kremalicious

They won’t stop with their cutting edge love. After having text-shadow implemented since many years and having a bunch of other cool stuff implemented like CSS gradients or CSS box-shadow the WebKit team freshly announced a new cool feature: CSS alpha masks.

From the Surfin’ Safari Blog:

WebKit now supports alpha masks in CSS. Masks allow you to overlay the content of a box with a pattern that can be used to knock out portions of that box in the final display. In other words, you can clip to complex shapes based off the alpha of an image.

It even can be applied to a video-element.

(Via Surfin’ Safari)

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Here’s my DeliciousLinks list with my favorite links from the past week. Be sure to subscribe to my RSS- or Atom-Feed so you won’t miss the next DeliciousLinks.

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Just right after Tiffen and Digital Film Tools announced their new image editing plugins for Aperture 2.1 Apple has released the Software Development Kit (SDK) for coding Aperture 2.1 plugins. It’s available from Apple’s Developer Connection for registered members (registering is free). You can grab the Aperture 2.1 plugin-SDK (3D9) as a 595KB download from there and start coding. If you want to know what exactly you can do with it as a programmer you should read those lines from Apple.

So it should be just a matter of time before we see another bunch of plugins popping out.

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I’ve decided to deliver a weekly link list for the past week called Delicious Links. This list will include some of my favorite links I’ve discovered in the past week. From now on I will post that sort of list every weekend.

So here are my delicious links of interest for the week 16/2008. I start with just a short list:

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The aim of this article is to give you a quick introduction of a css property named text-shadow which was first included in CSS2 (but it’s not implemented in all browsers yet). Nevertheless you can make some cool effects with it, which could only be done before by photoshopping text and rendering it as an image.

Because it’s included in Safari since version 1.1(!) Mac users should be aware of various effects done by this property. In fact, most companys and persons with mac users as their main target audience use this effect on their websites.

This article describes how text-shadow works, what you can do with it and which browsers currently support it. At the end of this article I’ve made up some examples and provide a list of useful resources.

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Writing right now on a longer article about text-shadow and it’s implementation in WebKit, the rendering engine which powers Safari and Konqueror. But now this exciting news popped up from Surfin’ Safari, the blog of the WebKit development team:

WebKit now supports gradients specified in CSS. There are two types of gradients: linear gradients and radial gradients.

Take a look at the entry on Surfin’ Safari to learn how those css-based gradients work and how they can be coded:

So what exactly is a gradient in CSS? It is an image, usable anywhere that image URLs were used before. That’s right… anywhere.

You can use gradients in the following places:

background-image
border-image
list-style-image
content property

Although the WebKit team is saying it is supported “now” a commenter on Surfin’ Safari states that it seems the whole function isn’t included in the latest nightly builds of WebKit.

So it will take some time, ’til it’s worth replacing the gradient images on my h3 and h4 headlines with just simple css code…

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Panoramic photographer Ian Wood has released an automation helper for Apple’s Aperture called Aperture Assistant as a first beta version (build 49). Aperture Assistent allows you to setup and automate complex tasks for Apple’s Aperture beyond the Apple delivered Automator actions in Mac OS X. The setup of these workflows is as easy as dragging around visual flowcharts.

Although the interface looks and feels a bit buggy (dude, it’s a beta!) it looks very promising.

You can download it from the programs website. The beta version will expire on 15th May 2008 but a new beta should be available before that says Ian Wood. While Mac OS X 10.5.2 and Aperture 2.1 are the recommended system requirements Aperture Assistant also works with Mac OS X 10.4 and/or Aperture 1.5.6 and above.

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Remember the campaign of the London police calling all people to regard photographers as potential terrorists?

Now the PressGazette reports that

Labour MP [Member of Parliament] Austin Mitchell is planning to take a delegation of photographers to the Home Office to protest about the growing number of cases in which police officers and others try to stop professional and amateur photographers taking pictures in public places.

You can read the whole story here:
Photographers lobby parliament over police curbs

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Adobe has updated Lightroom to version 1.4.1 and Camera Raw to 4.4.1. You can read a detailed explanation of what’s new in these releases in the Lightroom Journal.

Grab your update by following one of these links:
Lightroom Mac
CameraRaw Mac
Lightroom Win
CameraRaw Win

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Two days ago I posted links to the winning photographers of the Pulitzer Price 2008. Now Adrees Latif, who won in the category Breaking News Photography for his picture of the japanese videographer Kenji Nagai shot down during riots in Myanmar in 2007, reveales the story behind the picture in the Reuters Blog:

Within minutes, the crowd swelled from hundreds to a few thousand. The soldiers threw barbed wire coils across the roads.
Knowing that hundreds of people were gunned down in similar circumstances in a 1988 uprising, I climbed an old crosswalk directly overhead, to get to one of the few spots offering a clear view…

Read the whole story on the Reuters Blog

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Ever wondered what the heck 6500 Kelvin has to do with your photos? Here’s an in-depth article from the blog of James Duncan Davidson for better understanding of the whole color and white balance thing in photography.

Measuring the Color of Light by James Duncan Davidson:

Like all settings, the color of light has a unit associated with it. The unit, however, isn’t unique to specifying the color of light. Instead, it’s the same SI unit that is used for temperature: the Kelvin. I know that the first few times I delved into this subject matter, I thought it was a strange unit to use, mostly because light itself doesn’t have a temperature. Since it’s radiation, when it hits a surface it can cause that surface to heat up. But the light itself is neither hot nor cold. So, why the heck is a unit of temperature used to describe the color of it? …

And another in-depth article from James which is a follow up of the above article:
Color Temperature and White Balance

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After i released my Aperture File Types icon set many of you asked how they can really use these icons for displaying the icons of images on your Mac system. Sadly this isn’t as easy as dropping them in Candybar into a well for image icons cause there isn’t any well for them. So using other icons as standard file type icons for images is a bit tricky. I discovered two ways of doing it, which involves overwriting resources of Preview.app and Photoshop. So before doing anything I mention in this post, you should make a backup copy of them.
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The Columbia University has announced the winners for 2008 of the 92nd annual Pulitzer Price. The Pulitzer Price itself is often cited as the highest honor for american journalists. Among the various categories there are two winning entries for Breaking News Photography and Feature Photography.

In the Breaking News Photography the price was won by Adrees Latif of Reuters for his picture of the japanese videographer Kenji Nagai shot down during riots in Myanmar in 2007.

In the Feature Photography category wins Preston Gannaway of the Concord (N.H.) Monitor “for her intimate chronicle of a family coping with a parent’s terminal illness.”

Finally photographer Michel du Cille is a member of the Washington Post staff, which was awarded in the Public Service category for their work about “mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, evoking a national outcry and producing reforms by federal officials.”

You can also have a look at the other winners on the website of the Pulitzer Board or grab the press-release where you’ll also find Bob Dylan awarded in the Special Citation category.

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I have updated my icon pack with three new RAW icons including new icons for .SRF-files (Sony), .PEF-files (Pentax) and .ORF-files (Olympus).

The icon pack now includes 22 icons for: .jpeg, .gif, .tiff, .png, .pdf, .psd, .arw, .cr2, .crw, .mos, .nef, .raf, .raw, .srw, .tif, .oly, .fff, .3fr, .dng, .mrw, .pef, .srf, .orf

You can get them from the goodies-page under the same link as before.

And don’t forget to read my article about how to change the generic image icons in Mac OS X Leopard.

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Extremely useful post from Daniel Miessler about 9 Lesser Known Safari Features Worth Switching For:

Inline Dictionary:
Safari, being a Cocoa app (OS X), allows us to instantly define words we find. Simply highlight the word and hit the ctrl-cmd-d shortcut. So if I highlight the word ‘functionality’ in Safari and hit the shortcut, here’s what I get.

(Via dmiessler.com.)

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FlickrExport is a plugin for iPhoto or Aperture from Connected Flow which uploads photos directly from these application to your flickr profile.

Yesterday Connected Flow released the first public beta version of FlickrExport 3 (precisely it’s version 3.0.0b20). The new features includes:

Routing photos to multiple groups.
The ability to store a collection of group additions and recall them for later use (e.g. “Send to all my Black and White groups”)…

Via (Connected Flow Blog)

Available is a beta version for Aperture or iPhoto. They also made up a webpage for the FlickrExport 3 public beta where you’ll also find a nice screencast showing the new features.

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I missed to put an icon for .MRW-files in the first version. So the new zip-file contains the new icon for .MRW-files in all formats.

These icons are free for your personal use and include icons for all file types Apple’s Aperture 2 can handle (.jpeg, .gif, .tiff, .png, .pdf, .psd, .arw, .cr2, .crw, .mos, .nef, .raf, .raw, .srw, .tif, .oly, .fff, .3fr, .dng, .mrw)

• Mac + Win + Linux + iContainer
• Leopard ready (512×512)
• custom 32px and 16px icons

Get them from the goodies-page under the same link as before.

And don’t forget to read my article about how to change the generic image icons in Mac OS X Leopard.

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Nice article over at i love typography about what to have in mind when choosing a typeface for your project, whether it’s for web or print.

On choosing type - First principles:

Before we get to the nitty-gritty of choosing type, let’s briefly talk about responsibility. Fundamentally, the responsibility we bear is two-fold: first we owe it to the reader not to hinder their reading pleasure, but to aid it; second, we owe a responsibility to the typeface or typefaces we employ. Good typefaces are designed for a good purpose, but not even the very best types are suited to every situation. Personally, I’m always a little nervous about using a newly acquired typeface. A new typeface is something like a newborn baby (though it doesn’t throw-up on you): don’t drop it, squeeze it too hard, hold it upside-down; in other words, don’t abuse it, treat it respectfully, carefully.

(Via I love typography.)

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Thousands of people take photos every day. What if one of them seems odd? Terrorists use surveillance to help plan attacks, taking photos and making notes about security measures like the location of CCTV cameras. If you see someone doing that, we need to know. Let experienced officers decide what action to take.

yeah, i’m guilty. i took several photos of cctv cameras:
At Agentur Ahron
At Panthermedia

And there are more in my photo archive… Guess you have no other choice than informing the London cops cause they just “need to know”.

You can find the campaign website of the london police here:
Metropolitan Police 2008 Counter-Terrorism advertising campaign launched
You will be surprised what other things they are afraid of…

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An awesome creative idea for a blog post about Web-Design from Joshua Clanton6 Web Design Tips from Leonardo da Vinci:

Leonardo Da Vinci was one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, leaving behind a legacy that continues to inspire artists, scientists and others. Here are six things we can learn from him about web design.

He also made two other articles in this creative style:
5 Web Design Tips from Michelangelo
What Medieval Philosophers can teach us about Web Design

(Via Joshua Clanton.)

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