Skyrocket.be

There are some of those days when you just feel like you own the world because you found out something cool. And most of the times those things you just found out, are things you wonder how you couldn’t have known about.

Hiding multiple layers in Photoshop

If you are like me you probably like your graphics all nice and tidy, each on it’s own layer. Several of them grouped together in layer sets. The amount of layers can add up pretty fast if you are heavy on detail and graphics and hiding or unhiding several layers can be a timeconsuming and annoying task.

By accident i found out that you can easily hide or show several layers with only clicking once. Just click and hold on the eye icon of the first layer you want to hide and then drag down or up, over the eye icons of the other layers and they’ll automagically will hide or show too. Pretty fast and easy if you ask me.

If anybody has some of these small tips you think nobody knows about, please share them. Some of them are lifesavers!

Edit: This also works for linking layers, just click and drag on the chain icons. Thanks to Bart from Percept.be for this tip!

You should check out Helldesign’s site. I can’t understand a word from what he’s saying but the method of browsing his portfolio is totally awsome. The brilliant use of Ajax and the nice eyecatching design make this a winner for me!

http://en.helldesign.pl/

Now that Adobe has officially aquired Macromedia and the latter is now simply called Adobe (what’s in a name), the fuzz about the new application bundles takes off again. I can count myself as one of the people who would love to see Flash and Dreamweaver bundled along with Photoshop and Acrobat for example. That would make one hell of a webdesign bundle wouldn’t it?

Well Adobe is going in the right direction, they are offering three new bundles:

• Adobe Design Bundle
• Adobe Web Bundle
• Adobe Video Bundle

The most interesting at the moment is the Web bundle which combines Macromedia’s Studio 8 and Adobe’s Creative Suite 2. Unfortunatly that leaves me with the same problem as before, i buy a suite of products of which i’ll probably only need half. Indesign? Don’t need it. Illustrator, might come in handy but i can do without. Flashpaper? You’ve got Acrobat, who needs this? GoLive? Nah, i preffer dreamweaver. Fireworks? No need for that if you got Photoshop.

Adobe is sure taking the right direction by offering combined products but this is overkill. If they stay faithfull to their release cycle we should be getting a new Creative Suite within a year or so and i sure hope they’ll offer something in the lines of Dreamweaver 9, Flash 9 pro, Acrobat 8 and Photoshop CS3 all bundled together as the ultimate webdesigners suite.

Go Adobe!

Stock imagery is something almost all of us webdesigners come across at some point. And if you haven’t you are either a very good photographer or a poor designer. More recently i’ve discovered the wonderworld of JPEG2000.

JPEG2000 is the an image compression standard introduced in somewhere in august 2000. It’s not exactly new anymore but still little people use it and that has several reasons. Support is one of them. There are very little programs that support JPEG2000 out of the box. Even Photoshop CS and CS2 both need a plugin (which is delivered along with the package on the CD) to enable support for JPEG2000. The support is growing but only in the topline of image editing products. In the lower segments real use of JPEG2000 still has to be intoduced. And as far as i know there are no browsers that support it.

There are several advantages of using JPEG2000 over JPEG but the main reason i use it more and more is the fact it supports alpha transparency. It speeds up my design process (and every bits help, ask your clients), and stock sites that have JPEG2000 images in their gallery like Absolut Vision are a blessing for any designer. Absolutevision offers a big gallery of photo-objects and people with alpha transparancy or clipping paths included. Their imagery allows me to skip the tedious task of extracting a character or object from it’s background, and the quality of the photo’s they offer is great too.

They offer subscriptions for $39 a month (300 downloads) or $79 a year (3600 downloads). I’ve got me a year subscription and i use it alongside my istockphoto subscription but you can also register for free at absolutevision and just download their weekly free image. I’d say try it out and let me know if you have an other good or bad experiences with JPEG2000 or know of any other stock galleries with JPEG2000 images.

Just a quick note that the guys at mad4milk, the creators of the great mooFX, have released a demo of their mooflex CMS. Mooflex is a CMS enhanced and streamlined with various kinds of new Web2.0 techniques like Tags, livesearch and functional Ajax here and there. I’ve tried it and it works wonderfully well, i really would like to see this as a finished product. I would definitely use it if it gained a few more features (like fileuploads) .

http://www.mad4milk.net/entries/mooflex for more info and the demo!