jeremyswank

there's nothing worse, in my opinion, than writing a blog post in a wysiwyg web form when you know how to type and all you want to to is just type up a post. c'mon, it's 2011 and editing text in web forms is an execrable experience, one of the least pleasant things to do in a browser. markdown is a snap to learn and it is such a relief to be writing in your favorite text editor, without the copy-paste rigamole.

that works, but probably a better technique is to put in a normal h1 and assign the image to background of that element. then use text-indent to thow the display of the text off screen (as is commonly done). like this:

h1 { background-image: url(foo.png); text-indent: -999em; }

of course, you then have to give dimensions to the h1 to show the whole picture, but i leave that as an exercise for the reader.

i've been using the 9 nightlies now for about month and have had no problems with it -- seems pretty solid.

surprisingly enough, 'species' is both the singular and plural form of the word.

or you could just re-map cmd-Q to cmd-ctrl-Q in the Keyboard prefpane, under Keyboard Shortcuts. you don't need a credit card to do that.

fwiw, bbedit has a builtin [s]ftp file browser that works in the way you describe. i use it a lot.

bbedit also has unix shell script support and worksheets that can run one-liners. i don't use it much, so i can't really say how well it works or how useful it it. but i guess it would be possible to do what you describe, and given that it's bbedit, i'm inclined to think it would work intelligently and well.

i'm not affiliated with the company, but i've used bbedit since about 1997. i can see how textmate is superior in some ways, but it lacks some bbedit features that i use a lot so that makes it hard to contemplate changing -- just like the emacs graybeard who also commented.

why try to quantify the unquantifiable?

more != better

generally speaking, i'm no fan of interlace either, but my argument still stands that it could be used expressively -- in other words, to enhance the experience of the content for appropriate material. as an example, it might be a good choice if you were making a program and you wanted to exploit the impression that the viewer was watching a tv broadcast from a few decades ago.

a grain effect added to a digital photo is a kind of affectation, an artifice that is not intimately connected to the process of making the image, included as a stylistic decision; possibly an afterthought. it seems dishonest (not necessarly wrong) but it is part of a panoply of effects that can be applied that constitute what's possible with digital. there's no need to 'lament' since each medium has its own panoply of possiblities: photochemical emulsion gets to be 'honest' about grain, however, and digital does not, since with emulsion grain is not an 'effect': it is what emulsion, in fact, consists of. the same cannot be said about digital.

there are analogous issues between film and video, and even between older video formats and digital video. the future of movies no doubt includes a choice of frame rates, frame resolutions, interlace vs. progressive, and aspect ratios as creative choices. they will be part of the panoply of possibilities that artists will be able to use.

n.b.: in the silent era, there was no real standard film speed, and the film was often exhibited (in the days of hand crank projectors) at varying speeds to suit the content of the image and the music that was invariably played live alongside it. for example, romantic scenes might be cranked a bit more slowly; comedy scenes could be cranked a bit faster. it was only when the industry started to be professionalized that silent films were shot a 16 or 18 fps. with the sound era, the fps was upped to 24 partily to improve the fidelity of the optical sound. most projectors have for decades now multi-leaf shutters which actually interrupt the light path as many as 3 times per frame elimitate the perception of flicker.

but wait, it says the developer 'botched the output' -- shouldn't i be able to presume as a designer (who knows how to create proper output) that my contribution will not be botched by someone who may be a really fine coder, but lacks a good understanding of how to optimize images and deliver good output for the screen?

According to these: [MPEG](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpeg) and [MPEG LA](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-LA) are not the same organization. Quote "MPEG LA is not affiliated with MPEG, the Moving Picture Experts Group."

i don't quite get the europe categories. define "eastern europe". and "other europe"? what about "central europe" where i live?

i'm interested in your friend's work. can you provide a link or reference, please?

The digraph mark N© has been in use for many years by the groups The Tape-beatles and Negativland, for two examples. It was devised by the British artist Mark Pawson in the late 1980s. (I'm not saying anything against the new mark, just offering this up because it might be interesting to some.)

Czech Republic

The newly restored version, which I saw recently thanks to a torrent, is a much, much better movie (both finer as an art work and more entertaining) than the truncated, barely coherent, version that I remember from being in film school in the 1980s. The restored version displays a richness and fullness of story line that the truncated version, which circulated for decades, only hints at. (Personally, I consider the Moroder version to be a true esthetic atrocity, not worth watching.)

It doesn't hyphenate correctly. I get the word 'columns' hyphenated like this: 'colu-mns' and 'manuscript' as 'manuscri-pt'. A nice idea, but this implementation is unusable. Justification without correct hyphenation is just a non-starter.

I know from personal experience as a sometime working artist that limitations create a known space where creative attentions can focus less diffusely on the work at hand, which often has the effect of strengthening the cohesiveness and effectiveness of the final result. A lack of limitations, where 'anything goes', in common creativity (to distinguish it from those rare instances of exceptional creativity, where all bets can seem to be off) can be overwhelming. In art at least, and I suspect in good app creation as well, giving the creative impulse every opportunity to focus closely on the important details of the work will increase the chances that the work will end up with the qualities we most admire in well-crafted pieces of whatever medium: clarity, cohesion, efficiency, simplicity, elegance, among other qualities; that those of us who dwell in the modern era so admire.

for people who might not know, in English, Gruzia is the Republic of Georgia

noticeably slow, and for a couple days, the option to make new filters was gone (it's back now, tho). (Prague)

[fink](http://www.finkproject.org/) [macports](http://www.macports.org/)

but some of us designers think usability and good design are the same thing! therefore, one cannot come before the other (in some hierarchical sense).

... but use wisely. excessive visual clutter helps no one.

all of human cultural development (it seems to me) depends on borrowing what came before and adding your own differences to it. i even think it's possibly a generalizable pattern echoed in natural phenomena like language change and biological evolution. why should code be any different?

what i find interesting are the places where cli and gui are merged in such a way that uses (at least some of the) strengths of each. on the mac, i use quicksilver, which is kind of a gui for text-entry commands. adobe indesign and netbeans ide each have a drop-down field that's invocable by keyboard shortcut that allows you to directly access options and settings hidden in various menus and palettes by typing a few letters and arrow keys. the firefox plugin ubiquity also has these qualities, and firefox has find while you type built in. these are not terminal equivalents by any stretch, but they are real time-savers, and show the mouse up for the burdensome appendage that it is (forgive my exaggeration). i think if more gui designers and gui programmers would adopt this approach, computer interface design would move forward, imho, in a more useful and more interesting way, instead of slavishly using real-world object metaphors such as the desktop.

i submit that painting and music are also goverened by rules. they are clearly art forms. the cutting of film for dramatic effect is governed by rules, and the cinema is an art form. and in at man cases, art is useful. its best exemplars serve cultural identity. they educate and broaden experience (the best artworks are not just objects, but experiences). i could go on...