Website Development

Illustrator

Mock-Up Solutions That Are Not Photoshop

Website Development / , , /

This may come as an astonishing shock to some people, but Adobe Photoshop is not the only application in the world!

Perhaps we could bring some fresh viewpoints to our design process, if we tried another tool just once…

  • Illustrator – Scalable Vector Graphics, for instance. That’s actually closer to what the final product looks like anyway, and SVG editors are ever so much more graceful handling text than Photoshop. You might also try the free (and excellent) Inkscape.
  • Fireworks – Superior for some functions, such as object handling, vectors, and the slicing/exporting of images.
  • Xara Xtreme – Never heard of it, did you? Check it out, it’s a vector editor on steroids. It can even handle Flash and build web prototypes right in the app!
  • Balsamiq Mockups – Another new player in the field, this one was designed by an ex-Adobe employee. It’s specialized to just do web design mock-ups.
  • Pen and Paper! – Too many people knock this. Drawing on paper lets you stop thinking about the interface and tap your artistic thinking. People forget that creating a web document is an art. It’s also much more satisfying to tear up a design you don’t like than it is to delete it!

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Code injection

Code injection into a user-accessible text field

Website Development / , /

This is the biggest risk for the modern social web, because nearly every website has a comment or feedback form where visitors can enter content and post it to your page for other visitors to see. Now, what happens when you type some Javascript into a comment form on your blog and post it? How about an SQL database query, or some rogue PHP code? How about accessing your site with the malicious code in the address bar?

Attackers will look for any vector that can be used to sneak a line of executable code onto your web server. Remember, all they need is to get one line through, and they’ve got a foothold. For example, an HTML tag called ‘iframe‘ can be used to embed another web page into the host web page. Setting the iframe’s attributes to ‘width=0’ and ‘height=0’ can keep it hidden. But the target of the iframe might be a web server on the other side of the world with a Javascript attack that will steal your user’s data or install malware on your user’s computer. This is just one of the many tricks out there.

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InDesign CS4 : Developer View

Website Development /

The recently released InDesign CS4 comes packed with a long bullet-list of new features. Here are a few that stand out from a Creative Suite developer’s perspective :

GREP pattern matching for styles

You can now set a style to apply to a range of text that matches a grep-style pattern. For instance you could use a pattern like :

'@/:[:space:]]+>@[a-zA-Z_.]+?.[a-zA-Z]{2,3}'

to automatically apply a specific style to anything that looked like an email address. I’m not sure what the intersection is between page layout designers and grep pattern wizards, but the nerd in me loves the idea.

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InDesign CS4 : Developer View Read More »

Magma AI Page

Website Development /

Overview:
Apply Core Image effects to Illustrator artwork

Magma Effects™ allows you to apply a variety of new raster effects to text, paths and images in your Adobe® Illustrator® documents. Apply special effects such as star-shines, lenticular halos or zoom blurs. Make your artwork stand out with style by applying spotlight, bloom or shaded material effects. Over 100 raster effects are at your fingertips instantly.

Easy to use and lightning fast  

Simply select the artwork to enhance in your document and apply the Magma Effects filter or live effect to gain access to all of the Core Image filters available in OS X Tiger. Change parameters with real time previews while you add effects to the chain as needed. When you are done editing, the effects are applied directly to your artwork just like the live effects you already use.

Features:

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Graphics And Website Design

Graphics And Website Design

Website Development / , /

Of course, the fact that these graphics makes your website pleasing to view is also extra helpful. Graphics in your website can also make your website easy to view and also easy to understand. Many people will have trouble reading long texts and deriving information from them.

By embedding all relevant information in your graphics, you are guaranteed to convey the needed information to your visitors.

However, there are some tips that you need to follow whenever you are using graphics in your website. Although flashy graphics can be helpful in impressing your visitors, they can also be a detriment to you.

The main reason for this is because of the fact that flashy graphics and animations can have long loading times. Hence, when your visitor clicks your website, then he or she may not have enough patience to wait for your graphics to load in to your website. In fact, graphics that take too long to load can cause you to lose visitors instead of gaining them. Thus, you should make sure to use graphics that load relatively fast and you should try to refrain from complex animations in your graphical design.

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