In Depth: 20 things that drive web developers crazy
I'm going to be honest. The life of a web developer is pretty sweet. We get paid to sit around an open plan office all day solving problems that, if we weren't getting paid, we'd probably do anyway.
We also work with people who, because they don't quite understand what we do or how we do it, regard us with a certain bootlicking awe.
This does no end of good for our enlarged sense of self-importance. Unfortunately, some of those people are also the same people who tell us what to do. (Will the visual designers please stand up?).
And because they don't quite understand what we do, sometimes we have to do things that, quite frankly, make us feel dirty. Not to mention having to navigate PSD files so fiendishly organised that you would think they were created that way on purpose. (But that's okay, because we like solving puzzles too.)
So, visual designers, here's a list of 20 things that drive developers crazy. If you're not doing at least 15, then you're not trying hard enough.
1. Add rounded corners to every single element on the page. While you're at it, add shadows and gradients too.
2. Use the same PSD as a starting point for every project. Hide unused layers, but don't delete them. Make sure your PSD is at least 100MB.
3. Use sIFR on every piece of text. Bonus points if you choose a font that's very similar to Arial.
4. Never use the same dimensions on elements. Give each a different font size and colour (for black, use #000000, #111111, #121212 ...).
5. Use a lot of breakout images with transparency. Web developers love graphics breaking out of boxes and columns. Bonus points if you add text wrapping around images.
6. Add a modal window. At least half the site should happen in a modal window.
7. Add a Facebook Connect button. It's just a button. How hard can it be to implement?
8. Hide important PSD layers. Later, tell the developer that they missed a hidden element.
9. Create buttons with rollover, active and clicked states. Then don't tell anyone you've done this. Create a separate file for them and send it on at the last minute. We love surprises.
10. Tell the developer about some fancy functionality you read about somewhere on a blog. Then tell them to build it, because, if you saw it somewhere, clearly it's possible.
11. Add a carousel. Oh yeah, and make sure it's a full-screen carousel.
12. Use Lorem Ipsum instead of real copy. And make sure the reserved space is not big enough for real copy.
13. Randomly merge PSD layers. Why not? (But don't merge too many. It'll take you further away from the magic 100MB target).
14. Name all your files 'final', plus a date and a random letter (final-2010-12-01a.psd, final- 2010-12-01r.psd, final-2010-12-02b.psd).
15. Don't worry about making changes once everything is signed off. When we're done with a page, send another, completely different version of it. And tell us that those changes are necessary and essential for user experience.
16. Don't name or organise your PSD layers and folders.
17. If you're designing a form, forget about error and success states. We'll squeeze that stuff in somewhere. We love guessing your intentions.
18. When you're designing a website, don't invite any developers for brainstorming or design meetings. Make sure we're the last ones to see the layout. Show it to the client first, so it will be too late to introduce even a modicum of sanity into your work.
19. We should hang out more, so during QA don't use bug tracking software. Come sit with us for an entire day and point out changes you want made over our shoulders. Use the opportunity for some impromptu design updates as well.
20. And finally, this is the most important thing: don't learn anything about HTML, CSS, JavaScript or browser issues. The less you know about it, the more important we seem.
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In Depth: 30 best Mac apps for just about everything
1. AirDisplay - £5.99 I'm a firm believer that multiple medium-sized monitors make you more productive than one big one – we humans seem to work well with compartmentalised tasks – and if you have an iPad or even iPhone, you can add AirDisplay to turn it into an extra screen for your Mac.
It works over Wi-Fi, and I've found myself using it often at home when I just want a separate space to look at grabs, say, while I'm writing. It's not a permanent solution, but it's a handy thing to have. That iPads/iPhone are battery-powered is a bonus.
2. Artrage studio - £29
For all but the most dedicated – or especially solvent – graphic artists, the natural media application Corel Painter is an expensive luxury when the ArtRage range exists. Its watercolour is a bit disappointing, but the acrylic paints look good, and there's enough flexibility here to work with.
I love that the interface can easily be shoved to the perimeter so that I can concentrate on my drawing or painting – my background's in design – and the way I can have source images pinned to the screen. The tracing feature is a really great way to get a head start on a piece if you're in a hurry.
3. BOINC - £FREE
In the old days, if scientists wanted to crunch a bunch of numbers, they'd have to build or rent space on a supercomputer, one single, monolithic, terrifyingly expensive cluster of processors. The advent of the internet, however, has given rise to a new kind of computing: distributed computing.
The basic idea may be simple – an organisation parcels up little bundles of work, and sends them out to millions of computers all over the world to do then report back on – but the results can be extraordinary.
Though there are a few different distributed computing frameworks around, BOINC is particularly worthwhile as it enables lots of different research institutes to run their projects on a common system; install BOINC, and you can choose to participate in projects looking for cures for cancer and AIDS, looking for models that will help predict climate change, or even just looking for extraterrestrial life with the venerable SETI@home project.
Install BOINC, sign up for one or more projects, and decide how you want it to run. You could run it constantly in the background or just as a screensaver. Either way, this app offers a great way to put your Mac's spare processor cycles to good use.
4. Candybar - $29
CandyBar helps you organise icons that you've downloaded from sites such as http://iconfactory.com – iPhoto for icons, if you like – and lets you apply them individually or in sets to specific items or system-wide. It also doubles up, for me, as a quickand- dirty way to apply ICNS files to folders, or convert Photoshop sketches to icons that can be applied.
5. Carbonite - £41.95/year
I'm paranoid about backup – as everyone ought to be! – so as well as using Time Machine, SugarSync and SuperDuper, all for different reasons, I also bought a subscription to Carbonite as it enables me to back up everything on my MacBook Pro to a secure, offsite, properly managed server system. Even if my flat was razed to the ground, my data – irreplaceable photos, never mind work stuff – is safe.
6. Cocktail - $14.95
I fire up Cocktail every once in a while to clear out some of the background detritus that accumulates on any modern computer; blitzing log files and the like, and running a permissions check. It does more, though, offering simple checkboxes to help configure hidden options on your system. Exhaustive to the point of baffling, but worth the poking around.
7. Delivery Status - £FREE
This lovingly crafted little widget for Mac OS X's Dashboard layer tracks deliveries though all the big courier companies, including City Link, FedEx, Parcelforce, the Royal Mail, TNT, UPS and USPS. Delivery Status also ties directly into some stores' order and delivery systems, most notably Amazon and, of course, Apple.
Entering delivery details is easy, and the fact that it's a Dashboard widget means you only have to tap a single key to take a quick glance at how your delivery is coming along.
Of course it's only as good as the data the courier provides, but it's undeniably more convenient, especially if you're tracking multiple deliveries. I love, too, that it syncs with a service in the cloud that can also push delivery notifications to a £2.99 iPhone/iPad app.
8. Disc Cover 2 - $34.95
The software from Ukrainian company BeLight Software is clean, friendly, very Apple-like, and often criminally ignored by other Mac-centric magazines and websites. Its Pages-like desktop publishing package Swift Publisher 2 won our group test in issue 222, and Disc Cover 2 is not only instantly familiar to anyone who uses Swift Publisher, but is equally intuitive for any Mac user.
It's an app, as the name suggests, for creating labels and cases for CDs and DVDs, and it works very well indeed. Launch it and it opens with a blank document for a CD or DVD face; when you can drop in graphics, Disc Cover crops them down to fit the circular shape automatically, and lets you move, rotate and scale at will.
What I really love is that there are hundreds of presets for lots of different types of CD label systems from Avery, Fellowes and many more besides, and if you're printing onto sheets of labels, it's easy to tell the software which of the labels on an A4 page, for example, you want to print to. Of course, you can set up custom layouts, and manually nudge the printout if alignment is a little off.
Best of all for me, I can use Disc Cover to create designs that I can send wirelessly to print directly onto the face of printable discs on my Canon Pixma MP640. And it's so quick and easy to use that I'm happy to throw together a design for compilation CDs to keep in the car, never mind crafting covers for personal and professional projects.
It can also do layouts for tray and cover inserts, and import track information directly from iTunes. If you own a recent version of Roxio Toast, you'll actually find a 'lite' edition of Disc Cover in the same folder.
9. EyeTV - From £49.95 with tuner
The current incarnation of this app is nicely evolved, but it's functionally very similar to how it's always been – EyeTV is still the nicest way to watch, record and edit TV on your Mac. I use it on my Mac mini media centre all the time; I particularly like setting up a Smart Guide to list all upcoming films that I can just scroll through and record, later trimming and exporting to Front Row. It has broadened my taste in movies, and boosted my iTunes collection.
10. HandBrake - £FREE
Handbrake is basically a transcoder; it converts digital video files into a different format. Sounds dull, but one of its best uses is to convert almost any movie into a file that can play on an iPod, iPhone or iPad.
It comes with a slew of different presets, but it's hugely configurable as well, so that with sufficient experimentation, you can balance quality and compression to suit you. It hooks up with VLC for codec help and some other naughtiness that lets it convert commercial DVDs.
11. iPlayer Desktop £FREE
Yes, it's an AIR app, and yes, its use of Flash for the video player means iPlayer Desktop is really demanding on your CPU, but the ability to download BBC programmes for later watching is terrific.
12. iStat Menus $16
As you'd expect, I'm forever working on fresh Macs, or setting up new systems. Literally, the first thing I do – before I even open Software Update to patch the system – is go to bjango.com and download iStat Menus.
Without it installed on a Mac, I feel blind; is that site loading slowly because the server is having problems, or is it my internet connection? Why are my MacBook Pro's fans suddenly spinning up; what app's gobbling up CPU cycles? Hey, that Time Machine backup seems to have stalled; is there actually any data flowing on the FireWire 800 bus? Do I have enough space on my internal SSD to download that HD programme on iPlayer?
iStat Menus puts a series of highly configurable status icons in my Mac's menubar that I glance frequently to check what my Mac's up to; if I want more detail, I can click on the various icons to drill down into richer info. And even though, in Snow Leopard, the Mac can display the date beside the clock in the menubar, I much prefer the smart black icon that iStat Menus can use.
Oh, and the second thing I do is open Terminal and write defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES to disable that visually cluttered 3D Dock.
13. Last.fm £FREE
Spotify? Whatever. I still love the (ad-free) service from Last.fm. Give it the name of an artist, a genre or a tag, and it will create a unique radio station for you, playing similar music in a never-ending stream over the internet. It's terrific for discovering new artists, and really superb on the iPhone. And as a geek, I particularly like that it optionally tracks what you're listening to in iTunes, and lets you review your habits.
14. LogMeIn From £FREE
I like the promise of Back to My Mac, the bit of my MobileMe subscription that lets me connect to my Mac at home, say, from the office, and control it as if I were sitting in front of it. In my experience, though, it's unreliable; LogMeIn always works, and there's an iPhone/iPad app as well.
15. MacUpdate Desktop $20/year
Keeping your software up to date is usually a good idea; not only do updated versions sometimes add new features, but they also bring with them fixes for bugs and often stability and security advances as well. It can be a pain to have to check the sites of dozens of developers on the off-chance that an update is available, but MacUpdate checks them all for you; it can update most apps itself, so you can do everything with one click.
16. NetNewsWire £10.62
RSS feeds, those content-only, stripped-down versions of websites that get piped automatically to you whenever new content is added, are the best way to keep yourself in the loop. I have a very carefully selected list of a little over 150 feeds managed in a system of folders in NetNewsWire that help keep me informed and entertained.
Because NetNewsWire syncs with the free Google Reader online service, I can view and read my feed items on my iPhone, iPad, PC – yes, I have one! – and both my personal and work Macs. When I read an item on one, it's marked as read on others.
17. Nisus Writer Pro $79
I do most of my writing for MacFormat in Nisus Writer Pro. For me this word processor offers the perfect balance of simplicity and flexibility. It's more powerful than this, but you can think of it a bit like TextEdit with a fly-out drawer on the right with a bunch more options.
It supports styles, of course, can do footnotes and tables – and tables of contents – and some basic layout things such as changing margins and creating multi-column layouts and sections.
Most importantly of all it shows a live word and character count, and through its support for all the standard Mac OS X text-ending shortcuts, I can quickly select blocks of text to see if I'm writing to fit. And I am.
18. Plex £FREE
Nobody has been able to make the perfect interface for watching TV and movies. But, the best option we have is Plex. It's a brilliant open-source project and as well as giving you a great interface to local files and streaming services, it packs lots of codecs to help play most files.
19. RipIt $19.95
There are lots of legitimate reasons to want to rip DVDs – though this software has other uses too – and RipIt does it with aplomb. Stick in a disc and RipIt will save it to your hard disk without compression (it does basic compression if you want) as a .dvdmedia file that you can double-click to watch in DVD Player.
20. Socialite £20.60
Sick of logging into twitter.com, facebook.com, flickr.com, google.com/reader and digg.com, trying to work out what you've seen already? Socialite puts them all into one app, and lets you reply to and interact with updates, photos and more. It takes a while to set up, but it's worth it.
21. Spotify £FREE
We're banned from using Spotify at work, and you can understand why; if hundreds of people were using this free music streaming service, our bandwidth would plummet! At home, though, it's a fantastic way of checking out bands; if you decide to buy an album or track, be sure to do it through Spotify so they get a kick-back.
22. Scrivener $39.95
Most Apple-using folks, when comparing Mac and PC, will talk about the fact that there exists for Mac OS X an equivalent of pretty much any app Windows users will be familiar with. What they often fail to mention, though, is that the Mac boasts a handful of applications that have no equivalent on Windows, and that are so wonderful, they are reason enough to buy a Mac.
Scrivener is one such app. It's a word processor, but one focussed on the task of writing complex, structured documents such as novels or, in my case, features and group tests for MacFormat. (It also has a range of presets for writing screenplays, and so is a legitimate competitor to the heavyweight Final Draft app.)
Rather than creating one hugely long, linear document in Nisus Writer or (shudder) Word, Scrivener lets me create a raft of discrete, re-orderable documents that I can focus on one at a time. Each document can have a word or character count associated with it, as well as a notes field that is invaluable when writing group tests.
The Research folder can hold webarchive files from Safari – a terrific way for me to refer to products' spec sheets or Wikipedia references, for example – as well as PDFs. (After we've decided on a layout for a complex feature, Alex, our art editor, creates a rough layout and outputs this as a PDF, so it's great to have as reference.)
And because you can split the writing view horizontally or vertically, it's easy to write while keeping an eye on your notes and reference. Documents can be exported in a range of formats, and Scrivener documents themselves are just a special kind of folder; right-click on one to Show Package Contents and you'll see that they just consist of a series of nested RTFs.
Your writing isn't locked away in a dangerously proprietary format. The developer himself is actually a writer who, when he realised there was no software that did what he actually wanted it to, took time out, taught himself how to code, and created Scrivener.
It shines through; this really is a writer's tool, and I'm delighted not only by Scrivener's fantastic abilities, but also by the fact that whenever I discover a new ability, it works in exactly the way that I'd want it to.
23. SugarSync From $49.99/year
I bought a subscription to SugarSync because it acts not just as an offsite backup – copying essential work files to its servers – but because it syncs files across multiple computers, even those running Mac OS X 10.5 or Windows XP and later.
Unlike Dropbox, which currently mandates that you put the files you want to sync into a specific folder, SugarSync just asks you what folders from your existing folder hierarchy you want to sync.
I especially love that if I have to put my MacBook Pro in for repair, I can just use another of my computers; all the files will be there, and any changes I make will be synced back when I open up the laptop again.
24. SuperDuper! £19.85
If the SSD in my MacBook Pro failed, I have to give all the other backup systems I use time before I could actually start working again. With Time Machine, I'd have to reinstall and start to copy everything back to a new disk, and Carbonite and SugarSync would take an age to download.
SuperDuper!, though, creates a bootable backup. I just have to restart and hold down å , pick the SuperDuper backup volume, and I'm working again. The paid version does incremental backups, so the clone is updated at 16:45 every work day.
25. Things £44.95
Forty-five quid? For a to-do manager? Yeah, I know, it seems like – and, frankly, is – a lot, but, although I'm late to the party, I'm a total Things convert. The beauty of the system, for me, is that once I've taken a little time to set up areas of responsibility, projects, tags and deadlines, I can throw stuff I need to do into the app, and each day check it to see what I need to do.
It syncs with the iPhone and iPad – though each edition is a separate app – over a local network (cloud sync is coming soon), and though the system isn't perfect, it's a great de-stresser; I don't have to worry about remembering stuff any more.
26. Transmission £FREE
There are lots of clients for the Mac that hook into the world of BitTorrent, but Transmission is the one I use; it's clean, simple-yet-configurable, and Mac-like. BitTorrent is a system for downloading files that are held not on a central server, but on the hard disks of many thousands of ordinary users like you and me all over the world.
Though it has a murky reputation, BitTorrent can be used for good; Linux distros, for example, many of which work on Intel or even PowerPC Mac hardware, are often distributed using it. I like the web interface, too, which lets me add torrents to my Mac mini at home from my iPhone when I'm away.
27. Transmit $34
It will come as no surprise to learn that I'm forever shuttling huge files – podcast recordings, high-resolution graphics, InDesign files and more – around the world, especially as we have a sister magazine, Mac|Life, in San Francisco. And I also, because of the way our networks are set up at Future, use FTP to transfer stuff to and from our corporate servers from the personal MacBook Pro on which I do all my work.
Transmit is a lovely client for FTP, SFTP, WebDAV (the protocol iDisk uses; Transmit is a brilliant, fast, front end to iDisk) and other standards, and the new version even lets you mount remote servers as disks in your Finder sidebar, making it easy to open files live from remote servers. Its developers are gratifyingly passionate about the Mac, too; the attention to detail, even just in the order page online, is staggering.
28. VMware Fusion £53.95
I always have to keep the occasional Windows machine around to check stuff, and Fusion is my favourite way to do it. I keep virtual machines for every major version of Windows since 3.1 as virtual machines on a big external disk. Ironically, perhaps, our sister PC magazines often come to me for grabs.
29. Wallet $20
It's fitting that the last app in this feature should be Wallet, as without it, I'd lose all the serial numbers for my app. Wallet lets me keep them, with login details and other notes, all secure and synced via MobileMe to my iPhone using a separate £2.99 app.
30. iSale €39.95
Last time I went to sell something on eBay, I was working on a clean system and didn't have any eBay apps installed. The online process was horrible, however, so I installed iSale quick-smart.
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Review: MSI FX600
MSI's FX600 is aimed at those after design, usability and performance from their laptop. Ahead of its full release we were given a look at a pre-production model and, assuming a few minor issues are ironed out before final release, this could be an attractive option.Our main issue is with the keyboard. The isolated keys are nicely spread out, but the amount of flex evident across the board is unfortunate, producing not only a spongy action but also a noisy one. Nevertheless, this is a pre-production model and we hope this problem is rectified for the final build.
The chassis is built from plastic panels with an inoffensively attractive weave pattern, but we were a little disappointed by how flexible they proved to be.
We could move them with little problem, meaning that – in its current form at least – this isn't a laptop suited to the most arduous travel, and those looking to take the machine on the commute may be advised to look elsewhere.
The 15.6-inch screen impressed us with the level of brightness and detail it offered, making it a pleasure to use, whether you want to watch movies with the integrated DVD optical drive or edit intricate spreadsheets.
The shiny Super-TFT screen coating creates strong reflections, however, and is troublesome to use in bright or rapidly changing light.
Our pre-production unit featured an Intel Core i5 processor and 2048MB of memory. Performance is sprightly and you'll have no problem running applications such as word processors, as well as more resource intensive photo and video-editing suites.
Dedicated graphics
While our unit had an integrated graphics card, the final build will boast a powerful dedicated Nvidia chip, making the laptop suited to playing the latest games and multimedia-focused activities, which is great if you're creatively minded.
The laptop comes with a host of nice features. The four-speaker sound system is configured to THX standards, and the quality of the audio is moderately impressive.
There's also a hotkey which activates MSI's Cinema Pro feature, which tweaks the laptop's display and audio settings to suit watching films, although we detected little difference.
Finally, MSI's Turbo Drive Engine allows you to overclock the processor for a short period of time at the touch of a button. We found when we did this performance increased by just under 4%, which is impressive and will be useful to those who need that little extra power every now and then – gamers or video editors, for example.
Ultimately there's a lot going for the FX600. If MSI can sort out the spongy keyboard and chassis design, it just may be on to a winner.
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Review: Lenovo ThinkPad L412
Lenovo's ThinkPad range is renowned as offering arguably the world's best business laptops, thanks to their market leading build quality and usability. The ThinkPad L412 is the latest addition and is a high-powered portable with strong environmental credentials. Billed as Lenovo's 'greenest enterprise ThinkPad laptop', Lenovo claims the L412 uses the highest amounts of post-consumer recycled content in its production, saving the equivalent of ten plastic water bottles for each machine.
Tough build
The laptop itself looks much like any other machine in the ThinkPad range, with its stark black design and resilient matt-finish to its plastics. Build quality is top-notch, with rigid panels used throughout, making this an exceptionally tough laptop for frequent and demanding travel use.
At 2.4kg this is not the lightest ThinkPad we've seen, but it is more than portable enough to carry comfortably throughout the day.
The slightly curved lid and smooth finish lets the laptop slip easily into your bag and the 231-minute battery life can keep you working for half the day. Despite its compact chassis, the L412 is well-equipped.
A DVD rewriter lets you create CDs and DVDs, an eSATA port allows high-speed data transfers to external hard drives, and a Sleep and Charge USB port lets you charge battery-powered devices, even when the laptop is switched off.
Lenovo laptops are famed for having the best keyboards in the business and the L412 is no exception. The spacious spill-resistant board is quiet and accurate to use and responds with a flawless typing action. The indented CTRL key may frustrate some speed-typists, however.
With an Intel Core i5 processor and 2048MB of DDR3 memory, performance is outstanding and ideally suited to the most demanding business use, with multiple applications running smoothly and quickly.
Graphics are also surprisingly capable. An integrated Intel GPU has been used to keep costs and power consumption down, but the Intel GMA HD chip provides ample power for creating and running PowerPoint presentations and photo/video editing.
For optimum visibility in all lighting conditions, the L412 uses a matt-finish LED backlit screen to eliminate reflections. The 14-inch panel is bright and produces pleasingly sharp and natural images. VGA and DisplayPort outputs let you connect to a bigger screen when in the office.
While the ThinkPad L412 may lack the wow factor of rival corporate machines like Sony's VAIO Z-Series, its stunning usability, ample power and commendable green credentials easily compensate. All in all, this is another success for Lenovo and a great business machine.
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