One of the things I do at RDG, is occasionally draw maps. I also impart my knowledge of graphics programs such as Adobe Illustrator to those in the company who draw maps more often than I do, to enable them to draw them more efficiently and attractively.
An underlying theme in the the research I have done to achieve this has been to try to make things as live-editable as possible. Anyone familiar with Illustrator can imagine what a headache it may be to create, and make changes to, a map full of city blocks that look like those in the image below:
Changing the street routes or widening the streets, while maintaining a uniform street width, will be an enormous and time-consuming pain. And what if you want to change the amount of bevelling of the street corners? With Illustrator’s Live Effects and Appearance Palette, if you start your drawing off right, you can change these things in seconds.
MacMerc.com has announced the winning letter, in which Jeff Ferzoco explains to Quark why he’s switched to InDesign. Anyone who has used both programs regularly can relate and will find this letter hilarious. My favorite part: “Certainly, Quark, I won’t undo this decision.”
I switched about 2 1/2 years ago. I was amazed by the ease of use of InDesign and the familiarity of its interface (after using Illustrator), literally, within the first few minutes of using it. It’s so satisfying to hear more and more users making the switch and Quark getting what’s been coming to them. This is good news along with Firefox gaining rapidly on IE even before being a full release, and I look forward to seeing more people abandon their OS entirely.
“Need a quick way to transfer files between two Macs? Start up one computer with the T key held down, then plug it into another mac with a firewire cable. The “target” computer’s disk appears on the second mac! Be sure to ‘gracefully’ unmount the target computer’s disk by dragging it to the trash before unplugging the firewire cable. Press the power button on the target computer to turn it off.”
Instead of using a mouse and opening your browser, then navigating through your bookmarks menu to access your weather bookmark, you could press the Quicksilver hotkey (by default, Control+Spacebar), then type the first few letters of the word “weather,” Quicksilver searches through all of your Safari bookmarks, finds your weather bookmark, and when it does, you press enter, thus launching Safari on the page indicated on your bookmark. More than anything, Quicksilver is great for launching applications.
The process saves time and repetitive stress, and can be used in this same manner for many of your tasks throughout the day.
I don’t know when this happened, but today I noticed that Craig Kroeger’s miniml.com has gone from a Flash-based interface to a more accessible, search engine friendly, standard’s compliant design. This is ironic, because the pixel fonts sold there are generally for use in Flash and bitmap images, but I think it’s always wise to keep text you would like to have accessible, remain as pure text.
I believe his work to be historically significant because it has taken aknowledgement of the limitations of screen display to the extreme. I also dig the (almost) ornament-free design.
