I have seen the future…

February 24, 2006 / General

…and it still kinda creeps me out. I’m referring specifically to the Adobe-Macromedia merger. While both companies have a history of making excellent products, Adobe seems to have lost its way the last few years, and I’m worried it will drag the Macromedia product line down with it. I’m especially dismayed about the future of competing products: Freehand versus Illustrator, Fireworks versus ImageReady, Dreamweaver versus GoLive, Flash versus LiveMotion, FlashPaper versus Acrobat. Adobe’s programs (with a few exceptions) have become massive bloatware… try installing CreativeSuite 2 sometime — it takes up over 2GB of hard drive space! Will Adobe force …

I have seen the future… Read More »

The Fonthead

February 17, 2006 / General, web design and development

My brother recently sent me a link to a webpage with free font downloads. This tickled my on-again off-again love affair with typography, and triggered me to post a quickie blog about the subject. The more intricate details of typography (kerning, leading, metrics and the like) seem as obscure as ever to the everday computer user these days. Most people — quite understandably — only know what MS Word requires them to know. Then there are people like me who know a bit about the subject but still get too lazy to follow all the etiquette, such as using em …

The Fonthead Read More »

I hate to say it…

February 15, 2006 / e-learning, General, web design and development

But I found another Microsoft product helpful today. It pains me to say it, but it’s true. I have created an XML template for an online course delivery system I’m building at my workplace. The course data for each course needs to be placed into a copy of this XML template. The problem is that I don’t want to work directly in XML all day, and my coworkers can’t be expected to write course content directly in XML format. I needed to devise an easy-to-use method for inputting data to an XML document (filling in the blanks). My initial research …

I hate to say it… Read More »

Daily newness: An online XML-to-XSD Converter

February 13, 2006 / e-learning, General, web design and development

OK, most of you probably don’t know the difference between an XML file and an XSD (“XML Schema”) file. For a brief intro check out W3Schools’ XML Schema tutorial. A brief quote: “The purpose of an XML Schema is to define the legal building blocks of an XML document, just like a DTD.” This week I needed to create an XML Schema doc for work. The XSD file would be used to validate XML files I’ll be making for my online courses. Well, being a newbie to XSD files (though not XML), I was making decent but very slow progress …

Daily newness: An online XML-to-XSD Converter Read More »

Scroll to Top