Just a quick heads up on those of you (like me) who hadn’t checked out flock the new opensource browser. It’s still in developer mode, but you can download it and take it for a test drive.

And for you extension hungry Firefox user types, you have nothing to fear as they have already implemented that into flock and have chose some of the arguably best extensions available to start with. All you web developer toolbar die hards and adblockers take a sigh of relief.

Thumbs up for first impressions, it has an gui that mac users will undoubtedly gravitate to which is one of the main gripes from many mac die hards about Firefox (although I like its minimalistic approach). It fits into Tiger quite nicely. And its ALWAYS nice to have another standards aware browser around for both pc and mac to heat up the fire on MS IE.

Its hard to believe I actually went to all of this trouble for this entry today as I really shouldnt be even writing it (I should be working in Illustrator). After happily upgrading to Tiger a couple days ago, I also was excited to find that there was an Illustrator update as well, so I wiped my Panther install and did an erase and install to make way for Tiger. AH, a nice clean fresh OS headed my way! Overjoyed upon the completion of the install, I grabbed my 4 Adobe CS2 Creative Suite Premium cds and began the long haul install, and updated to the latest versions.

Eagerly going to Illustrator to see if there had been any improvements- to my great dismay I found the bugfestwarptour™.

1) Open up a new document and the icon at the top of the file window is Illustrator 10 ( I don’t even have Illustrator 10)

2) Save the open document using the OS dialogue box and first the thing opens up all huge with a ton of whitespace under it, AND it doesn’t allow you to save as ILLUSTRATOR format, it defaults to Adobe PDF and plain Illustrator is not in the drop down options. Yet the file save as name has an .ai extension, if you go ahead and save that, then it will save your file with an ai extension with a PDF file format, as well as a PDF icon.

3) Changing to the Adobe save as dialogue, allows you to save it as Illustrator and is selected in the drop down menu, but saves your file with a PDF icon.

Worse yet, I went to the adobe illy forums and some guy said

“same issue here at first. I reset the NVRAM and it corrected.

boot holding down the apple-option-o-f keys.
You’ll get a white screen with black text on it type the following:

reset-nvram (press return)
reset-all (press return)

The mac will restart.

This also solves the issue of excessive fan noise after the update for some. “

NVRAM, Fan issue??? I’m glad this *might* fix the icon issue- which could be an Apple problem, but what about the dialogue boxes and save options? If any other machead designers out there have experienced this or know of any fixes I’m all ears.

Check out these screen grabs to see what I’m talkin about.

grab 1 grab 2 grab 3 grab 4 grab 5

Have you ever wanted to get a screen shot of the entire layout of a web page? I’ve always wanted to be able to see what my designs looked like as a whole below the “fold”. In addition to that if you have ever needed an image for mock up or for a presentation then your answer can be found in Paparazzi. Paparazzi allows you to enter a URL, choose your own width and height values and then generates a PNG file for you of the URL. It’s a fantastic little app and its FREE to boot. So if you’ve got a mac running at least 10.3 give it a download!

For an example here is a grab of this page of my site at 1024 x 2130. Size: 500k

Hat tip to Scott.