72 thinking « Lehigh Valley Website Design

I ran into a small problem a couple days ago. I had purchased an album on my iPhone while I was on the way back from a client meeting. When I got back I wanted to transfer the purchased album to my iTunes on my computer that way I could enjoy the lovely sounds at the office as well. When I plugged my phone into the computer and tried to drag the purchased album to my iTunes, it wouldn’t let me. I wasn’t too surprised as all of the iPhone / iPod devices are setup so that you can’t drag and drop your friends music from their devices onto your computer to try and avoid paying for the music. I tried a couple quick things until I found the solution.

The solution wasn’t too complicated, but I don’t feel that it was obvious enough. My initial thoughts was that there would be a ‘transfer purchased’ button somewhere when you’re looking at the Music or Default panels. Unfortunately I didn’t see one (maybe there was one and I missed it, if so feel free to comment below). Anyway, the solution that I had found came from right clicking on my device name and then finding a ‘Transfer Purchases’ option there. Once I did that, everything moved smoothly from my iPhone to my computer and I was ready to enjoy my new album.

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A good friend of mine showed me a nice little Mac application called Anxiety a couple years ago. At that point I was playing around in multiple applications to try and find a really simple tool to help with project management. After playing around with apps like OmniFocus and Things (which I really did like, by the way), I was finding that many of the applications had just a little bit too much going on. Now that doesn’t make these applications bad or anything, actually both those listed above are really great applications that I would highly recommend. However, they weren’t what I was looking for.

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As a web designer it’s extremely important to be able to test projects in multiple browsers. We want to try and ensure that people get the same experience whether they’re looking at a project in Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc. Now any web designer should be able to tell you that Internet Explorer is the biggest issue with our jobs. To be honest, if we didn’t have Internet Explorer things would be so much easier, in particular Internet Explorer 6. According to Wikipedia, IE6 was release in August of 2001. That’s more than 8 years ago! When you think about that in computer years, it’s a lifetime! So why are so many people still running IE6? I can’t answer that, but I can tell you for certain that when it comes to web development that tons and tons of money is wasted on making sites work in IE6!

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When working on a computer it becomes imperative to learn keyboard shortcuts, or key commands to keep things moving, and moving quickly! Being that I’m on the computer what feels like 24/7 I’ve picked up a few that I use constantly! Below is just a short list of some of the basic Mac key commands that we use constantly when either setting up folders for client files, sorting through tons of running applications, or browsing the web. These are just a handful of useful keyboard shortcuts that we put together.

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So I’ve been using this method since I’ve realized that I don’t always remember everything; and what I’m talking about is using the Mac Screenshot to measure pixels. If you’re like me and use ‘px’ as your measurement rather than ‘em’ then this may be a technique that you can use as well. So lets jump right in…

When I built out a website I write all the code and export all the images by hand so I have an idea of the width and height of different div’s and images are… but I don’t always remember the exact pixels. For example if I’m trying to position a div tag in a certain spot and I have it set to ‘absolute’ positioning and its off by so many pixels, I just hit Shift + Apple + 4 to activate the screenshotcursor and draw a box the size that I need to move the div tag.

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