AC Vent

Any one who knows a web programmer even remotely well will probably have heard a rant about the Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) browser at some point. If you are a programmer yourself, you’ve likely been the voice of numerous such rants yourself. I certainly have. You build a beautiful site, it looks perfect in every major browser – even IE7, which has it’s own ’special’ quirks. But IE6, for some unfathomable reason, refuses to recognize one little style or div tag, and suddenly it looks like your site got hit by a virtual grenade and is splattered in a haphazard fashion all over the screen. It’s a mess and fixing it, more often that not, results in the site looking bad in every other browser. So you have to do these complex, inefficient hacks on your own code just to get it looking good everywhere. This of course takes a considerable amount of time, as you can’t always tell right off which small tag is the one causing the problem, let alone hash out the work-around. Read the rest of this entry »

A good designer friend of mine is excited this week because he’s getting a new MacBook Pro. This got me thinking about the design tools or general creative aides I find drool-worthy, and would love to have and get excited about. (These are in no particular order of importance or price, just how I thought of them.)

1. The Wacom Cintiq 12WX graphics tablet – Now, I have never owned or even used a graphics tablet before (I know, sad, right?) but I have long wanted one, and this seems to me it would be perfect. Decent size drawing area, yet compact, and shows what you’re working on in the actual drawing area, instead of having your pen working on a blank tablet while your eye is looking at the computer monitor (which I would imagine as a nightmare of coordination). Read the rest of this entry »