The Ianternet.

As I type this, my machine is dutifully installing “Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 Production Premium”. Adobe is a company that enjoys a stranglehold over the design and publishing industries (try applying for a job in an agency listing “CorelDraw” and “The Gimp” on your CV and see how far you get), so why – oh why? – is their visual communication frequently, face-smackingly, awful?

The Read Me document that came with Production Suite has been typed up in Microsoft Word (truly! I checked), their logo a low-quality JPEG paste job, the type set in crushingly dull Times New Roman. Sure, I’m aware that they won’t be submitting their Read Me documents to any design awards. But considering it’s their customers’ first impression of software that they’ve just splashed more than a grand on, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that they run it by an eager junior designer with a copy of InDesign to spruce up. At least then they’d be using their own product.

Update: Todd Kopriva of Adobe replied to this post. He writes:

… the ReadMe documents are handled by overworked program managers who have approximately zero time between when the features and bug fixes and known issues are settled and the document needs to go off to be translated. The idea of spending any time to make them look good would be met with either guffaws or questions about one’s sanity. Just today, one such program manager said to me that no one reads the ReadMe documents, anyway. That’s why people like me (in Technical Support) end up making posts like this one.

And don’t make fun of my aesthetics. It’s hard enough to get all of the information out in time without having to be self-conscious about design. ;-)

I stand enlightened. So, rather than making fun of Todd’s aesthetics, let us close the book on the troubling mystery of why Adobe’s Read Me files aren’t as beautiful as they could be, and be grateful that we have up-to-date and pertinent information instead of purty columns and fonts. Gracias, Todd!

An Aussie with a bad cough? Nope, just a really fast way of searching a Textmate project. From ack’s description:

ack is a tool like grep, designed for programmers with large trees of heterogeneous source code.

And ackmate lets you run ack from within Textmate. You can grab it here – if you like it, make sure you leave Mr Protocool a tip, too.

If you inadvertently close a tab, merely hit ⌘-z and all is well with the world.

It’s the little things.

I’ve been using Chrome as my default browser recently. It’s fast - it feels faster than Safari, to me - and I love the lightweight interface. I’ve been lured back to Safari though, with the recent introduction of version 5.0.

• Safari has finally received native support for extensions, something that Firefox and Chrome users have enjoyed for a long time. They’ve implemented them nicely too; you just use HTML, CSS, and Javascript to build them, rather than the unfamilar XUL markup that Firefox uses. From Apple’s code samples, I was able to get a basic extension working within 10 minutes - it inserts the word “elephant” at the top of every page. Let me know if you’d like a copy.

• The “Reader” feature looks great - I particularly like the way it intelligently joins multi-page articles together. I won’t, however, be throwing out Instapaper any time soon; I love the idea that you can save an article for future reading.

• It’s speedy. Though it’s interesting to note that Safari runs Javascript runs merely three percent faster than Chrome. Seems pretty negligible to me.

• It has intelligent URL guessing. When you’re typing in the address bar, it performs a substring match on your bookmarks and your history, in both the URL and the page title.

• It’s more Mac-like. You can use OS X’s services, such as typing cmd-ctrl-D while hovering over a word to get a dictionary definition, something that Chrome doesn’t support.

All-in-all, a welcome upgrade. The fierce competition ‘twixt Apple and Google is great news for tech fans - long may the arms race continue.

You heard right, easing fans: Ease and Wizz is compatible with After Effects CS5. They’ve Adobe-fied the interface, but it’s otherwise identical.

So if you’ve been putting off that upgrade till you know that your easing expressions work with CS5 (however unlikely that may be), you’re home free! Go forth and tween. Tween like the wind!

(Here’s where you grab it.)

Recently, I’ve been using 1Password to manage my online passwords. Had I known about Clipperz, I might not have forked out for it.

Clipperz is a damned clever online password manager. But here, don’t take my word for it; let Matt Neuberg of Tidbits explain.

Pimp your maps with the newly introduced “Labs” feature. Add a latitude/longitude tooltip, drag to zoom, aerial imagery, and – why not? – turn it upside down.

The ProRes4444 codec is included with the latest Final Cut Studio. And it rules. It’s almost as good as Falco when he was at his peak.

However, colours have a tendency to shift when importing ProRes4444 renders into Final Cut. This tip from Todd Kopriva lets you know how to stop these annoying gamma shifts – just in time for Christmas.

I love that a multibillion dollar company, employing the world’s greatest minds, still writes code that’s too lazy to distinguish between singular and plurals:

This page was visited 2 times via 1 network locations

(From Google Anayltics.)

I’ve dabbled with Subversion and Git, but I think I may have found my version control system of choice: Mercurial. It’s easy enough to get up and running, there’s plenty of documentation, and it’s free. In combination with Bitbucket I can pay a lousy five bucks a month to take advantage of remotely hosted version control: up to 500MB worth with 5 private repositories.

Here’s a screencast by Dan Benjamin introducing Mercurial.