Mike on TAP

Here’s a 1977 film that highlights a new Bell Labs-developed system for building advertisements to publish in the Yellow Pages. While very crude by today’s Photoshop/Illustrator/Fireworks/whatever standard, the scanner + dynamic design system was a huge leap forward for workers used to setting their own type and photos.

Watch how fast this system fills in the blue shaded area behind the SAM’S at around 3:30.

Source: Adobe TV

People joke about sleep and brag about how little sleep they can ‘get away with.’ Those people are idiots. Look, when you’re tired, you cannot concentrate very well. You cannot learn very well. You cannot work very well. And my favorite, you cannot drive very well. Hell, you’re the person who doesn’t turn left off of Shiawassee onto Grand on a red light. Yes, that’s me honking at you. TURN!

Laura Spencer over at one of my favorite blogs, FreelanceFolder, has some tips on getting a good nights sleep. Here are a few random picks:

Check the temperature–A hot, stuffy room can keep you from sleeping comfortably. Likewise, if your room is too cold you may have trouble going to sleep. Find out what sleeping temperature is most comfortable for you and program your thermostat accordingly.

Avoid alcohol before bedtime–A nightcap just before bedtime is a bad idea. While alcohol is a depressant, studies show that alcohol consumption can disrupt your sleep.

Dedicate a room to sleeping–Do you have a big screen TV, a work desk, and other non-sleep essentials in your bedroom? Well, try taking them out. If you use your bedroom for too many activities during the day, you may have trouble sleeping at night.

Get a physical–Remember to get regular checkups to make sure that there is no physical problem keeping you from getting enough sleep. If there is a physical cause for your lack of sleep (such as sleep apnea), your doctor can prescribe the best course of action for you.

Source: FreelanceFolder

Now here’s a cool tutorial. Andrew over at Script Tutorials has put together a killer tutorial showing you how to make a bunch of spinning gears in CSS. Very cool. He’s got lots of other good stuff so be sure to check out his site!

In today’s lesson, we have made the animated gears with CSS3. The result looks very nice. I have used CSS3 keyframes, animation and transforms (rotate) in order to achieve this result. Please pay attention – current demo works well in Firefox and Chrome / Safari (webkit).

Source: Script Tutorials

This thing is a Targus USB 3.0 Dual Video Adapter and it gives your notebook or any other computer another display port. It simply needs one USB 3.0 port and has both DVI and HDMI to drive resolution up to 2048×1152 which is good display up to 24″. The Targus employs the DisplayLink DL-3900 chipset as it’s the only one in the DL-3xxx series to boast dual head output. Drivers are available for Windows and Mac. Thought it looks like the Mac drivers are only in the alpha stage.

I’ve never seen one of these in person so don’t blame me if you buy one and it turns out to be junk, ok? I just thought it was really cool and thought some of you guys with notebooks might dig it as well.

Source: Every Thing USB

Adobe has announced that Adobe Photoshop CS6 beta, a preview of what’s to come in the next release, is available as a free download from Adobe Labs. You can download the beta, try it out and provide feedback to the product team. In other words, give Adobe free labor which you will in turn have to purchase when the final release of CS6 comes out in the first half of 2012.

Source: Adobe Labs

Deek shows us how to make synthetic Photoshop lightning.

My brother sent me this link and I thought I’d pass it along. This place called Designer Resource Box has a huge selection of CSS, HTML & jQuery cheat sheets. It’s not really cheating so don’t worry about breaking any societal taboos. No one can possibly remember every little facet of web stuff and that’s where these come into play.

Source: Designer Resource Box

Thanks to Mr Dooby Noob for the three.js project! Click the graphic above and watch the demo. Works best for me in Chrome. I just have too many extensions in FireFox for it to run with any speed. When you get your jaw off the floor come back here and read the rest of this post…

The aim of the three.js project is to create a lightweight 3D engine with a very low level of complexity; in other words, for dummies. The engine can render using < canvas >, < svg > and WebGL. The three.js engine allows developers to create mind blowing 2D and 3D animations with Canvas and WebGL, from basic cubes to advanced animations so smooth you’ll wet yourself.

Source: Github

Now here’s a neat trick. Jack Moore has a nice tutorial on making an animated ribbon menu.

I’d never seen Jack’s site before but he appears to have several JQuery and HTML5/CSS3 tutorials. Might be worth your time to check it out.

Source: Jack Moore