Posts Tagged ‘Tools’

Fun stuff with MODx output filters

Friday, November 9th, 2012

Here’s a quick tip about one of the great built in features with MODx. Let’s say that you have a few pages that need some different code in the header of a site. Maybe it is some custom CSS or Javascript. With MODx’s powerful output filters, you can do some pretty cool stuff that will make your like much easier.

Let’s say that you have a part in your template that looks like this:

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<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html lang='en'>
<head>
    <title>[[*pagetitle]] | [[++site_url]]</title>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <base href="[[++site_url]]" />
    <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.0/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
</head>

This is a super basic HTML5 head area. There’s definitely some more meta tags we’d want in there, and I’m including the google hosted jQuery, but this will work for now. Anyway, we want to put in some CSS code in there that only gets applied on certain pages. Here’s one way to do that pretty simply:

First, let’s add that style block to your template.

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<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html lang='en'>
<head>
    <title>[[*pagetitle]] | [[++site_url]]</title>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <base href="[[++site_url]]" />
    <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.0/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <style type='text/css'>
 
        [[*Inline Style]]
 
    </style>
</head>

Now we can add a Template Variable named “Inline Style” to the system. I like to use textareas for these kinds of things so that you have a little bit more room to type in your new CSS rules. Don’t forget to allow this template to access this Template Variable.

Each page using this template will now be able to have some custom CSS injected into the head, through the use of this Template Variable. Now, let’s say that you want to have a default bit of CSS in there to start with. Well, you can do that with the Output Filter “default”. It looks like this:

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    <style type='text/css'>
 
        [[*Inline Style:default=`body { background-color: #f00; }` ]]
 
    </style>

So now each page will have this CSS by default, and you can override that default CSS by putting something into the Template Variable. Pretty cool, eh?

There are a ton of different output filters, so you can do things like addition, check for value, basic if/else logic, convert strings to dates, and more! Check out the docs, and have fun with your MODx coding!


InDesign Dimensions Include Stroke Weight?

Thursday, May 26th, 2011

One thing that has driven me crazy about InDesign is that by default, unlike Illustrator, the dimensions of an object include the stroke weight. So if you draw a box that is 1″ x 1″ that has a 1 pt. stroke applied to it, then remove the stroke, you no longer have a 1″ x 1″ box. You have a 0.9861″ x 0.9861″ box. Conversely, if you draw a 1″ x 1″ box and then add a 1 pt. stroke, it becomes a 1.0139″ x 1.0139″ box. This has plagued me ever since I started using InDesign and has wreaked havoc when trying to align things.

I wanted it to work like Illustrator. In Illustrator, If you draw a box and add a stroke, it does not include the stroke weight as a part of the dimensions. One way I would get around this in InDesign was to align the stroke to the inside of my shapes. This worked all right until I butted two shapes up against each other. If those two shapes had a 1 pt. stroke then where they touched it created a 2 pt. stroke, again, raising my blood pressure to new heights.

So finally, after years of insanity, I decided to see if I could find a way to fix this and I found it! I don’t know why I didn’t search for it sooner. It is very easy fix but somewhat hidden. You would think it would be in InDesign’s Preferences but it’s not. (Believe me, I looked there many times!) The setting is located in the fly-out menu of the Transform palette! Duh.

If it is not already showing, you can find the Transform palette under the Window menu then Object & Layout.

Then in the Transform palette, in the fly-out menu, uncheck Dimensions Include Stroke Weight.

Much better.

(You can also find this setting in the fly-out menu of the long, skinny Control palette at the top of the screen when you are using the Selection Tool (black arrow)).


Find All Open Paths in Adobe Illustrator

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

A few weeks ago, I was working on an illustration and I noticed that the Divide function in my Pathfinder palette was not working the way it was supposed to. After a little troubleshooting, I found out that it was because one of the shapes I was trying to divide was not a closed path. I looked to see if Illustrator provided an easy way to find and select unclosed paths to no avail. It seemed to me that you should be able to find it under the Select menu where you can select stray points, all text objects, same fill or stroke color, or same blending mode etc. It seems like selecting all unclosed paths would be a pretty common query. Nope.
I did a Google search to see if anyone else had this problem or knew something that I didn’t. I ran across a free plug-in that adds Open Paths as well as 17 additional object types under Illustrator’s Select menu. It is awesome. Now I can easily select Guides, Open Paths, Closed Paths, Filled Paths, Unstroked Paths, etc. instead of spending valuable time and sanity hunting these rascals down.

The screen-caps above show Illustrator's Select Menu without (left) and with (right) the SelectMenuCS3 Plug-in.

You can find this and many other useful Illustrator plug-ins here. Thank you Rick Johnson! Download the file and then drag the plug-in into Illustrator’s “Plug-ins” folder. (On the website, it says it only works with CS3 and CS4 but it works for me in CS5).

The above plug-in only finds open paths. It is up to you to close them. I found a script that will find and close all open paths in Illustrator. I found this one on vectips.com. It actually contains 2 scripts; one that closes all Open Paths and one closes all selected Open Paths. To use the scripts, in Illustrator, under the File menu go to Scripts then Other Scripts… and navigate to the downloaded script and click Choose.

A dialogue box will open and let you know how many open paths it found and ask you if you want to close them all.

If you want your scripts to show up automatically without having to navigate to find them, store all your scripts in Illustrator’s Scripts folder. You can find Illustrator’s Scripts folder here: Applications/Adobe Illustrator CS5/Presets/en_US/Scripts.

Sweeeeeeet.


Hey Craig!

Friday, February 11th, 2011

I love Craigslist. I found my job there, I found my house there, and even a sweet west elm headboard there. I love perusing the posts and seeing if I can find some sweet items or great deals. I go through phases where I go on there every day, and generally have a list of items that I cycle through searching. If you search a lot of specific items like I do (card catalog, faux bamboo chair, etc…), going and searching everyday can be time consuming, but maybe not anymore!

Today I discovered Hey Craig! an online application that helps you in your daily search. All you have to do is enter the item you are hunting for, your email, and Craigslist location. Hey Craig will then keep watch on Craigslist and email you when those items are posted. Voila, you have avoided the daily search! The catch that I noticed, is like any search on Craigslist, if a post contains those specific search words, you’ll probably end up getting items that aren’t exactly what you are looking for. This could potentially lead to many emails if you aren’t terribly specific! I’ve signed up to test it out and hopefully it will find the card catalog of my dreams. If you’re a craigslister like me, check out Hey Craig here!

11/26/2012 – UPDATE
It has come to my attention that Hey Craig has gone out of commission, but in its place another way to search Craigslist has popped up! This new way of searching is called Cl Alerts. Cl Alerts provides a simple way to get real time alerts on your favorite Craigslist searches. On their website, Cl Alerts provides a bookmarklet that you can easily drag on to your bookmarks bar. When you have the bookmarket, just visit Craigslist and perform a normal search of something that you would want to receive alerts on. Once you’ve done your search, all you have to do is click the Cl Alerts bookmark, enter your email and you’ll start receiving alerts on your favorite item. Additionally, Cl Alerts has a way of allowing you to streamline your search to eliminate pesky keywords and get extra specific about what you’re searching for. This will save you time and let you be the first to score the deals you’re looking for.


Google Font Previewer

Thursday, November 18th, 2010

Another free Google tool in beta?  Yep.  Seems like another one comes out every week.  This one in particular has been out for months, so if you haven’t given it a try yet, then you are overdue.

Do you need help configuring, testing and then easily embedding some free fonts into your web pages?  Great!  The Google Font Previewer lets you pick one of the open source fonts from Google’s Font Library, then tweak the size, spacing and decorations using simple sliders and buttons.

Perhaps even more exciting is the Chrome browser extension for the Google Font Previewer.  Click the icon in your Chrome toolbar, and select the web font you want the page you are currently viewing to become.  Zap!  New fonts to preview.  This can be great if you’re designing a site, but you’re just not sure which free web font to use.

These are both great tools for designers and web coders alike, so give them a shot.

Google Font Previewer (http://code.google.com/webfonts/preview)
Google Font Previewer Extension for Chrome (https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/engndlnldodigdjamndkplafgmkkencc)

Also, don’t forget to go back and read Greg’s post about Google’s Library of free Web Fonts.


MODx Update: Fantastic new administration panel

Wednesday, October 27th, 2010

We here at the Zoom Creates Nerd Herd (the development team) have always loved the modX CMS tool. It’s extremely flexible, has a great system for templates and code chunks, and is limited only by your imagination. We’ve been using it for sites since before the code base was at a stable 1.0 release, probably since around late 0.8 beta releases. There are many great plugins that help with breadcrumbs, dynamic navigation and menus, AJAX requests, search engine friendly URLs and more. Today I’d like to point out some of the features and changes of their latest release, Revolution 2.0.4.
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Top 5 Free Resources For Business Tweeps

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

TwitterGrade for Zoom Creates

As of the writing of this post, there are 7,682,986 registered users on Twitter.  Once your business has made the leap in to the Twitterverse, you’ll need to have some resources at-hand to monitor and contribute to this additional way of sharing yourself. Your adoring customers, clients, fan-boys, and industry peers will begin following you. How do you stay on top of the flow of followers, and keep everyone engaged?

For businesses to grab a share of those potential customers, they need tools to research, track, and position themselves correctly.  Here is the short-list of business-oriented resources you should be using for Twitter.

TwitterGrader
Find out what your business rank/grade is on Twitter.  Great tool to start your research.

TwitterCounter
Register for this free tool to begin tracking your subscribers, get weekly reports, predictions, and advice on who you should be following.  You can also overlay your competitors in the graph to see how you compare.

HootSuite
The “do-it-all” tool for business tweeps.  Register and set up scheduled tweets to be posted days, weeks, and months in advance.

LocaFollow
Geo-located Twitter happenings in a specific area.  Set it up to track your city or neighborhood, and keep an eye on what is trending near you.

TweetScan
Similar to Summize (AKA Twitter Search), get reports on topics which affect your business.  Sign up to generate email alerts. Find out who is talking about your business or brand instantly or report daily and become aware of how your brand is viewed by the Twitter masses.

If you incorporate some or all of the above resources into your Twitter endeavors, you will definitely see better results than if you hadn’t done any at all. How much of a difference will it make? No one can say for sure, but at least you’ll be able to see how your numbers and metrics are being affected and what measures you’re taking that seem to be paying off. Happy Tweeting!


Options for Online 3D Content

Thursday, September 2nd, 2010

3D movies, 3D TVs, 3D cameras and camcorders, 3D cell phone displays… The 3D craze is well underway. So here’s a list of my favorite 3D development apps.

3D in Flash – Since Flash CS4, Movie Clips could have 3D transformations (position and rotation, but not scale). It’s a primitive 3D engine. In fact, Adobe calls it 2.5D. It’s more than 2D, but not quite 3D.

There are also 3D libraries such as Papervision3D and Away3D that can be imported into your Flash project that will give you a real 3D engine. These are great if you need to use Flash for your project, but you’re still limited to bending a primarily 2D program into 3D. Also, Flash comes with a lot of overhead and it is not the most efficient or fast solution for 3D content.

Virtools – Virtools offers a unique coding experience in which the programmer adds functionality by linking together behavior blocks in a schematic drawing, similar to a flow chart. It’s a very fast way to get basic functionality on your game assets. For example, to make a box rotate, just drop the box model in the 3D view to add it to the scene, then drop the Rotate behavior on it. In the schematic view, draw a link from the output of the Rotate behavior back to its input and you’re done. There’s not a single character of code to write, and it only takes about 5 clicks of the mouse. Of course, this is a pretty simple example, but most of it really is that easy. If you want more control, you can click a few more times to specify how fast it rotates and in which axis. You can also create your own behavior blocks if the hundreds that come with Virtools doesn’t have what you need. The downside to Virtools is that it is ridiculously expensive. Seriously, Virtools, offer a free version and lower the price to build your install base. You’d make up for it in volume.

Unity3D – Like Virtools, Unity is an integrated development environment (IDE) for building 3D games and simulations. I just started playing with it, but so far I like it a lot! Programming in it is not nearly as easy as in Virtools, but it is about the same as coding with Actionscript. It beats Flash with Papervision or Away3D when it comes to everything else. It’s a pain in the neck to get 3D models into Flash. In Unity, just save your assets in the Assets folder. They’ll now show up in your assets list in Unity. Also, because Unity is a real 3D engine, Flash can’t compare in visual quality to what you can do with Unity. Unity comes in a free version and a pro version, plus add-ons for developing for iOS or Android. And Unity 3.0 is coming out soon!

So there you have it; 4½ 3D development solutions (Flash by itself only counts for ½).


Quick Tip: Math for designerds

Friday, July 16th, 2010

Generally I let the nerd herd (aka our talented team of web developers) be the ones to get excited about math related functionality. However, I gotta say, I do get excited about the way InDesign allows you to do math in the control panel. Probably because anything that does the math for me is exciting! How does it work? Imagine you have a frame with an image in it on the page and you know that it would probably fit better if it were 2.125″ bigger. In the Width field up in the Control panel, type +2.125 next to the existing size. When you’re done, press Tab or Return (PC: Enter) and InDesign will do the math for you to adjust the size of your frame. This also works in the X and Y axis fields — allowing you to move items by a specified amount without doing the math yourself. You can also use different functions, such as subtraction (–), multiplication (*), and division (/).


Was this review helpful to you?

Wednesday, July 14th, 2010

I’ve been having major cell-phone trouble. I couldn’t make a call longer than 5 minutes and I was unable to send out more than a couple texts at a time before my battery fully drained and my phone just shut down. It’s a horrible feeling being so disconnected. The solution: I needed a new battery. I wasn’t about to try to go to the Verizon store (I’m not much for waiting in line for hours) so I tried problem solving using good ol’ Google. I found a couple of online stores with batteries selling from $8.99-$49.99. I’m not sure why the battery pricing was so across the board, but I wasn’t about to pay over $30, and don’t even get me started about the additional shipping fees involved.

Amazon Review

In my search I found the holy grail of cheap batteries online for $3.99-$10.99 on Amazon. “How could this possibly be so cheap?” I asked myself. I of course was drawn to the cheapest battery ($3.99 new), but went straight to the buyer reviews, because how could such a sweet deal exist? Well, to my dismay…it doesn’t. I found out that some people (out of 21 reviews) had luck, but the majority found the product to look used, be scratched, and the new battery would still not hold a charge. So what did I do? I went for the $4.99 (new) version with the more positive reviews.

User reviews can definitely be a valuable resource for users and sellers. Reviews help build trust in a product; They let us see how a product will look or work in real life by someone who has actually experienced it first hand. A buyer can learn if their potential purchase will be reliable and good quality. A review can also help narrow down all of the other potential choices out there (such as my million other battery options). If a product is perceived as favorable by a consumer, product sales can take off. And vice-versa, a negative review can impact how much you sell (like the $3.99 battery). (more…)