the software tag
Adobe unveiling Creative Suite 4
This May, Adobe released limited Beta editions of the forthcoming 4th edition of their Creative Suite. I had the fortune to try out Dreamweaver CS4 and Fireworks CS4. Those who had access to the Beta versions gained some insight regarding the stage of development, but Adobe remained guarded over the planned features of the other CS applications.
Now, Adobe is officially announcing the 4th version of the Creative Suite on September 23rd. Before you all get the wrong idea, this is NOT the release date but rather the official unveiling of the release date along with the feature set and a lot more details about the applications. You can register to view a special web broadcast that will take place on the 23rd.
Photoshop CS4 (codenamed Stonehenge) will apparently support 64-bit systems (at the moment only for Windows). It will also offer a palette of Flash-tools and support the import of 3D wireframe models.
Once I know more, you can read all about it here!
Simulate Color Blindness with Color Oracle
I just noticed an interesting article on color blindness over at Pixelgraphix. Color Oracle helps webdesigners to view in real time, what a website would look like for people suffering from one of the various color blindnesses. The filter is applied to the whole screen so it’s completely independent from the browser and even works with images in Photoshop.
Color Oracle is free and available for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.
Panic’s 10th Anniversary: Coda
The stars finally seem to be in a good constellation for web designers this month. Adobe shipped Creative Suite 3, CSS Edit was upgraded to 2.5 and we are seeing the first Alphas of Firefox 3. Iwas even more excited, when Steven F. commented on Panic’s 10 Year Anniversary:
“It is by a more or less random coincidence that on the day after our company’s tenth birthday, we will be conducting by far our biggest, most ambitious new software launch of all time. I hope you’ll come by to check it out, especially if you make web sites.”
What Panic released a few days later reminded me once again why a Mac is the best platform for developing websites: Coda is just the application I’ve been waiting for all my life. I’m not merely enthused, I’m seriously stunned.
Coda is a single, tiny application which handles all your webdesign needs. Editing (X)HTML and CSS, previewing, FTP (of course), Terminal access and a great reference book, all in one. The Panic team introduces Coda with the words:
“So, we code web sites by hand. And one day, it hit us: our web workflow was wonky. We’d have our text editor open, with Transmit open to save files to the server. We’d be previewing in Safari, running queries in Terminal, using a CSS editor, and reading references on the web. ‘This could be easier,’ we realized. ‘And much cooler.’”
You can read more by Panic co-founders Steven Frank and Cabel Sasser. And John Gruber also has a nice review of Coda on his web site.
CSS Edit
Web 2.0 in style? Now it’s Web 2.5 in style! Macrabbit has released version 2.5 of their great CSS editor. And best of all, it’s a free upgrade for owners of the previous version.
Freshly Minted
Shaun Inman has once again outdone himself by launching two new websites and an updated version of Mint on one day, and a Monday at that! I’m quite fond of the new shauninman.com design with a duotone palette and a date-based background color.
Screenshot of the shauninman.com pre-launch intro page
More important however is the new version of Shaun’s website analytics tool Mint. For those who don’t know Mint, its simple yet powerful interface features an overview of visits, referrers, popular pages and searches which can all be taken in at a glance on Mint’s flexible dashboard. And with the help of third party Pepper — little extensions for the dashboard — Mint is even more powerful.
Speaking of Pepper (yes, that’s both the singular and plural form), the second website launched by Shaun today is the Peppermill, the new place to download the Mint software, official Pepper, widgets and third party Pepper. This ensures, that Pepper developed by others can all be found in one single place, somewhat reminiscent of the Mozilla Extension room. As Shaun puts it:
Until today tracking down third-party Pepper involved checking the Pepper Development forum religiously or subscribing to Sam Brown’s Peppermint Tea. And there was always the chance that a developer’s site and Pepper would disappear.
In case you aren’t convinced yet, there are some nice screencasts, screenshots and even a live demo on Shauns website. And what’s best, Shaun somehow tricked inflation. The price for Mint 2 is still at the same US $30 (€ 23,-) it was before. And existing Mint licenses can be upgraded for only US $19 (€ 15,-). That’s less than the price for two drinks around here, and believe me, it’s worth those two drinks.
If you don’t have your site Minted yet, you should definitely do so now — just take a look at the feature highlights. And if you already use Mint, did I tell you that Mint 2 is out? Because Mint 2 is out, you dinosaurs, you!
ColorZilla now working on Intel Macs!
I’ve just received word from Alex Sirota, that his great Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Suite extension, ColorZilla, is now working on Intel Macs.
Its task is to assist professional web developers and designers with color related tasks. The feature most of us have used though, was the color picker, which unfortunately stopped working on Intel Macs.
ColorZilla allows you to get a color reading from any pixel in your web browser. You can do all sorts of things, like adjusting the sampled colors and copying them to the clipboard, but those are just two of the color related tasks ColorZilla performs.
