Kim Siever’s Blog

According to Think Secret, the newest version of Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop CS 2.0, will ship next month.

Among the new features arriving in the next and ninth version of Photoshop, code-named Space Monkey, will be the ability to scale placed bit-mapped and vector files losslessly, including the ability to edit the original and have Photoshop update the file; an object-based user interface that will enable, for example, the ability to select multiple layers and perform manipulations across all of them at the same time; Editable Filters, allowing filters to update when filtered content is adjusted; HDR support; a customizable user interface; and a WYSIWYG Font menu.

I needed multiple layer editing just the other day. Why do these things always come after I need them?

UPDATE (04 Apr 2005): It’s here.

Mozilla Foundation has released version 1.0.1 of its most popular browser, Firefox. The new version consists of security updates.

“Regular security updates are essential for maintaining a safe browsing experience for our users,” said Chris Hofmann, director of engineering for the Mozilla Foundation.

Download here.

I have seen how successful people had been with selling clothing and products online devoted to their brand or services. I thought I would do the same thing.

Naturally, given the HotPepper group of websites, it seemed natural to offer apparel, bags and other items with a hot pepper on them. People like hot peppers. Or, at least, I do. I just assume others like hot peppers as well. After all, there are hundreds of different types of hot sauces and dozens of varieties of hot peppers all along the Scoville scale.

Anyhow, I guess my assumption was right, because someone bought some hot pepper boxer shorts on Valentine’s Day. I would love to write the person and thank him for his service, but cafepress doesn’t provide contact information in their ales reports.

You won’t be the first person to have a pair of hot pepper boxer shorts, but you can get a pair yourself before they become a fad. Or, you could get a shirt, hat, apron or a variety of other items.

Hot pepper lovers should show how much they love hot peppers by what they wear.

I made some changes to HotPepper.ca Wifi. For those who have visited it, you will have realised that HotPepper.ca Wifi is a website for finding wifi hotspot locations around the world.

The biggest change had to do with Google Maps. Google Maps has taken the blogosphere by storm, and since I didn’t have much to add about the site except for “very cool”, I thought I would do the next best thing to commenting on it. I implemented it into HotPepper.ca. That’s right, now if you click on the name of a wifi hotspot, you will be directed to Google where a map of the city will be displayed and a marker pointing out the location.

Google Maps is still in beta, so there are some limitations. First of all, it is heavily USA-centric. There are some Canadian maps, but they seem to be limited to locations south of the 50th parallel. As well, some of the locations may not show up in the map and based on Google’s search algorithm other unrelated addresses may show up.

Still, it’s added functionality.

Some other features I have added include:

• being able to add a new wifi location directly from the city page
• showing other cities in the same province/state as the city on the detail page

In addition, we are rapidly approaching 300 wifi hotspots in 25 countries.

If you haven’t visited HotPepper.ca recently, you should now. While you’re there, you might as well add wifi hotspots you know of in your own city.

The W3C specification for CSS 3 has added a new opacity property. Previous to this, Internet Explorer used

filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(opacity=50)

and Mozilla-based browsers used

-moz-opacity

Of course, this was not an ideal situation since it relied on coding that was not based on standards, something the W3C has been trying to reduce and something that was at the root of the browser wars of the 1990s.

The W3C introduced the opacity property in the 5 March 2001 working draft version of the CSS3 specification. Currently, the W3C specification for CSS3 is only at “candidate recommendation” status and has been for nearly two years. This means, technically, it is not a “standard”.

That being said, Firefox supports the opacity property of the CSS3 specification. This is important because it proves that Firefox is still committed to web standards and is forward thinking.

Check out these two boxes below. In Firefox 1.0, the top one is black and the bottom one is grey.

UPDATE: (31 March 2005) I just checked Safari and it supports the opacity property of CSS3 as well. Very cool.

I hate being teased. I hate being told I am going to get something and then not get it.

Please don’t tell me you are going to have me design your website if you’re never going to actually design it. Don’t come up to me and say, “I need a website done” if you are never going to follow-up with it. I wouldn’t have been doing the website anyhow if you hadn’t told me, so I would rather not be teased with the prospect of another website.

Please don’t tell me that you told your friend to contact me to do a website. Every time someone has told me this, it has not resulted in a new client. Don’t tease me with it.

I am a professional web designer. I feed my family with web design. I clothe my family with web design. I put gas in my van with web design.

I don’t need to be jerked around like I am some high school student cranking out 25-buck websites out of his basement.

I deserve respect.

I couldn’t get enough with my last design project, so I up and designed a new one. Actually, most of the work was in the set-up. As you will see, the maintenance is virtually automatically.

A friend of mine, John Hesch, put together a site that aggregates posts from a collection of LDS blogs. The site is based on RSS/Atom feeds that are checked at regular intervals for updated content. If there is new content, the software provided by Planet aggregates it onto the front page. It’s like a web-based RSS reader.

I thought the idea was catchy, so I decided to do one for design blogs. John gave me a hand in setting it up and creating the cron job that checks the feeds. HotPepper Planet seems to be working now.

The list I have is relatively small, but if you want your design blog listed, let me know.

I came across the new PanicGoods website today and I have to say I am really impressed.

Not only do they have some cool t-shirts, they have a very cool shopping cart.