Are you Mac or PC?

I just took the test and came out 100% Mac.

Actually it was my second attempt, the first go was very nearly, but not quite 100%. But let’s face it, “87% Mac” doesn’t look quite so impressive. So anyway, if you want to skew the results, think carefully whether you want to think ‘different’ or ‘differently’…. you’ll see what i mean. Oh, and obviously Mac users eat salad!

While you’re there, you can read my guest blog “10 things I love about my MacBook Pro” – a run-down of the ten things I like best about my laptop.

My MacBook Pro narrowly avoided disaster a little while back (see my earlier post The Luckiest Laptop in Leitrim.

realtime graphics software website

More of a face-lift than a complete site re-structuring, nonetheless they are very happy with their new look.

The site itself is built on a bespoke (i.e. not Wordpress) content management system, and the code was very clean with enough class and ID selectors to play with, so in the end I managed to give the entire site a complete make-over by changing CSS only, and then uploading a few new images that are referenced by the new style-sheet.

See : www.rtsw.co.uk

And of course, don’t forget to visit Booth B24 and have a chat with our good friends at RT Software.

RT Software develops and supplies PC-based real time 3D graphics solutions for broadcasters. These solutions are aimed at sports, news, elections, interactive TV, virtual sets and for playout graphics.

Visit the RT Software site now for Real-time 3D graphics broadcast solutions.

Well anyway, it seems my laptop bag is more watertight than anyone could possibly hope for, and the Macbook Pro survived. Some papers just beneath it in the bag had started to go a bit soggy, but the machine itself was dry as a bone.

The luckiest laptop in Leitrim

Here’s a kind of reconstruction taken a few days later, so most of the mess is cleared away, but it should give an idea of how things were.

So there we are, we had a lucky escape – particularly as no-one was standing underneath the ceiling when it came down. Waterlogged plasterboard is heavy. And I guess my Tesco laptop bag is pretty well padded too.

FontExplorer X also crashed when trying to view the offending font, but it appeared OK in Font Book.

There’s a couple of different ways to proceed if you’re faced with a similar problem. Obviously deleting the bad font (and re-installing if that’s an option) is one way to go. That assumes that the font file itself is bad.

But there’s also a chance that the font is OK, but the font cache is corrupted.

There are a couple of ways to clear your Mac’s font caches – one is to restart in Safe Mode (hold down the SHIFT key immediately after the startup sound and release after the Apple logo appears).

Fortunately, FontExplorer X has a couple of options under the Tools menu – ‘Clean System Font Caches’ and ‘Clean Application Font Caches’ (this gave me the option of cleaning the ‘Adobe’ application font caches). I cleaned both.

The end result? Photoshop CS4 working fine again.

A word of caution: there can be a number of reasons why fonts might go screwy on your Mac. Adobe has a page on troubleshooting font problems here: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/327/327791.html . I’d suggest reading it before doing anything too drastic.

As a big fan of Magic Bullet Looks, this was a great opportunity to upgrade to the full Magic Bullet suite.

I’ve just had a quick try out of a few of the plugins in After Effects – Instant HD 1.1 and Frames 1.0 look pretty nifty. Steady looked promising if a bit slow, but to be fair, the test footage I was trying was VERY shaky. I may try some more realistic tests later in the week.

Anyway, a big thank you to Mary and Dave at Red Giant for replying so promptly to my cheeky emails.

And also a very big thank you to Angus for phoning me earlier to let me know the sale was on in the first place.

holiday apartment web design

If you view the site in Internet Explorer you’ll see that all the boxes (including the heading banner image) have square corners, but if you use a proper browser like Firefox, you should see rounded corners. I know it’s a bit of a cop out, and I did (briefly) investigate JQuery rounded corners, but in the end I opted for a IE conditional comment to replace the heading strap with an alternate (square cornered) image so that at least the look and feel is consistent depending on which browser the site is viewed in.

I’m also now a big fan of Parallels Desktop for the Mac. While I was doing a quick check for cross-browser compatibility I was able to run Firefox and Safari and Explorer versions 6, 7 & 8 all at the same time on my laptop. Possibly the subject of a future blog post I think…

Hi Mike

Dave

Of course it’s always nice to get a ‘thank you’ from a satisfied client. But I was particularly chuffed by this email. First, I’d never met the producer in person. Also, he’d found me through this website (which proves at least that some of my tentative SEO efforts have paid off).

But more importantly, it was a real test of remote working for broadcast clients in the UK. All the briefings were done by phone or email, preliminary design ideas were presented via this site, and all the finished graphics were done entirely remotely from my studio here in (lovely) Leitrim, Ireland. I uploaded all the video files on to this site and the guys at Cactus TV downloaded them at the other end.

Of course there’s probably still going to be occasions where a face-to-face is called for. But for the time being, Mohill’s the place to be…

Tolkien Fonts - cufon text replacement example

So, the plugin is called WP-Cufon and you can get it at wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cufon/

It’s quick to install, has good documentation, and it’s easy enough to specify some rules to control the text replacement on your site.

So for example I’ve used :

Cufon.replace('h1', { hover:true });
Cufon.replace('h2', { hover:true });
Cufon.replace('h5');
Cufon.replace('#navbar a');

which replaces the font for h1, h2, h5 headings and any link text within the ‘navbar’ div with a special font of my own making. All of the subsequent styling is covered by CSS. It really is very simple to set up.

You need to convert your font first into a format that Cufon can handle – there’s a Cufon generator that does the whole thing very neatly. It also, importantly, allows you to limit usage to certain domains to protect the font from use elsewhere.

I’d previously looked at Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) but I have to say I think Cufón may have the edge if only for ease of set-up – although, granted a lot of the hard work has already been done by the plug-in. Oh, and Cufon doesn’t use Flash.

I don’t claim to understand exactly how Cufon works, but if you’re interested in that kind of thing have a look at http://wiki.github.com/sorccu/cufon/about which goes into all the nitty-gritty.

And here’s a link to the creator of the wp-cufon plugin, Tobias Battenberg

OK, Tolkien fans

So this next bit is only really of interest to fans of The Lord of the Rings… (look away now if hobbits and dragons aren’t your thing!). No really.

The site I’ve used Cufon on is a Tolkien book collecting site – and I created a special font that brings to mind the calligraphy of the author J.R.R.Tolkien – I was pretty pleased with the end result, so if anyone’s interested they can buy a copy of Tolkienesque Regular (in Truetype font format) from my store.

I also ended up tackling another Wordress theme design from scratch – so the entire site has a kind of ‘Tolkienesque’ feel to it. That’s the name I gave to the theme too.

Tolkien Wordpress theme

The Wordpress theme makes heavy use of categories to organise the 400-odd entries, and has a neat ‘Random Item’ widget that I made to pull a text link and the first thumbnail image from a random post. Anyway, I was quite pleased with the end result. It’s been a labour of love built in spare minutes snatched here and there over the last few months.

But I’m most pleased by the fact that I can now use any old font I like in Wordpress, subject of course to EULAs and other legal niceties, or at least until the legal quagmire surrounding @font-face, font embedding and linking gets sorted out.

Virtual Set

You can see it on some of the Magners League shows, and it’s also on air for ‘The Hub‘ with a different logo in the virtual screen.

As usual, it was built as a 3D model in Cinema 4D and then painstakingly textured up using my special secret process (which I may reveal as another blog post at some point).

Finally, it was exported as an fbx file which I loaded into tOG (by RT Software) for some final tweaks before the whole thing was zipped up and downloaded by Setanta at their end.

It was a pretty fast turnaround for this one – under a week to get it on air, with a few updates supplied after the first TX.

You can see more images here.

Although I won’t be able to make it over to Amsterdam for IBC this year, I thought I might just give a quick heads up to all you media types that my old pals from RT Software are exhibiting again this year. RT Software’s tOG 3D system is the technology behind some of my virtual studios and many of the real-time election graphics that appear on my site.

RT Software at IBC (RAI Amsterdam) : Hall 3 (3.A59)

The RT Software booth (3.A59) will feature many live examples of real time 3D graphics in action:

- Tracked virtual studio
- Trackerless virtual studio
- News room graphics systems
- General purpose 3D overlay graphics
- Sports graphics solutions
- Telestration products

And if that wasn’t enough – here’s more reasons to pay the guys a visit.

- Trackerless virtual studio solution with advanced image processing to allow real ptz camera moves.
- VR solutions include a high quality software matte keyer to save on implementation costs.
- Sports telestration products include line tracking and texture tracking for flexible deployment
- “Best in Class” rendering and integration with design packages mean your design house concepts can be achieved live on air.

About IBC:
IBC is the leading international forum for the electronic media industry, attracting 1,000+ exhibitors from more than 130 countries. It combines a highly respected and peer reviewed conference, an exhibition that demonstrates state of the art media technology and unrivalled networking opportunities.

See also (external links):
www.ibc.org : IBC 2009 official site
IBC – RT Software Company Profile

Hairy Bikers

Be sure to watch The Hairy Bikers’ Food Tour of Britain. It’s a 30 part series that starts tonight on BBC Two at 17.15 and is broadcast every weekday over the next few weeks.

Just putting the finishing touches to the graphics for the last few episodes.

See : Broadcast Design for Hairy Bikers’ Food Tour

Read the BBC press release

Like the original set, they’re designed to have a kind of ‘TV Graphics’ feel to them, while keeping a safe distance from the ‘old style’ classic BBC Weather symbols which were their inspiration. They were originally designed from scratch in response to an increasing number of requests for the real BBC ones which are, of course, protected by copyright.

My new set of Weather Icons consists of 32 individual symbols :

1. sunny
2. sunny intervals
3. white cloud
4. black low cloud
5. hazy sun
6. mist
7. fog
8. clear sky (night)
9. light rain showers
10. heavy rain showers
11. light snow showers
12. heavy snow showers
13. sleet showers
14. light hail showers
15. heavy hail showers
16. thundery showers
17. cloudy with light rain
18. cloudy with heavy rain
19. cloudy with light snow
20. cloudy with heavy snow
21. cloudy with sleet
22. cloudy with light hail
23. cloudy with heavy hail
24. thunderstorms
25. light rain showers (night)
26. heavy rain showers (night)
27. light snow showers (night)
28. heavy snow showers (night)
29. sleet showers (night)
30. light hail showers (night)
31. heavy hail showers (night)
32. thundery showers (night)

Here is an example icon at 256×256 pixels to give an idea of what you’d be getting…

Weather icon : Thundery Showers (night-time)

Links:
Weather Symbol (set 1)
Weather Symbol (set 2)
see all products

I don’t know exactly (yet) how to make it into a downloadable widget that other people could use on their own sites, but if I get time I may investigate how to package it up. At the moment it’s just hard coded into a regular text widget. And it’s also hard coded to pick up the weather forecast for Carrick-on-Shannon, so I expect the appeal might be… er… limited.

The inspiration for this came from seeing articles like Using Weather Data to Change Your Website’s Appearance through PHP and CSS and of course, the BBC Weather site which displays different graphics depending on the weather forecast.

The main thing I wanted to learn about was just the basic process of getting and parsing a feed and using some of the data it contained to pop a weather symbol on my site – there were plenty of sites out there offering different solutions, but the php classes from Marco Voegeli were a great starting point.

I discovered quite a few useful things while trying to put this together. Probably the most important in the end was to check your hosting company’s firewall settings…

I’d had the basic code working fine for AGES and was testing happily using MAMP on my local Mac, but every time I tried to put it live on the server it killed the entire blog and all my existing widgets vanished from the admin page. That usually happened right before Wordpress froze up completely.

Anyway, the bottom line is I needed to contact my host (Supanames) to get them to allow me to contact the remote website to access the Weather feed. There’s a link in MyPanel called ‘Firewall Rules’ and a form to send a request to the engineers to enable connections to a particular URL. Which once again, all happened very promptly, so full marks again to Supanames support.

Also, if ever you lose all your widgets from your Wordpress Admin screen, I’d recommend disabling your plugins one by one until the list comes back, then remove (or edit) the offending widget, and then re-activate the plugins. I know that’s probably fairly obvious to most, and may not always solve the issue, but it’s still a good starting point.

Mike