I am considering adding Mike Davidson to my personal list of web/html heros. He has something called sIFR (flash replacement of text so a nicer anti-aliased font can be used). Or as he puts it: Introducing sIFR, The Healthy Alternative to Browser Text.

I think I will try playing with this. If I understand it right, and I have to admit it is presented in a way that makes it a little hard for us slow people to follow, you have your text, use his engine to export your text, and it is embedded as a swf file.

When I am approached to design and write a new site, the hardest part of the process for me is to choose a colour scheme, my meagre talent lies in coding, not the artistic aspects.

A recent discovery of mine has alleviated this problem somewhat. This simple Javascript online tool allows you to choose a colour from a palette, and it will show you a heap of compatible colours in a mini page type display so you can see how they go together. This is not the first such tool I have seen, but it is definitely one of the best ones.

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I love Google. At the bottom of a recent Google search up pops a promo for Picasa. It said:

You can find any image you want on the Web. How about on your own computer?
Albums. Editing. Printing. Sharing.
Try Picasa, Google’s new photo organizer.
Free Download!

Now I have to tell you, it looked good when I hit the product features page.

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There has been an open source anti virus application for UNIX/Linux systems for sometime now, and I’ve been hoping that they would release a version for Windows for almost as long. It turns out that they have released a Windows version and I just didn’t know about it.

Before I go any further, I should explain that the reason that there was a UNIX/Linux version was not because either of those operating systems has a virus problem, in fact quite the opposite. Pretty much every installation of Clamav (the anti virus app in question) I’ve seen has been to enable Linux file or mail servers to protect Windows client machines, not to protect themselves.

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Finally, an article about something directly related to web design.

Open Source software is not just for Linux, there is a growing amount of multi-platform and Windows open source software showing up all over the net. (Even Microsoft is getting into the act as a PR campaign.)

Based on a very recent Mozilla platform, Nvu (pronounced N-View) has produced versions for Windows and Linux. The goal for this program is pretty simple, to make an open source program for web developers that has the best features of both Frontpage and Dreamweaver in a small and easy to use package.

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The world has millions of sight impaired people, Australia has at least 300,000, and other countries have an order of magnitude more.

Should they be discriminated against by web designers? Most countries have laws that give an emphatic NO! In fact, there have been court cases where companies have been sued for not providing for the disabled.

So, how does an ordinary “sighted” web designer discover if their proud works are suitable for those with vision impairments?
Up till now, you just had to follow disability guidelines and hope that was enough.

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SciTE Text Editor is a very nice text editor for syntax highlighting in many languages.

Cheers

Don