One of single (test) most productive tools for a mac is Quicksilver which is a free plugin that allows you to quickly hit a few keys and conjure up all kinds of wickedness from your system. And now it looks like Ubiquity brings this genius to the Firefox browser. Check out the video below for a demo and here is the link to go get it: http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
I had a rare Apple customer service moment this past week that left me both thankful and frustrated. The short of the story is as follows: I went to buy a track in iTunes from the Hendrix blues album and iTunes informed me I had already purchased this track... upon some reflection I realized I had bought it a few years ago on a desktop box in a place I worked. I had long since forgotten this and apparently 142 other songs I had purchased over the years and various computers. So I went into my iTunes account and then realized though I did buy these items I could no longer download them. Now if this was a CD from say CDBaby.com and I had lost it well I would expect to have to buy it again, the logic being I bought the CD that I could play anywhere and lost it somewhere, but with iTunes I bought this DRM laden digital item that is pretty much somehow not mine. So this set me to thinking... shouldn't iTunes make this available for me to download since it is really theirs and they are just letting me listen to it in my own limited and closely guarded way off in a room somewhere that no one else can hear?
Turns out they will but only as a "courtesy" and only once! Ha! So this left me thankful I could recover those tracks and frustrated at the realization they were never really mine to begin with but are now mine to lose... ahhh DRM... makes the work a warm and fuzzy place.
So incase you are wondering how to do this for yourself:
Is worth mentioning last night I laid back with the MacBook Pro 17" and watched a netflix OnDemand movie without a hitch. This is pretty slick considering Netflix OnDemand service only works with Windows machines as it is dependent on the Windows Media Player 11. Obviously this is a lame duck for Mac and Linux users but with VMWare's Fusion it was no sweat. And restarting the virtual instance of XP home from the suspended state is redonkulously fast.
This was also watching over my wifi network using full screen mode so this is pretty impressive. I tried this a few month back with Parallels and it was a no go. The install experience for the Netflix plugin is typical Microshaft style crap and takes you through endless prompts and upgrades, DRM upgrades, etc... but once you are there it is worth the functionality... now if I can just get something besides movies made before 1979 from netflix ondemand!
I am officially done with Parallels and glad to receive the competitive discount rebate from VMWare. One other interesting note... I installed VMWare and then Windows XP and then booted XP in the background while working on coding something else and surfing the web. How's that for performance. :)
Just in case you don't recognize this screen shot.. this is when we find out that Soylent Green "is made out of people!" .. look out Chevron with your lame ass Human Energy marketing campaign. :)
I have found many of my clients through the process of working on a project come to ask this question: "What is a vector vs. bitmap image?" Many times I will ask them for vector versions of their logos and marketing materials to be re-purposed in the design of their web project. My question is many time met with puzzlement. I saw this video the other day of a master digital illustrator drawing over a bitmap image in Adobe Illustrator and thought this would be an excellent way to show the difference.. so for understandings sake:
The bitmap image is the photograph underneath which is confined by resolution and pixels. The vector image is the drawing being made over top in this video which is full scalable and editable to any size and essentially boils down to a mathematical equation. And because description still sounds so cryptic I offer this video for show and tell which is a time lapsed shot of many hours of work sped up to about 6 minutes:
