The Graphic Mac

I’m not sure how well that will go-over with Gmail users. Personally, I feel like the Gmail service already lacks enough features that they should focus solely on email features, rather than adding non-email ones. At the same time, I feel like email is a private thing, and I don’t necessarily want any sign of “socialization” in there at all. Besides, the Gmail interface is already a cluttered mess as it is, I’m not sure how they could work-in social networking without making it completely unusable.

I’ve been longing for a way to update my Facebook and Twitter status in a single location that I’m already using; something that fits into my existing workflow.

There are plenty of services out there that would allow me to update my social networks, but they would require me to visit yet another Web site to do it, and that means yet another set of usernames and passwords to remember. No thanks.

With Twitter having the lock on micro-blogging, and Facebook having 400 million users and an expanding feature list, including the world’s largest photo-sharing service and reports of a full-blown email Web-client coming, you have to wonder just how long Google can afford to sit on the sidelines and watch.

Caleb Kimbrough has quite a vast collection of beautiful textures available on Flickr that’s definitely worth checking out. In the latest upload, we have five awesome grunge frames. The textures are available under the CreativeCommons Attribution license, meaning you are free to use them as long as you attribute the work to the authoer, usually with a link back to the photo page.

Be sure to check out Caleb’s Photostream for more great textures.

When you consider some states are handing out $1,000 Macbooks to students and teachers, it’s not hard to imagine Apple’s true reason for the iPad’s existence is to get more product into more hands at a young age.

Think about it. The purpose of the laptop program is to make the Internet available to kids, and to give them something to produce their homework assignments on (even though we know they use it for much more). But in this economy, schools are certainly rethinking these “laptops for every kid” programs.
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Life was much easier back in the days when everyone used Points and Picas for measurements in the design field. Has anyone ever been told to provide an ad 6 59/64 wide? For years I’ve used this fraction-to-decimal chart, keeping it tacked to the wall next to my monitor for quick reference.

You can download the free fraction-to-decimal chart here.

If you want to open a layered Photoshop file as a flattened image you can save time by going to the Open dialog box in Photoshop and selecting your file. Hold down the Shift and Option keys and hit open. You will be presented with a dialog box asking if you wish to Read the Composite Data Instead. Hit OK and you will have a flattened version of your file opened instead of the layered version. This key-combination works while double clicking a file in the Finder as well.

BrushKing offers over 6,000 brushes in multitudes of brush packs, all free and available for download. All the brushes are categorized for easy surfing, and each brush pack has its own page with a preview image, brush info, author, license and download links.

Everybody knows you can go to any particular page in you InDesign document by double-clicking its page icon in the Pages palette, or by typing the page number you want to go to in the little Page indicator box in the lower left of your document window. Of course, there’s always the old Command + J shortcut to bring up a dialog box where you can type your desired page number in. Here’s another page changing tip. Hold down the Option key while double-clicking the page icon in the Pages palette to not only go to that page, but switch the view to Fit Page in Window at the same time.

Why?

One of the reasons I made the switch was so that I could focus more on the content, and much less on actually getting the content posted; as well as making the site something I actually enjoyed looking at. The new design isn’t going to win me any awards, but it definitely puts more focus on the content. Gone are the seldom used features from the old site, such as dedicated discussion forums. The forums never really caught on, instead I was fielding dozens of emails a day from readers. At first I felt bothered by the fact that people weren’t using the forums. But after a while, I began to appreciate the one-on-one interaction with readers. The contact form is up at the top, and I welcome the emails! READ THE REST OF THIS ARTICLE.