October 12, 2007 A mishmash of recent updates 
Busy
Last month I took on a full-time on-site contract gig in addition to a handful of projects. The contract ended 10/5, and I’m down to just one of the other projects, in addition to October’s workload. I’m very much booked for the next few months and continuing to receive requests. To keep up with all of this, I’m looking at a few options, including finding some allies to delegate production work to, and now looking for office space, so I can be more productive than I am in my corner of our home.
My iPhone
My iPhone has become indispensable. There’s been a few quirks and idiosyncrasies over the past month, but when I was heading into Boston on the train daily, and sitting on a desktop computer as a contractor, having the iPhone handy for email, the web, and music was awesome. That said:
- Battery life: It hasn’t let me down yet, but I’ve had red 20% and 10% warnings on the train on the way home. Of course I’d spend much of the day refreshing email, and using Safari on EDGE on the train. Internet usage is the biggest drain. I guess 10.5 hours of usage isn’t so bad with that in mind.
- Mail: I’ve had one frustration with mail and it’s largely stemmed from one client with images embedded in their mail signature. I’d already been routing all my POP addresses through one Gmail account, so I just set up Gmail through the iPhone’s predefined settings. The only catch is with attachments. A download, even if the two-line preview is displayed, is forced when there’s an attachment to an email. Is this always true? Not sure. Do I have to sit and watch it say “Loading...” every time I’ve gone back to one of their emails. Yup.
- Fast EDGE and slow EDGE: I read somewhere on the web that there are actually two versions of the EDGE network in use. I could tell you which one I was on at a given moment while on the train. EDGE is not particularly fast, but it’s functional. Slow EDGE is slow and cumbersome. Waiting 1 minute for an email to load is no good.
- Crashed There were a few incidents, especially after the latest update (1.1.1). Sometimes I’d hit a page in Safari and the music would just stop. When I went back into iPod, it wouldn’t remember what album I was in, but would revert to a previous selection. One morning it completely locked. I had to look up how to reset it (hold both buttons in til it does), to reboot it and regain control. Another morning, as I slid the slider to unlock it, it stuck at the right edge. Hitting the top button would show/hide the splash screen, with the slider halfway up the screen. I had to reboot it then too.
I have not hacked it. I bought an iPhone to be productive with it and to use what Apple provided, not compromise that. (Interesting thoughts on that here. And the other side of the story, sort of, here.) At home, on wifi, it’s amazing. I can grab it and sit on the couch and have a full Internet experience in my hand. The only thing I’ve played with was renaming MP3s to create ringtones in iTunes, which 1.1.1 broke.
Btw, WordPress is optimized for iPhone.
Transparent PNGs
I’ve been trying to shift production work to using PNGs for some time. With two recent projects I’ve finally taken the time to make it work, not without some snags.
The process I’ve been using:
- Save for Web in Photoshop (CS2) as PNG-24 if you want alpha transparency (anti-aliased - edge colors fading over the background). To do this, you need to cut the graphic over a transparent background. You can also go transparent GIF style, and use PNG-8, which will allow you to select multiple transparent colors, but the edges up to those colors will be aliased. You can’t float an image over any background with PNG-8; you need to match the background color.
- I then grab the images from my iMac over the network to my laptop, where I do coding. I drag and drop them onto GammaSlamma, a mac product that strips Photoshop’s embedded color profile info out of the image files. This was my biggest challenge working with PNGs. They’d render different colors in Safari and Firefox on the Mac, and probably different on Windows. GammaSlamma eliminates that concern.
- There’s still a problem with PNG-24: IE6. It doesn’t support alpha transparency in PNGs. There’s a solution. You can find it at http://www.twinhelix.com/css/iepngfix/. Unfortunately that solution isn’t without its snags. Because it replaces images through references to their parent, it breaks when you apply it to positioned elements. (You also have to specify each element with a PNG background image that it’s going to hit, as by default it just grabs all img tags.) Why is this a problem? Well, the project I’m currently working on has all these nice little boxes with rounded corners that can grow vertically over a gradient background. Using “bottom left” for my background image breaks when that image has position and is fixed, and binding a button to the bottom using position: absolute and a position: relative container, not to mention that that button is a PNG-24 background image, breaks too. I got around it by using a double wrapper div, but I’m not a fan of that. I had to give up on the rounded corners and do PNG-8 and push back on the gradient background. Same for the background-image I was swapping using jQuery in the top of the box as different tabs were clicked. I had to do PNG-8, and it can only sit over a specific background. Still, some progress has been made. A few steps can provide some nice effects, providing the layout is tempered with some restraint so they don’t pile up too fast.
Recent work
I need to put together a portfolio update together highlighting some recent work I’ve done. For now I’ll just say:
Cadillac, XSLT, NBC, Playskool, sIFR, jQuery, .NET, client press coverage (for Rack & Go).
Color suggestions?
I put together this version of C77 so I could update the design purely through CSS. I grabbed a palette (Giant Goldfish) off COLOURlovers and applied it. I’m looking for something new. If you’d like to suggest 5 or 6 colors that would work well, some orange is a must, feel free to send them my way.
