I learned to program on the streets, in the school of hard knocks, instead of some sissypants classroom with “rules” and “techniques” and “sound, solid advice”. So occasionally frequently I learn new things about programming that I perhaps should have learned long ago. This may be one of those things; a bit o’ wisdom that is actually common knowledge. But I’ll share it here as a gift to my fellow hard knockers. Wait, that sounded wrong … Read the rest of this entry

My friend Mimi Payne has launched a new website called Arkiva Tropika featuring scans from her exhaustive personal collection of Polynesian menus, postcards, matchbooks, and other ephemera. It’s truly an overload of mid-century graphic design and photography, and it’s great browsing as a source of design ideas, or just for fun. I’ve seen Mimi’s collection in person and the quality and volume is staggering. At launch the site only features a fraction of her collection, but she’s adding more to the site all the time and the RSS feed chronicles the latest additions.

There’s scads of Tiki Bars, illustrations, and vintage typeset menu interiors, and this is really only the tip of the iceberg. I’m really excited to see this launch, I wish I had it as a resource when I was designing Forbidden Island’s menu. The site features tags and searching, and was designed and programmed by Humuhumu. Congratulations Mimi!

http://www.arkivatropika.com

The wonderful blog IronicSans interviews Seetharaman Narayanan of Photoshop splashscreen fame. I love interviews of unfamous people behind famous things, like The Sneeze’s interview with the FedEx logo designer.

Here’s a tip: A “progress bar” should go from left to right, and never go backwards.

Yours doesn’t. It goes from left to right, and when it just about reaches the end, it hops back to the beginning with a new “status” message, so it never really shows you how far along you are. That’s retarded. Literally.

Apple announced the iTV -- a set top box that will play iTunes movies and shows on your TV. Details are blurry at the moment, since it was just announced hours ago and it won’t ship until 2007, but from what I understand it’s 300 bucks but still requires you own a computer and have it turned on and running. I think I’d be fine with that but I don’t think that’s going to fly with the iPod generation. Read the rest of this entry

First off, although I love them, I have some issues Photoshop’s Vector tools.. But I thought I’d share this little trick I use with snapping vector shapes to guides.

The Problem

When moving stuff around with the Path Selection Tool, shapes only want to snap to guide lines via their points. This can cause the occasional problem when a shape’s curve defines one of it’s edges. Take this rounded triangle for example:

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This odd little Photoshop trick that I’ve used for a long time just came up the other day while I was working on my new game, and I thought I’d blog about it. It uses an obscure side-effect of floating selections to make filling in the gaps of semi-translucent images a bit easier and without a lot of steps. See this broken button here?

The trick I’m about to demonstrate will let me fill in gap in this button without copying, without pasting, without creating a layer, without using the clear command or delete key, and without any precise measurements, and hopefully without me using any more italics. Read the rest of this entry

A few months ago I visited the San Francisco Airport’s in-lobby art exhibit on Polynesian Pop. The display was fantastic -- a lot of great collectables and ephemera from both the midcentury and the current Tiki revival. Humuhumu, her Mom (who was travelling that day) and I browsed the exhibit for quite some time. Taking it all in, something caught my eye, and it wasn’t any of the pieces in the exhibit, but what was behind them. The back of the display case was lined with a huge print of faux Hawaiian patterns. Read the rest of this entry

When debugging projectors, there are times when you need a log file or a message window to help out with fixing issues. There are ways to open up a message window directly inside of a projector, but there are scenerios where that’s not useful: either too much is being dumped to the message message window, or the bug occurs on a third-party’s machine who isn’t the developer themself. In the past I’ve written a custom debugLog() function and then called it with messages that I wanted to keep track of, but this method isn’t compatible with the way most of us use the message window in Director: the “put” command, which means going back and changing the important Put commands to Debuglog(). Read the rest of this entry