Dolphin’s Dock

Ok, I’m a little late finding this, but I love it.

Well, you may have noticed that things looks a little different here now. I’ve been so busy lately that I have only had time to occasionally pick at it here and there, so it’s taken me a LONG time to get this theme developed. I dove a little deeper into WordPress’s templating core in this one giving it full support for threaded comments (a feature added in WordPress 2.7, I believe), and the ability to easily switch out the header image (which I probably won’t really do, but I wanted to teach myself HOW to develop a theme with that capability). So I’m pretty proud of this one.

I made the conscious decision when I started this theme to NOT worry about Internet Explorer 6 compatibility. IE6 is a crap browser and now that it’s two versions old, it’s time for people to upgrade. I haven’t tested the template in IE6, but I know it will look pretty messy because, if nothing else I used a fair number of transparent PNGs which IE6 doesn’t natively support. If you have to use IE6 for some reason, there’s always the RSS feed. But outside of IE6, I’ve tested it in IE 7 & 8, and the latest versions of Firefox and Safari. If you run into any bugs that I’ve missed let me know.

Of course, also let me know what you think about the theme in general!

I don’t drink soft drinks so I had yet to see Pepsi’s new look… until today. What the heck were they thinking? You don’t change an iconic logo like that. You tweak the treatment to keep it up-to-date, but not an out and out change. And the font looks incredibly dated already. The can design is nice, but without a decent logo and wordmark, what’s the point?

Every so often, I fire up Photoshop to create something or another to make things a little prettier just on my own computer. Since today I created something I thought might be useful for others, I decided to share. I use the excellent freeware app “Fluid” to turn some of my commonly visited websites into faux desktop applications. One of them is Netflix, so today I created an icon to sit in my dock waiting to launch the Netflix site.

The icon should scale up to 512px just great (though seriously, who here has 512×512 icons on their screen?). In case any windows users are interested for whatever reason (maybe you could place a bookmark on your desktop and change it’s icon), I’m including it both in the Mac ICNS format and the Windows ICO format. You can use/share them freely, just please don’t sell them.

Netflix Icon (ICNS) | Netflix Icon (ICO)

Did nobody actually look at this logo before approving it?

(via Logo Design Blog).

When I heard that McCain has used royalty-free stock photography for the back-drops for his big speech, I initially wasn’t all that concerned. Believe me, in my job I spend alot of time perusing stock photography. It’s a lot easier than lugging around all the camera and lighting equipment needed to take professional looking photos, and a lot cheaper than hiring a professional photographer to do it for you. Plus you can get shots you otherwise wouldn’t have access too (after all, it would have been really hard for the GOP to find black folks at the convention to take pictures of, seeing as there were fewer there this year than there have EVER been in recorded history). How ever when I heard they came from iStockPhoto.com (of which I’m quite familiar), it occurred to me that there was a pretty serious TOS violation going on.

No, the page you are looking at isn’t some avant garde blog template. It’s what Dolphin’s Dock looks like stripped of its external style sheet in celebration of CSS Naked Day ’08. (Note: I’ve only stripped down the front page so if you’re reading this as an individual post, click here to see the stripped down site.)

Nope, I’m not talking about the 2008 election.

It’s been at least a couple of months since I’ve had to create anything at work containing a “button” (well I’ve had a few app interfaces to design, but nothing needing a generic web button). Today, I needed one. I went through all the motions on auto-pilot and popped out a nice little button but as I reached for “Save,” I stopped dead in my tracks. There on my screen, I noticed that, without a second thought, I had just created something that looked so incredibly old-fashioned that I couldn’t CMD+Z fast enough to get it off my screen. That’s when the sad fact hit me. The “glassy” button is dead. A moment of silence, please.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d been telling my boss for a long time now that glass was going out. The trend over the last couple of years had been towards increasingly simple glass effects, and finally dropping the sharp highlight altogether for a more matte look. Still, there’s a difference between “going out” and “gone out” and it’s jarring when that which at one time reigned as the very epitome of modern “Web 2.0″ design elements finds itself in the latter categorization, and even beyond that and into the “dated” and “old-fashioned” categories.

Jackolantern 2007

The design should look familiar to anyone who has visited here (as opposed to reading the feed) this month. Unfortunately, I had trouble getting a decent picture of it lit, it kept blurring. I didn’t have time to pull out the tripod and take a picture that way (to avoid the blurring) because i was already running late on getting everything set up for the Halloween party, and by Sunday morning, the finer pieces (like the tree branches) were already wilting pretty badly.

Update: Well, as I said, I was unfortunately unable to get a decent lit shot this year because I didn’t have time to set up the tripod for one before the party and the heat and humidity caused this guy to wither in record time (plus I don’t know what health it was in in the first place with the drought and all. All of the pumpkins for sale seemed kinda small this year). What I did though for those who really want to see it lit is digitally “light” the above photo in photoshop. It’s below the fold check it out. And remember you can click either picture for a larger view.

Continue reading Ignis Fatuus

If you happened to encounter any downtime here (or weird broken layouts) lately, I apologize, but hopefully you can now see what was going on.

As you can see I’ve put together a brand new theme for Halloween! Let me know what you think and if you encounter any problems. There are a few minor problems in IE6 (and one even smaller problem in IE7), that I’m aware of but nothing that anybody will likely notice unless they are deliberately putting the site through the torture test I did when testing everything out.

Hope you have a happy Halloween!