Steve Jobs - Rest in Peace

“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

IE does it again!

A picture is truly worth a thousand words. And this one cracked me up! It neatly sums up everything that web designers love about Internet Explorer. I want one for the office wall...

Let it snow, let it snow...

They say it's a magical, ‘once in a lifetime event’... snow in Wellington. And not just snow on the hills around the city, we’re talking actual snow on Lambton Quay and Courtenay Place, even on the floor of the Hutt Valley... Is this the flipside of 'global warming'?

If it is, I don’t mind a bit. In fact after the cold and the rain that’s come in with this much talked-about four-day ‘Polar Rodent’ (that’s Jim’s description, not mine) the sight of show falling to ground level in the Hutt makes the cold and discomfort all seem worthwhile...

FREE FREEHAND (PLEASE)!!

I've been running my own Graphic Design business for the last 16 years. Like many in my situation I’ve upgraded hardware and software regularly during that time but currently I’m still on a Mac G5 tower running OS X 10.4. The reason? My all-time favourite vector drawing programme, Macromedia Freehand, won’t run reliably on newer systems. As I may have mentioned elsewhere I’ve been using Freehand from Version 2 (when it was Aldus Freehand). IMHO Freehand is a superior, more intuitive product than its rival, Adobe Illustrator. While I have used Illustrator when pushed, Freehand suits my work style better, is faster and saves files smarter/smaller. And the ‘xtras’ that I regularly use are not included in Illustrator.

If, after buying Macromedia, Adobe had included some of these ‘superior’ features in later builds of Illustrator I would have thought they were listening to their users. But they didn't. Instead they have simply told Freehand users to ‘get over it’ and come across to the wonderful world of AI. They simply stopped supporting Freehand (though they do still sell it), allowing it to languish to the point where it wouldn’t run a reliably on later versions of Mac OS. And I believe it won’t run at all on Intel-equipped Macs running Apple's new Lion OS.

I recently discovered the Free FreeHand organisation. Free Freehand came into existence to persuade Adobe to continue development of Freehand, or to sell the code to an organisation that will continue to develop what it calls ‘quite possibly the best vector drawing application ever made’. To this end they have filed an Antitrust case against Adobe.

To read more about Free FreeHand and follow the progress of the Antitrust case, visit www.freefreehand.org

Spam you? I don’t even know you!

I’m more than slightly disturbed by the amount of ‘bounced’ emails that are returning back to my ‘generic’ email address.
The reason that I find this more than slightly disturbing is that I never sent the originating message. I don’t use this address to send email. The ‘generic’ email address is for generic enquiries. Nothing more. I reply to genuine enquiries from my personal email address. I only ever send email form my personal email address. So you see my dilemma. If I never sent the originating message, why am I getting bounce-backs as undeliverable?

It's all down to those pesky ‘spambots’, of course. Unfortunately, while I've taken every care, it would seem that one of the little bastards has harvested the address. I don't know how or when this happened but my generic address is ‘out there’. And now that it is ‘out there’, like all things on the Internet, it’s very hard to take it back.

So what can I do about it?

I had a spam problem a few years back which got beyond a joke. In the end I thought I would knock the problem on the head once and for all. So I took all contact email addresses from our website. I disabled the contact form (replacing it with a very clear explanation as to why I had taken this action and underlining this with my personal view of all spammers and all things spam). And, as I had already predicted would happen, all this did was turn the website from a point of dialogue to a monologue. Our message was still out there but I had effectively removed the most important part of the interactive experience of our website. It did mean that the spambots weren’t able to put their crap out through our contact form but this benefit was completely outweighed by the fact that potential clients were no longer able to contact me through the website.

When you are visiting a website you're already in ‘online’ mode. Chances are, given the choice of a form or email link you’ll click either over a telephone number (unless, of course, you were looking for a telephone number in the first place).

About the only thing I can think of this time round is to change this particular email address. This would mean, of course, that any business stationery that carries this generic address would need to be updated. I may yet do this. But, unfortunately, it won’t ever stop the spam. Although it will stop me getting the bounce-back...

Anyway, what I'm really trying to say is if you got spam emails from mhdesign.co.nz it wasn't me. And it wasn’t anybody else. Really!