Stay Organized with Anxiety
A good friend of mine showed me a nice little Mac application called Anxiety a couple years ago. At that point I was playing around in multiple applications to try and find a really simple tool to help with project management. After playing around with apps like OmniFocus and Things (which I really did like, by the way), I was finding that many of the applications had just a little bit too much going on. Now that doesn’t make these applications bad or anything, actually both those listed above are really great applications that I would highly recommend. However, they weren’t what I was looking for.
Running IE6, 7 & 8 on Your Mac
As a web designer it’s extremely important to be able to test projects in multiple browsers. We want to try and ensure that people get the same experience whether they’re looking at a project in Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc. Now any web designer should be able to tell you that Internet Explorer is the biggest issue with our jobs. To be honest, if we didn’t have Internet Explorer things would be so much easier, in particular Internet Explorer 6. According to Wikipedia, IE6 was release in August of 2001. That’s more than 8 years ago! When you think about that in computer years, it’s a lifetime! So why are so many people still running IE6? I can’t answer that, but I can tell you for certain that when it comes to web development that tons and tons of money is wasted on making sites work in IE6!
Useful Key Commands
When working on a computer it becomes imperative to learn keyboard shortcuts, or key commands to keep things moving, and moving quickly! Being that I’m on the computer what feels like 24/7 I’ve picked up a few that I use constantly! Below is just a short list of some of the basic Mac key commands that we use constantly when either setting up folders for client files, sorting through tons of running applications, or browsing the web. These are just a handful of useful keyboard shortcuts that we put together.
Making Great Presentations
For those of you who have browsed our site you may have seen our little video on how we handle most web design projects. In this entry we’re going to give you a really quick overview as to how we put that together. The biggest key is that we used Keynote to make it! Keynote is an Apple application (sorry PC users) that is simply awesome. It’s extremely dynamic, clean and easy to use. For PC users, it’s basically a much easier to use, better version of PowerPoint (in our opinion). It has beautiful transitions and effects that help make your presentations pop.
Using Mac Screenshot to Your Advantage
So I’ve been using this method since I’ve realized that I don’t always remember everything; and what I’m talking about is using the Mac Screenshot to measure pixels. If you’re like me and use ‘px’ as your measurement rather than ‘em’ then this may be a technique that you can use as well. So lets jump right in…
When I built out a website I write all the code and export all the images by hand so I have an idea of the width and height of different div’s and images are… but I don’t always remember the exact pixels. For example if I’m trying to position a div tag in a certain spot and I have it set to ‘absolute’ positioning and its off by so many pixels, I just hit Shift + Apple + 4 to activate the screenshot cursor and draw a box the size that I need to move the div tag.
