St. Petersburg Web Design Blog

Every knows that Adobe bought Macromedia a while back. Web Designers in the know have always preferred Fireworks as a graphics and photo editing tool over Photoshop. Alot of Web Designers aren’t actually We Designers though, they are Graphics designers, who have had to adapt to web design. And they were taught in schools (since until recently there were no web design degrees) how to use Photoshop. Therefore they don’t even know about Fireworks usually. It’s one of the reasons you shouldn’t hire Graphic Designers to design web sites.

It’s true you can use Photoshop to make web pages. It’s true, they’re a couple things that Photoshop can do that Fireworks can’t. But there are so many things that Fireworks can do that any graphic editing software should do, that once Designers learn Fireworks, they never go back.

Anyway, the point of this article isn’t to rag on Photoshop (but if one knows both software the comparisons are inevitable, sorry Adobe fans, Photoshop sucks), but rather to say we’re all glad Adobe hasn’t killed off Fireworks!

I looked through Adobe’s web site (what a mess!) to find the “new” features of the latest version of Fireworks, called Fireworks CS3. Sadly they went all republican and most of what they are saying is new Fireworks already did, let’s hope they haven’t broken these features. The few things that are actually new are pretty self explanatory:

• Adobe Bridge integration

• This is a software interface to adobe resold and far overpriced stock photography. Don’t bother you can get the same stuff cheaper from the people who sell it orginally or even better, try istockphoto.com

That’s it, that’s the only actual new feature, and given its spammy nature I feel dirty calling it a “feature”.

Here’s what they say is new but actually already exists in Fireworks:
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Not only did Microsoft’s new security software for their new operating system - “Vista” score last in all categories (only catching 91% of todays well know viruses and only noticing 79% of intrusion attempts), in the latest round of test, but it also “quarantines” all E-mails and Contacts in it’s own Outlook and Outlook Express e-mail software. By mistaking all e-mails and contacts in the address book as viruses, it isolates them making them not accessible by the computer.

Needless to say this has users on Vista irked. “This is the most unacceptable act Microsoft has ever committed,” groused one user on a forum. “I run a small business and I am screwed. I have no way to respond to e-mails because I made the mistake of trusting Microsoft… and all of my e-mails and contacts are gone.”

Microsoft finally confirmed the problem via e-mail Friday, and said it will update the Windows Live OneCare engine to fix the problem as part of its monthly patch release cycle.(Editors note - They didn’t say this month).

No press release, nothing on their web site no e-mail to Vista users (I guess there’s no point because they can’t use their e-mail), just an e-mail to the security researchers.

The fact that this hasn’t been reported in the IT press or the regular press demonstrates just how much influence their advertising dollars have.

Microsoft also offered the following step-by-step fix to recover lost e-mail in the meantime:

– Close Outlook or Outlook Express

– Click change OneCare settings in the main OneCare user interface

– Click on the viruses and spyware tab

– Click on the quarantine button and then select the pst or dbx file and then click on restore.

To ensure that the problem does not continue until the next update, Microsoft said users should also do the following:

– Click change OneCare setting in the main user interface

– Click viruses and spyware tab

– Click on the exclusions button

– Click on the add folder button

– Navigate to the specific folder that contains the.dbx or.pst file to be excluded.

– Click OK.

Also noteable from the tests performed by AV-Comparatives was that the top names in the computer security business, McAffee and Nortons anti-virus scored poorly too (not in the top three in any category, and more costly than all.

Is it a subtle attack, a way for those who don’t understand us to rid the world of “our kind”? I don’t know, but this developement just may kill every web developer out there:
Scientist develops caffeinated doughnuts

They know we need our caffeine, they know we can’t resist free doughnuts. All they have to do to kill each and every web developer, programmer, etc, is to dump a big pile of these in conference rooms across the world and whisper the phrase (free doughnuts in the conference room” and computer geeks across the world will eat them until they overdose on caffeine and sugar!

Dastardly Evil Genius Plan!
Sugar, Fat AND Caffeine! It’ll be the death of all computer geeks!

This is a test of a new WorPress Plug-in called the Lightbox-Plugin. What does it do? It presents photos in the original lightbox script style. Which is to open a photo from a thumbnail without leaving the page and while dimming the rest of the screen.

Here’s the photo:

See I told it was a nice way to present photos! It’s easy to install, easy to use, and really does present photos in a clever and eye-appealing way.
A note on usage:

1. This isn’t a very effective means of displaying large sized photos either. Large size photos don’t fit on most monitors, and if it doesn’t fit, the close button gets pushed off the screen and Noobs (new users) get freaked out. We don’t want to freak out the Noobs do we?