Intimidating.

cemre — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 06:48:16 +0000

5 MINUTES AND 44 SECONDS LEFT.

What is this, a bomb?

Flash drive appears as 200 mb under Windows

cemre — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:08:49 +0000

I got this tiny flash drive from Amazon a couple of months ago and I really grew to like it. Something peculiar happened with it, Windows wouldn’t recognize the FAT partition that I had created using Mac OS X and re-formatting it with Windows reduced the capacity of the disk to 200mb.

Solution is to use HP’s flash drive format tool under Windows, it recognizes the full capacity.

http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,64963-page,1/description.html

Keywords: flash disk, flash drive, usb drive, thumb drive (we really need a standardized name :), 200 mb, 200mb, partition, format