Skyrocket.be

Oh boy, has it been going slow here or what? I didn’t even make the reboot, and believe me, it makes me feel terrible. I’ve been drowned in work with my new (kickass) job and several sideprojects so that is basically what kept me from posting regulary on my blog. No excuses though … here are some links to make up for it

Flock for Adobe Photoshop, Flock is one file, containing over 300 files inside. Flock contains 153 Fonts, that self install, 158 brush packs for Photoshop 7 and up, self install, and over 50 additional packs for Photoshop 7 and up. Each pack, contains about 30-40 presets, all in one file, self install. We would estimate that Flock contains over 7000 individual presets, in addition to the 150 fonts. All inone file, one download, one install.

Google Sketch-Up, Looking for a nice application to create some 3d content? Look no further since Google released SketchUp free, the free version of their recently aquired 3D modelling application. I must say SketchUp was a good application a while ago still unther their former owners, i’m curious what Google made of it.

Btw, where is Picasa 3??

Since a few days I’ve been experiencing a very (and i can’t stress the very word enough) annoying problem. As webdesigner I have 4 webbrowsers installed and a few standalone versions of Internet Explorer. More recently I also added the IE 7 beta as a standalone exe to the list. From that moment on IE 6 started to behave strangely.

When I typed an URL in the address bar and hit enter, all of a sudden firefox launched and loaded the website I requested. Now normally I wouldn’t mind Firefox imposing itself over Internet Explorer but I want to test my websites in all browsers on my computer, not just a few of them. The odd think was that links clicked in a website didn’t act similar, they just launched normally in IE or in a new IE window.

After some latenight searching on Google I couldn’t come up with a solutions so I resorted to using my little server for testing websites in IE. Of course this wasn’t a long term solutions so last night I started searching for a solution again and guess what? IE 7 messed up!Because I didn’t install IE 7 in the normal way but hacked my way through it to run it alongside IE 6 some registry keys were entered wrong. This caused IE to launch all pages from the addressbar in Firefox. This seems to be an issue known to the IE dev team so they were kind enough to offer us the simple solution: delete a regkey.

They also stressed we should be installing the IE 7 beta the normal way. Yea right, if I’d be able to uninstall it as simply as it was installing it I would probably do so but I’m not going to install a beta product to replace a … erm … functional version. Certainly not since explorer acts as the backbone of the Windows GUI. Damn you Microsoft, do you really think I’m stupid.

Not installing IE 7 the proper way was own stupid fault, yes … but that won’t keep me from running IE 7 and IE 6 side by side. If the issue pops up again I know what to do!

While writing the previous post I made a staggering discovery. Spreadfirefox.com, the premier site dedicated to promoting the o-so-popular alternative browser, doesn’t have a single link to the firefox homepage or a downloadlink for firefox on their homepage. They are there for marketing firefox though, they say it themselves.

As a small, non-profit organization, the Mozilla Foundation has very limited resources at its disposal to market Firefox to the world. SpreadFirefox was created to fill this void, and was founded on the same principles of community involvement that drive the development and testing of Firefox. We believe there is nothing that a large community of enthusiastic volunteers can’t accomplish, and this site exists to unite the community into one cohesive marketing force that even competitors with unlimited resources can’t compete with. For more information, see our original announcement.

Ok, I agree that the site is dedicated to people looking for marketing material for promoting the browser but still it’s a little silly they don’t offer a link to the product they are marketing. The site is run by several members of the core Firefox and mozilla team. Maybe they have a reason they didn’t link there but I can’t think of one really. Can you?

Firefox is on the road to becoming a serious threat for MSIE for the most popular browser. Recent studies by XiTi, a french buro for market research, show that Firefox now has over 20% average marketshare in Europe and 15% in the US. A good evolution i’d say, now lets only hope Microsoft gets their act together and offers a product which doesn’t cause us webdesigners hours of frustration. Cross your fingers.

Via http://www.spreadfirefox.com

It was a little unclear at some point but the people behind SteunFirefox.nl have found a way to put the money they raised to good use. The initiative is a follow up from the pagesized Firefoxad in the New York Times and a big German newpaper. Rumours were that the dutch version of this initiative didn’t raise enough money to buy a pagewide ad in a dutch national newspaper. After the rumours were confirmed by the people behind this initiative the question rose what to do with the money they collected. Now they have agreed to put a pagesized ad in Sp!ts, a free newspaper with over 1.6 million daily readers in the netherlands. They still need €600 ($728) to get to the required amount of €10.000 ($12,135) for the advertisement. I’ve already paypalled some money, why don’t you help them raise the rest of the money and make the web a better place for all of us.

Via http://tweakers.net