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There is a thing in Mac OS X that really annoys me.. If you have different resolutions and then there is a display icon that appears in the upper menu and it shows an old Cinema Display (the plastic version) and I think that screen is really ugly, and why hasn''t Apple changed it I thought? There are new screens and computers since 10.4 Tiger, but I guess the guys over at Cupertino is just lazy =)

Two tips that relate to the same problem.

Sometimes your client wants colour but he/she hesitates about the cost of a full colour print. The only option you have left is use a spot colour (Pantone). But it's limiting your creativity. Well sometimes InDesign helps you being creative by giving you some options.

ItalianMike asked me to explain how my 'Vector shapes' InDesign tip could be done in Photoshop. I promised I would, so here it is.

Photoshop is a very big box and everybody has his own ways of achieving things. So this tutorial is my way of handling this problem.

First of all open your image (that's easy).

Now double click in the 'Layers palet' in the background layer and rename your layer (the lock must disappear).

Next step is to create some shapes.

1. This is a picture of an old Thunderbird we are going to colorize. Right click on it and choose Save Picture as... to save it on your hard drive. I took this picture somewhere in Ontario, Canada so you can use it for free. Open this picture in Photoshop.

Update: This bug has been fixed in Safari 3. Thanks Balazs N. for the tip!

Safari is a great browser, but not perfect. It doesn't handle CSS background repeat commands correctly. If you set a background not to repeat with no-repeat and it has negative positioning it will still be repeated.

The Table function in InDesign is very powerfull and I want to do some entries about the possibilities. First of all there are the Stroke options.
When you create a table just like the example above you can determine in the table options the stroke and color and so on. But with the table selected you can click on the stroke pallet and you will have something like the image above. Now what does this mean?

A recent discussion sparked the idea of using LAB colorspace for transposing colors. In this lesson, I will show you why and how to do it.

In some occasions you may be in a situation where you need every bit of memory you have in your machine. Finder eats quite a bit of memory (25MB+ of real memory and hundreds of megabytes of virtual memory). You may decide you want to stop the friendly face running temporarily to free up resources to finish up a huge Photoshop job or a video render.

[img]http://www.afterglow.ie/images/deskarticleheader.jpg[/img]
In the past few years , OS X has given Apple a second whirlwind romance with public opinion. It's software, UI effects and "just works" mojo have caused a great ripple of curiosity through previously skeptical PC users.
While the rest of the computing experience on the Mac has jumped forward the file manager used by nearly every single Mac user has puffed along by comparison.

Comparing the Finder of an old Performa chugging away on 0S 7 and Tiger's sleek GUI, the actual functions and implementation haven't changed hugely. So after using the Finder for a decade for media and graphic work, I've come to certain conclusions .

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[*]The Desktop and Finder are two sides of the same file management coin. The best way of getting people into the bad habit of dumping files into an unrelated area. The desktop is just a folder that obscures everything else.

[*]The majority of time is spent navigating for folders, opening files and viewing location info.

[*]My desktop picture never gets seen as it's covered with multiple overlapping windows during the normal multitasking day.

[*]I go to the Finder as an interruption to my workflow, not part of it. Dipping in to find a file, switching between windows, scanning through columns, expanding the window, scrolling horizontally, etc.

[*]Expose and Dashboard give an indication of how you can execute file and system functions in a single layer.

[*]I grew out of metal (brushed or otherwise) when Faith No More split up.

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As an excercise in thinking through Photoshop one day. I mocked up what I would think would help someone in dealing with their information dump all day. This is one step behind vaporware as it currently exists in only in a Quicktime Movie and PDF. But that never stopped any PR department.

So Desk was born ...