We’re planning on using Cufón to a larger extent than we have before on our build for Gregory, which has to be localized in a number of languages.  Using a text replacer for the designed text will allow us to localize text without rendering out new gifs and pngs for every language and whenever copy changes.  Not knowing how fast Cufón could render when given a lot of text, I put a test together.  PHP renders out a bunch of random text in blocks ranging from 10 characters to 1,000,000 characters.  Then Cufón goes to task on each, in sequence.  JS tells  you how long it takes.  Try it out here, but be advised it can crash your browser.

Here are the results of my very non-scientific test:

At 100,000 characters, FF3 threw “A script is running slow, blah blah” messages.  IE7 just crashed.  Safari 4 hung in there till 1,000,000 but then it gave up.  It looks like Apple’s claims about Safari 4’s speed have some truth.  I didn’t test any of the past generation of browsers, I may go back and add them later.

It looks like Cufón works perfectly fine on a page where it’s converting a thousand characters or less.  But it shouldn’t be used to convert the majority of the body copy of a page.  That’s perfectly acceptable to me.

As of lately I’ve really been meaning to explore Photoshop CS4’s 3D tools. After researching the programs new native 3D tools, they seem to be much more powerful than I had initially imagined. I also was really impressed with Adobe’s latest promotional site “Meet Dweezlbug” where artists Genevieve Gauckler and Erick Natzke created a beautiful creature using the suites new tools. The site features a brief breakdown on all the tools and techinques used such as the new native 3D tools, adjustments, 3D layers and also a bunch of new flash tools and techinques.

I love it all!

Enjoy!

While busy working away on creative for Gregory’s 2009 product launches, and in desperate need of some seriously great photos, we needed to find someone who shared our vision and could deliver the exact imagery we needed. Enter über talented photographer Tim Kemple. We spent the last week hopping around Northern California with Tim and an incredible group of talent including the amazing climbing machine Joe Kinder. From Grass Lake in Tahoe to Bolinas and the Bay, Tim captured an amazing set of photos we literally cannot wait to unveil.

We have recently been using Cufón on some of our recent projects, most noticeably version 3 of our own site as well as Mering Carson, replacing sIFR which worked but was resource heavy as well as a cumbersome task of creating fonts.

This has opened a lot of creative freedom for our creatives, knowing they can use a font and to see it exactly the same from design in comparison to the build. I would have to say this makes Jeff’s and Demetre’s job a lot easier.

The nice thing about Cufón is it’s still SEO friendly as well as very lightweight compared to the flash solution that has been the de-facto method of typography treatment for the web, sIFR.

One downfall of Cufón is you can’t select text, although sometimes you get lucky, it just isn’t supported. You might be thinking, oh no?! But hopefully in later builds this won’t be a problem, and it will be the most “usable” solution. What are your thoughts?

This is an easy thing but I never took the time to figure it out because I use phpMyAdmin so much. Exporting a database is easy with phpMyAdmin, but importing if it is large can be hard because a lot of times your connection will time out or PHP is restricting how big you can upload or whatever. If you can SSH, this is easier:

mysql -u USER -p DBNAME < dump.sql

If you are on Media Temple’s DV server, like us, you can do this:

my DBNAME < dump.sql

So much easier!

Lets say, you are making a site, were everything is AJAX, and you rely on event handlers to know when people double click on this element, drag the image across the site, etc. Normally you would start listening to things once the DOM fires (when the page loads), but problem is, it only fires once.

Here is an example of a normal “onload” listener in Prototype.js:

Event.observe(window, 'load', function () {
$$('tr[rel="file"]').each(function(element) {
element.observe('click', function(event) {

new Ajax.Request('file_info.php', {
asynchronous: true,
method: 'get',
parameters: 'ajax=true',
onComplete: function(t) {
$('files').update(t.responseText);
}
});
event.stop();
});
});
});

So, once the window loads, tell every table row with the rel attribute named “file” to some things once its clicked (in this case, gets the file info). Problem is, with all the new table rows coming in, Prototype wasn’t told to listen to the new table rows, only the previous ones that are gone.
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