Jeff Carlson (.Thought)

Seattle Times Column and Safari 3.0.2

My Seattle Times Practical Mac column today talks about Safari 3, which is a beta for Mac but also for Windows: "Trekking through Apple's new Safari". In addition to talking about improvements over Safari 2, I noted Apple's initial hiccup with Windows security:

Safari also offers better security, especially compared with Internet Explorer, which is often used as a gateway to deploy malicious software. However, Safari stuttered at the starting line in this respect as several security flaws were discovered shortly after the software was made available. Apple quickly released Safari 3.0.1 for Windows to plug those vulnerabilities. Although Safari 3 is beta software, Apple will need to work hard to ensure that it's not permanently tagged as being insecure.

Sure enough, today I see that Apple has released Safari 3.0.2 for both Mac and Windows. Nice timing, Apple! My column gets turned in earlier in the week, so of course there's no way this could have made it into the article. But still.

Web Design for Print Designers - Resources

My second presentation at the HOW Design Conference was "Web Design for Print Designers." Here are a list of resources I mentioned.

My apologies if you looked for this last night; I ended up crashing hard at about 9 pm (the first night I've slept more than about 5 hours in too many days)!

• A List Apart, great resource for Web designers.
• Article: "Quick CSS Mockups with Photoshop" by Casper Voogt
• CSS Zen Garden, site that really demonstrates the power of CSS.
• Joe Clark's Web site, a rich resource for accessibility information.
• PDF Enhancer, by Apago (for the woman who asked about ways to deal with large PDF files online).

Thanks again to everyone attended the session!

Wrangling Fonts Presentation Links

At the HOW Design Conference today, I gave a presentation called "Wrangling Your Fonts." Here is a list of resources that I mentioned (or didn't mention but found useful).

• "Avoid the Most Common Mac OS X Font Mistake," by Sharon Zardetto Aker; TidBITS, 2006-05-29
• Take Control of Mac OS X Fonts, by Sharon Zardetto Aker (electronic book).
• Take Control of Font Problems in Mac OS X, by Sharon Zardetto Aker (electronic book).
• Real World Mac OS X Fonts, by Sharon Zardetto Aker (physical book version of the above ebooks, if you prefer paper).
• "The Mac OS X font managers review," by Dave Girard; Ars Technica, 2006-12-28
• Smasher, by Insider Software. Opens old font suitcases and breaks them up into new suitcases for better font management.
• Suitcase Fusion, Extensis
• Font Doctor, Extensis
• Linotype FontExplorer X
• FontAgent Pro

Thanks to everyone who came to hear me speak!

How to Purchase My Photos

Speaking of photos, the last post - plus a query from a friend - prompted me to point out that you can now purchase some of my photos, as either prints or fully framed. I wrote an article last year about printing photos for the Seattle Times (see the blog post here), and one of the companies I looked at was Seattle-based ImageKind. I set up a store for testing and then largely forgot about it as I moved on to other projects.

I've now added a few more photos to it, thanks to a recent deal between ImageKind and Flickr that makes it easy to have prints made of your photographs. The print quality is excellent, and the prices seem reasonable considering that you're getting custom framing done and shipped to you. Plus, they offer a "no questions asked" return policy if you don't like the end result.

And if you do purchase one, email me and let me know how it turned out!

Beautiful Seattle

  Ferry Leaving 2 
  Originally uploaded by Jeff Carlson

Just wanted to say that I live in a beautiful place.

I was eyeing these clouds already downtown, but when I saw that the sun was punching through the clouds and a ferry was about to embark, I quickly found a parking spot under the viaduct, crossed the street, and ran across a parking lot to get several shots before the ferry was gone (another version can be seen here).