Visual Lizard

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We work on the Internet and are constantly consuming information. There's a lot of it out there. We'd forget it if we didn't write it down someplace…

Visual Lizard's blog covers everything from web standards to the muppets, from php to comic books to music, just about anything we find interesting

Wednesday, August 16th, 2006

Google Talk Upgrade

Google has recently upgraded it’s instant messenger client. For those of you who are using it, just right-click the Google Talk icon in your taskbar or system tray, and choose "Check For Updates Now".

First of all, if you use the voice chat options, you now have the ability to leave voicemails to your contacts. Useful if they are not immediately available. When they get back, the message will be emailed to them with the recording as an attachment.

A regularly requested feature that finally appears is file transfers. This ability not being available has been the reason I’ve most often heard from people using MSN Messenger. It’s good to see it here.

Finally, something I wasn’t expecting, but I like: being able to set your status to automatically update with the current band name and song title your listening to. Works with iTunes too.

There’s an official write-up on the changes here. And if you don’t have Google Talk yet, click here to try it out. It’s free. :)

Monday, August 14th, 2006

Red River College Relaunch

Visual Lizard is proud to be part of Red River College’s recent relaunch, officially unveiled on July 26th, 2006.

Red River College’s website represented a massive amount of information across separate layouts and structures. by developing the new site on Visual Lizard’s Catalyst content management system, the porting over of the content was a smooth endeavour, making future updates and edits relatively painless.

The new site is broken up into multiple audience areas, divided up by content type. From the home page, users may click the colored tab that best describes them. This will lead to a color-coded section with content and links suited to specific audience interests. And an expanding sidebar navigation and dynamic breadcrumbing links ensure visitors get where they are going!

The new site also sports a robust search feature. By typing a key word or phrase, visitors can easily find the content they are looking for no matter where it resides. With this Quick Search field available on every page, nothing gets lost or buried for long!

Of course, all this was built on the new site design provided by the bright boys and girls at spacecadet design, who worked tirelessly with College Relations department and endorsed by RRC’s Web Management Committee. The redesign freshens the site appearance while also bringing it in line with the College’s overall visual identity.

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

Ford: Leave Global Warming to the consumer

We have known for some time that the motor companies under the influence of Big Oil have been denying global warming. Now, however, with the mounting evidence that pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are causing the problem the motor companies are finally coming around and saying "yeah, you were right" to the scientists and environmentalists. In a BBC news story in July 2006, the executive vice president of Ford of Europe and the Premiere Automotive Group, Lewis Booth basically stated that in order to turn around global warming it was in the hands of the consumers... that is to say that if we want to fix the global warming mess we are going to have to ask for the greener products before the auto industry should build them. He also went on to suggest that governments should offer incentives to the auto industry in the form of business tax reductions to promote green technologies, and that the consumer should be taxed for not buying green.

While he does say a few things about how we as a consuming society have to change our way of thinking about greenhouse gas emissions which are very true, he does not think that the automotive industry should take the leading role in that change. I have a suggestion for the automotive industry. Change your thoughts on you overall market. Instead of relying on the consumer to slowly come around to a more green way of thinking, assume that the demand is there and provide the greenest options possible. Given the opportunity, most people will choose the greener option provided that the price is similar. If the automotive industry took a stand and pushed for the green option, Big Oil would have no choice but to fall into line. Of course this won’t happern, because *whine* "that would be hard" *whine*.

Honda and Toyota and even Ford are already starting to provide the green options, and an article for motortrend.com is showing that the demand is already there. Its time for the American Auto Industry to grab hold of the green bandwagon before it slips out of sight. If the auto industry takes the lead, other polluting industries may take the hint, and maybe the global warming problem won’t seem so insurmountable.

Monday, August 7th, 2006

Apple Announcements at WWDC 2006

Apple’s WWDC 2006 announcement went out. They used the time to announce the new Mac Pro and to preview some of Leopard’s features. I’m not going to go into too much detail, there’s a hundred better articles out there that already do that. Instead, I’ll give you a sampling and my impressions.

The new Mac Pro, replacing the G5 PowerMacs. I admit I’m disappointed the rumours that a new enclosure was coming out turned out to be false. Personally, I think the titanium look is nice, but I’m yearning for a new look from Apple. The white Macbooks are sweet!

The new Mac Pro’s are Apple’s top end machines, and unlessy ou have serious coin to drop and really need the extra horsepower, you’ll give this a pass. Let’s face it, I do not need 16Gb or RAM or four harddrive bays :)

The juicy bits I was waiting for came with the Leopard preview. I might have mentioned it before; I want to buy a Mac as my next machine, but I’m holding off until Leopard is released. Looks like that won’t be until spring 2007, but with what they showed today, it looks like it’s going to be worth the wait.

Mail got a bump, making it a little more like Apple’s answer to Outlook. Addition of Notes and a To-Do list, which integrates with other apps. I preferred Mail when it was fairly stand alone, and I worry about it starting to do too much. If the To-Do integration with iCal and other apps are solid, it’ll probably work out all well, but I’d have to hands-on it to be sure.

Time Machine is Leopard’s built in backup software. Don’t let the fancy name and graphics fool you, there’s some solid thinking behind it. I’ll have to read up in more depth to form a full opinion, but right now, three things spring to mind. One, great idea, love being able to retrieve past versions of documents I saved or deleted outright. Could be useful. Two, how much drive space and resources does this constant backup take? How much can it be configured. Or outright turned off? And three, the 3D effects are cute, but can they be turned off?

Another feature in Leopard is Spaces, virtual desktops. It’s like the tabs on your web browser; open a new blank desktop for apps, to reduce clutter on screen. You can tab between desktops, and easily drag apps to and from Spaces. For some people who work with a dozen apps open, this will help keep things easier to manage. Move iTunes and Mail in one Space, then open browsers, editors, etc in a workspace Space instead.

In my opinion, the coolest feature in the set was the Dashboard upgrades. Not only did they add Dashcode, allowing for faster and easier creation of widgets, but they also added Web Clips, through Safari. Basically, on any webpage you view in Safari, you can press a button, choose an area in that webpage, and make it a widget... instantly. For those of you like me who would love very specific widgets but never had the time to learn the nitty gritty, this is magic.

There were more announcements, of course. Core animations, to make slicker apps, iCal upgrade to match up with the Mail upgrade, Spotlight upgrade, better accessibility through text readers, and more. Also, there were some unannounced bonuses on the Apple Store, like the one-third price drop on Apple’s 20inch, 23inch, and 30inch Cinema Displays.

For full information, I recommend you check out this article at Engadget, who provided excellent coverage live from the keynote. Or, if you missed it completely, watch the entire keynote in Quicktime.

Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006

Launch of Original Pictures

We have just launched the latest edition of the Original Pictures Inc. The graphic design of the site was provided by Spacecadet Design. The graphic design provided some small challenges to our use of cascading style sheets in the site’s dynamic database driven content. With a little effort we were able to produce the interpreted design, and still manage to follow W3C standards.

Original Pictures Inc. now has a place to showcase their productions and the customized content management system we built allows for staff to keep their site up to date without needing a working knowledge of html.

Original Pictures Inc. makes use of the Visual Lizard Catalyst Content Management System.

Wednesday, July 26th, 2006

Iconfactory Being Updated

It seems Iconfactory is currently updating it's web site, moving toward a standards compliant design. Not only that, but for the week the site is unavailable, visitors can view short animations showing isometric pixel characters reconstruct the identifying factory logo.

There's a new one each day for six days. As of this writing, they are on number three, with trucks "moving out" HTML 4 tags and table tags. You can browse past animations by clicking the colored numbers along the bottom.

They have some excellent free icon sets by talented artists at the Iconfactory. I'm looking forward to the new site.

Monday, July 24th, 2006

IE7 Beta 3 and FTP

I use Windows Explorer for my FTP client. At first, this will attract cat calls for the "smarter than thous", telling me to use a "real" FTP client like Filezilla or CoreFTP or somesuch. I have downloaded, installed, and tried a variety of FTP clients and I had the same problem with all of them: they are a completely seperate program from my regular OS browsing.

I usually have a couple Windows Explorer windows open, accessing folder locally, on the network, etc. I am extremely happy being able to drag and drop between them, double clicking to open a file in it’s associated program or editor. I can easily browse a set of folders and files and make changes to a web development.

What I do not enjoy is then switching to a completely different program, and having to browse to those same local or network folders so I can upload them. And no, I do not want to set up an FTP client to be able to locally browse and open files in associated programs. That’s what the OS is for.

In my opinion, the FTP client should be just the remote directory. I do not need a local directory listing. Windows does that just fine. And I want to be able to drag from Windows Explorer to my remote directory, and back again. Using Windows Explorer as my FTP client gives me that. I still have a seperate FTP client for anything fancier or more advanced, but 90% of my FTP use is uploading and downloading graphics and text files.

So then Microsoft provides IE7 Beta 3 for download and testing. I download and install it and test it. The first problem I encounter is that FTP seemingly does not work. I can get an HTML directory listing, but I can no longer get a FTP client.

I look into it on the IE developer listings, I follow the instructions, still no good. I look into it through Google, and find that authenticated FTP access has trouble in IE7 currently. Some people are successful, but some people are not. I was a not.

No problem. I tried IE7 Beta 2, and after some testing, was able to uninstall it without lingering after effects. I tried the same here, removing IE7 Beta 3, and reverting to IE6. Everything was fine until I tried FTP.

I could only get an HTML directory listing. Going into the IE6 options and tring to reset the appropriate settings and checkboxes had no effect. It seems IE7’s FTP problem had completely infected Windows Explorer.

Curses!

To make a long story short, I eventually had to System Restore back to before I installed IE7 Beta 3. We work off a network specifically so if something like this (or worse) happens, nothing critial is lost. Still, quite annoying.

So, lesson learned: more research beforehand :)

Monday, July 24th, 2006

2 Weeks in Lake Tahoe up for Sale

Sadly, getting to Lake Tahoe with 2 small children in tow is not in the cards right now, so if you are looking for a nice place to head for a ski or golf vacation, this might be right up your alley.

2 Weeks in Lake Tahoe, on Ebay. Go. Bid. Win. Have a great time and take some scenery photos for me.

Thursday, July 20th, 2006

How To Live With A Great Designer

How to Live With A Great Designer - by Seth Godin is a must read article for anyone who is thinking of hiring or working with a designer.

Seeing as we work with a lot of great designers, we thought that they might appreciate this list! Maybe make it mandatory client reading prior to the start of every project. ;)

Monday, July 17th, 2006

Spider-Man 3 Teaser Poster

This popped up on a variety of sites on Friday. I have to say, this is a pretty sweet looking poster. I love the way the spider logo changes with the red and black, particularly the top legs.

Here’s a description from Comingsoon.net...

Sony Pictures has sent a new backlit lenticular Spider-Man 3 poster to select theaters in North America and we’ve got your sneak peek online! As you can see, the poster features Spidey’s chest which goes from red to black/grey depending on what angle you’re looking at it. It’s very cool to see, so be sure to look for the poster in your local theater.

I haven’t had a poster on my wall since I was a teenager, but I might have to make an exception for this one :)