Todd Lambert - Web Designer and Web Development » Edition 1

Did someone say “MacWorld”?

Todd Lambert — Sat, 08 Jan 2005 09:21:59 +0000

Yup, it’s that time again. That wonderful time when you see all the new toys available from Apple and then try to figure out how to pay for them.

Myself, I want a rack of new G5 Xserves, and Xraid, and a bevy of those new iPod Mini-me’s…. Yup.. that’s what I want.

I’m also looking at the new iLife suite for another $49 bucks… then throw in the upgrade for my copy of Final Cut Express at another $99… [adding in my head] I am now up to one miiiiilllliiiiooon dollars! Well, at least it feels like it will cost that much.

Still, it is such a wonderful time right now, being MacWorld and all.

Flesh is not flesh colored at all!

Todd Lambert — Wed, 05 Jan 2005 09:17:45 +0000

There I was the other day, thinking about colors to be used for an upcoming project, when I started to realize that colors don’t mean as much to me as they used to.

Colors started as pretty benign designations that you are taught as a kid: Orange, Yellow, Green, etc.. Then as you move into the world further and discover Crayons™, you suddenly find yourself immersed in new names for what were once just simple colors. Now you have Raw Sienna, Maize, and Prussian Blue. They could still be classified by the base color names, but now they are so much cooler!

Anyways, I then thought about how Hexadecimal equivalents relate to the cool color names from my Crayon™ days and decided to do some searching about the origins of these new names. I ran across a very cool rundown on the history of Crayola Crayon™ colors and when they were introduced.

Then searching further, I found that SimpleBits was running a small informal quiz, asking you to guess the Hex color codes of a few sample swatches (which I did very well on btw).

Then I realized, I have gone from simple color names to fancy Crayon™ colors and finally ending in boring Hexadecimal colors. Where did I go wrong?

Safari gets Min / Max Height Properties

Todd Lambert — Mon, 03 Jan 2005 03:07:19 +0000

David Hyatt announced that the latest internal versions of Apple’s web browser Safari include support for min-height and max-height properties now. This is a step forward but only a step as it still doesn’t support min-width and max-width yet, however he did say that those were in the works.

But again, this is only a step forward because Microsoft refuses to implement this capability into Internet Explorer.

For those who don’t know what these properties do, they allow for “liquid” designed sites (sites that expand and contract according to the browser window size) to be set to maximum width and heights. Why is this important? Because this helps to keep text from extending to very long widths and helps to keep lines of text at a readable length. This site uses a max-width property which is displayed in Better Browsers™, but not in Internet Explorer. Maybe we will get these new technologies about the same time that Microsoft implements support for PNG graphics with an alpha channel like the rest of the world has already done. I won’t be holding my breath, however.