Mike on TAP

With Steve Jobs stepping down as Emperor of Apple, I’ve seen a zillion (no exaggeration) blog postings and news stories about the subject. I’ve gotten to the point of just ignoring it all as noise. But this post by Daniel Pintilie over at Design Modo caught my eye. Daniel lists six things that web designers could learn from Mr. Jobs. I’ll list them here but make sure you read the article for (a little) more detail.

1. The design is decisive
2. Clients pay a lot of money for quality
3. Marketing is the entity that bring clients, the quality of the products maintains them
4. Discipline, hard work and self-evaluation are mandatory to be successful
5. Establish a clear direction and never give up
6. Ask your subordinates to be better, but you must be the best

Source: Design Modo

I just got this in my email and though I’d share the good news with you.

The City of Lansing’s North Capitol Ramp, located on Capitol Avenue, is now open for public use.

Students and staff can park in this ramp and pay by either cash, credit, or their StarCard.

StarCard Rate: $.80/hour
Cash Rate: $2.00/hour

Hours of Operation: 6am-11pm
(Gates will close the ramp from 11pm to 6am every day and weekends.)

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please feel free to contact Parking & ID Services at the below information.

Our friends over at PhotoshopSupport.com have given use links to five cool Photoshop videos. Watch ‘em and try not to learn anything. I dare you.

Manipulate and Synthesize Puppet Warp with Content-Aware Fill
Combine the timesaving power of two of the most popular features introduced in Photoshop CS5 to perform highly complex image edits in seconds. Use Puppet Warp to easily recompose an image by manipulating any elements, such as a model’s arm or hand. Then quickly remove the unwanted details with Content-Aware Fill, saving hours of cleanup work

Restore Old Photographs and Other Images
Remove any image detail or object and watch as Content-Aware Fill magically fills in the space left behind. Understanding how this breakthrough technology works can help you get amazingly fast and reliable image edits every time.

Straighten Images with Ease – Free Photoshop Hi-Def Video Tutorial
Quickly fix image distortions — and achieve more realistic results — with the intuitive Puppet Warp tool. Perform subtle manipulations like straightening bowed horizon lines or correcting perspective distortions in architectural images.

Amazingly Fast Effects
Apply show-stopping effects to your images with the Adobe Pixel Bender® Plug-in for Photoshop CS5, an emerging technology available on Adobe Labs. Pixel Bender offers dozens of new hardware-accelerated filters for one-of-a-kind looks and dramatic results.

Remove Unwanted Parts of an Images
Easily remove power lines and other distractions from images in seconds using the new Content-Aware option for the Spot Healing Brush. Make even the trickiest image elements, such as drooping wires, disappear as if they never existed.

Source: PhotoshopSupport.com

Here’s a tip from the Photoshop Tips, Tricks & Fixes eBook featured at Photoshop Daily. This tip will help you recover over and under exposed photos and make them pop:

Source: PhotoshopSupport.com

In this week’s Deke’s Technique, Deke McClelland shows you how to change the color of a car in Photoshop.

Source: PhotoshopSupport.com

ARTS229 Super Student Alycia sent me this vid and thought ya’ll might enjoy it. 7 principles that make your website more engaging with Dr. Susan Weinschenk

An “Anti-cable” television ad from the 70′s to discourage viewers away from cable television. Ironically, they encouraged people to support the movie theaters.

Here’s a video of Deke creating a cryptozoological critter. This should come in handy for ARTS171 Project Six, yes? Yes, yes, indeed.

I don’t know how much of this is real and how much of this is hype.

Stuxnet: Anatomy of a Computer Virus from Patrick Clair on Vimeo.

I’m getting lots of folks asking me if they should upgrade to CS5.5. I thought that was a fair enough question so I starting reading up on it a bit. Here’s what I found in an Adobe Forum:

Q: Are there any new features in the Web Premium suite outside of Dreamweaver, like Contribute, Bridge, Flash?
A: Dreamweaver and Flash are the two web products that are updated in CS5.5. Contribute, Bridge, Fireworks, Illustrator, and Photoshop are all the same as CS5.

There you have it. The only two applications in all of CS5.5 (that I care about) that changed are DreamWeaver and Flash. I have no idea what’s changed in Flash but DreamWeaver CS5.5 is a big, big change. They’ve added all sorts of very cool features that will probably change the way I work, assuming they work as advertised. That’s a big assumption too.  DreamWeaver CS5 has some very annoying bugs in it.  I can not find a detailed list of things that change in DreamWeaver CS5 – all I can find is sales propaganda.  So, I’ll have to download the demo copy of DW CS5.5 and report back.

Update:
They didn’t fix the one bug that drove most of the ARTS229 students bonkers… stay tuned…