Tag Archive for web developer

Acorn 4 – Photoshop for Developers

I’m a developer by day and work for a very small company, as such I don’t have money to buy expensive tools. While I know Photoshop is the gold standard for design, the few times I’ve used it I found the interface very confusing and didn’t have the time or the energy to get up to speed. Enter Acorn from Flying Meat Software this tool hits the sweet spot. It has the ability to do a lot of things that I’ll probably never use but more importantly it gives me the ability to handle the smaller image manipulation tasks that come with my everyday job. Here’s video that shows one of the cool features I’d never be able to figure out in Photoshop.

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More Misguided Microsoft Marketing

There has been a lot of buzz surrounding Microsoft’s latest ad for Internet Explorer—

The ad is clever, but like pretty much every other Microsoft ad, they don’t show anyone using the software. Though they miss the mark entirely, when I and every other web professional complains about Internet Explorer, our complaints aren’t because the browser doesn’t perform well or is slow. The complaints are related to the work we have to do on the backend to make our sites work with IE. The source code for this very page contains lines like:

<!--[if IE]>
<style type="text/css">
.addtoany_list a img{filter:alpha(opacity=70)}
.addtoany_list a:hover img,.addtoany_list a.addtoany_share_save img{filter:alpha(opacity=100)}
</style>
<![endif]-->

For those not in the know this means I have to work around IE and specific versions even to get the page to look right. In essence as a web developer I have to create the page once to work with Safari, Chrome and Firefox, then I have to go through another iteration to make it work with IE. The hate for IE comes not from the user experience of the browser which is fine, it instead comes from all of the extra work needed to make the page work with IE.

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