iPad2 vs. The Playbook

When looking at the newest trend in portable computing, you can’t ignore the development of the tablet PC or simply the “tablet”. The term tablet now refers to a computing device roughly the dimensions of a piece of paper or smaller that uses a touch screen as its primary user interface. Two of the major examples on the market include the Apple Ipad2 and the RIM Playbook by Research In Motion. In this article, I will not be discussing the wide assortment of tablets available running on the popular Android operating system created by Google.

Physical Size & Resolution

The Apple iPad2 is the second generation of Apple’s iconic, ground breaking tablet device. With diagonal screen dimensions of 9.7 inches with a resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels, the iPad is approximately the size of a peice of 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of standard paper. This makes the iPad the perfect size to hold in one’s hands when reading e-books or browsing the web, especially if it is enclosed in a handy carrying case.

The RIM Playbook, still on its first product released was made smaller to fit into the suit pocket of its target audience – business executives. The screen size is 7″ diagonally, with a resolution of 1024 by 600 pixels, though its form factor makes it look like it would be more appropriate for watching widescreen movies (although the aspect ratio isn’t exactly correct). Along this line of thinking, the 32GB and the 64GB version both come with an HDMI cable for connecting to a television or other compatible viewing device, so you can watch movies that are stored on the Playbook on a much larger screen.

Quick Comparison

The Apps

Apple is widely touted as having the largest supply of apps available for its platform, which makes sense as they have been in the business of creating apps for a number of years now, since almost all of their apps run on an iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad. It is estimated that there are more than 500000 apps available at the appstore, and about 37% of them are free.

On the other hand, the RIM Playbook is getting a lot of flack for there not being enough apps in the Blackberry App World. But really, what could you not find if there are only 250000 apps? It is expected that in future releases, a Playbook will be able to run any of the more than 35000 Android apps I feel this is not really a reason to complain. Besides, the Playbook is primarily targetted to corporate users so expect less apps.

What are you going to buy?

In the end, your decision on what to buy should depend on your needs and what you intend to use the device for. Hopefully your decision aren’t based on what is cool and what is hot, but who among us does not dream of the newest Apple technology? A lot of people think RIM should stick with the corporate market, and frankly the cost of most Apple products is quite prohibitive. I’m looking for a cheap deal on an Android tablet from my wireless provider at the moment, but I was able to get a 65GB RIM Playbook from a friend as part of the employee discount plan and while I CANNOT WAIT FOR IT TO BE DELIVERED!!! I did agree to give it to my wife for Christmas

So what’s your tablet? Tell me in the comments below or follow me on Twitter here.

The folks over at LinoType.com have just graciously released two excellent typefaces and made them available for free to celebrate the re-launch of their website. The site has a few stylistic changes and all in all browsing is a pleasant experience, though I can’t exactly say I’m a long term lurker on their site.

They have made available a 5-computer license for two fonts that go well together – Trump Mediaeval Italic as a heading font and Neuzeit Office as a body font.

I tried them out in Word 2007, but I haven’t tried them out in any other graphics software yet. Also available is a web font version which I also haven’t tried. I put together a little sample and was going to see how it rendered as a PDF (from Word) when I noticed quite a difference:

On the left is the document in Word 2007. On the right is the exact same file converted to a PDF using Standard optimization. The difference in weight may only be an optical illusion, but the difference in size is quite noticeable. Since this is a screenshot of the document it may not appear as crisp as it does when viewed in Word (I’ve always wondered about that… I guess printing is the only way to tell for sure) but I did find Neuzeit Office to be extremely clear and crisp.

Do you know about the difference in rendering between Word and its PDF generator? Are you able to duplicate results like this? Leave me a comment below and tell me how you did it.

It was quite a surprise to hear about the death of Steve Jobs today. It really is hard to imagine what life would be like today without Steve Jobs. A quick search turns out he has his name on over 300 patents. Unlike the Macbook and iPad users of today, I had an early introduction to Apple products.

In my high school days in 89 – 93, I had science class in a room of Mac Classics. I remember using the spreadsheet program to plot data, though I don’t remember the name of the software at the time.

When I was in grade 10 I took part in a summer programme working with our provincial park system (I was an Ontario Ranger at Potter’s Creek). I clearly remember playing a game called Shuffle Puck which was totally cool at the time. In the year before I went to university I worked a convenience store where we rented videos (VHS!) and we used a database on the Mac Classic to keep track of the rentals.

Fast forward to my second job out of university, and I was a support dude for a design department where the digital designers had PCs (Windows NT workstations) and the graphic designers used Macs. A number of them had grey, Mac 8500 towers which were out just before the Mac G3s were first released. I remember getting one of the designers the first G3 in the company, and I remember the excitement over upgrading to OS 9.0. I worked there for about a year and I became attached to using Macs and when I finally bought one it was an iMac DV (Graphite) running OS 9.1 and OS X (10.1). It is actually funny, because I used the computer for a long time. I still have it but it sat in my basement for the past 5 years, and now I want the files off the hard drive and it won’t boot, so I’m trying to reinstall OS 9.2 so I can get my files off. Otherwise I’ll have to try and extract the hard drive from the iMac.

There are few things Steve Jobs “got wrong” but maybe everyone else just didn’t get it. I would have loved to have a Mac Cube!

Now-a-days though, it seems like everyone has a Mac, or at least wants some sort of Apple product. Steve Jobs revolutionized the home computer industry in the 70′s, the personal music industry in the 90′s and now create a whole new world with the development of the iPad. In the first year university course I teach, 46% of the students have a Mac computer or laptop.

Thank you for everything Steve Jobs. I look forward to seeing the last products you had a hand in creating and how they will again change our world.

Hey everyone, I need a bit of help. I am crunched for time so this post isn’t written well, but maybe you can help shed some light on book design software.

I’ve always wanted to learn book binding but I have a totally different question right now. I’m an instructional designer and I need to produce a lot of learning material, and it could eventually fill a small book. What software do you use to put together books?

I believe software like Adobe InDesign and Quark Xpress will do that sort of thing, but I’m also interested in the work flow. Is content written in something such as a word processor as a text editor and then imported or is the copy written into text boxes?

I’ve also considered looking at Microsoft Publisher, because realistically my needs are pretty small but I do still have questions about the content creation and workflow.

I found Blurb.com seemed like a pretty interesting site. It sounds like it provides free software for you produce your book and then you just pay for the printed copies. It sounds like a great idea, have you tried it?

While I do enjoy using WordPress as a blog platform — especially when paired up with the Thesis theme — but sometimes my needs are a little more complex. This year I’ve started using a hosted WordPress blog as a CMS or Content Management System for one of the courses I teach. I do have my own servers and I do have access to one of our servers at work, but I wanted to see how well the site hosted at WordPress.com could do the trick. I may be able to share my experiences with other instructors who have less computer knowledge and for whom a hosted solution would be idea.

I had originally thought there was a book on using WordPress as a CMS but it turns out a few websites out there have some good information like the guys at iThemes.com and their WordPress as CMS minisite. You can also find some great ideas over at noupe.com which is run by the gang at SmashingMag.

And of course, apart from the WordPress For Dummies book, there is alsoSmashing WordPress: Beyond the Blog which is also by the gang at Smashing Magazine. Honest, I did not plan that

When using WordPress as a content management system, you want to create most of your content as Pages, not blog posts. Another good thing is to be able to set a static homepage which is something I’ve been wanting to look for for months and you’ll find it on the list at the Noupe.com site.

If you have any tips on using WordPress as a content management system, let me know by leaving a comment.

Follow me on Twitter here.

A lot of people give the font called Papyrus flack. Designers for the most part call it a horrible font and it should never be used. It made a “big” impact on the design world when the movie Avatar used a similar font in its credits. I say big in smart quotes because hey! we’re just talking about designers here!

Here is a design secret to help you reach ordinary people, not designers: Most non-design people love Papyrus.

That is why I chose to use Papyrus as the title font for a new site I’m working on that helps people use martial arts for health.

The Papyrus font provides a feeling that is a bit ancient, a bit wise and is good for things that are supposed to be old. This feeling can be enhanced by antiquing the font or grunging it up a little bit. This is the kind of feeling I want.

Another possible font could be ITC Kick, which you can get for a limited time as a free font when you place an order at Fonts.com

Or another consideration would be a free font like Chinese Takeaway:

Those last two have a more playful or perhaps even insulting overtone to them. Be very careful when you choose which fonts to use because each font has a specific message.

And so, that is why I choose Papyrus. If you visit my martial arts site and don’t see the banner in Papyrus, it is because I spent too much time writing about it here and not actually doing the banner

If you want to find a good font for real Chinese characters, get a good collection of traditional Chinese character fonts here. If you are really stuck, Linotype offers you high-quality fonts in all formats. Explore, shop, and download our collection. Find your fonts

Photo by H. Koppdelaney: http://www.flickr.com/photos/h-k-d/

Everybody loves stock photography, especially when it is free. Here is my list of the top free stock photography sites. Some may require that you sign up to be a member, but at least they don’t charge you for using the images!

In many cases, the only requirement is that you cite where the image came from or who created it. Never take credit for someone else’s work and by linking to the creator’s site or at least listing their name or URL you might be helping them out by giving them more exposure or possible future clients!

If you are a designer or photographer, you could also consider these sites for uploading your work. Maybe you’ll make a few bucks from the licensed areas!

Top 4 Free Stock Photo Sites

1. Flickr
2. DeviantART
3. MorgueFile
4. Dreamstime

Flickr

One of the great things about Flickr is the ability for content creators to mark their work according to their copyright control or their use of Creative Commons:

The font used is Akzidenz Grotesk Bold.

Since all content on the World Wide Web is automatically copyright property of its creator, the creator gets to decide who can use the content and for what purposes. Here is a quick break down for what to look for:

- Attribution: You can use the image in your work as long as you give credit to the original creator. You can even create other works derived from it.

– Share Alike: You can use the image for whatever purpose you want, also make derivative works from it (for example, use in mashups and modify it yourself) but only if you allow the exact same rights to others for the work you create out of it. Your work also has to have the Share Alike license.

If you are a professional designer, you’ll also want to keep an eye out for Non-Commercial licensing — — since that means you cannot make any money of the work you create that includes the image.

There is a lot of variety in Creative Commons licensing, so check this Flickr page for an exhaustive look. There are currently more than 22 Million images on Flickr with the Attribution license. Keep these in mind when looking for images from other sites.

You can find me on Flickr here.

Photo by Jhonsky: http://jhonsyk-stock.deviantart.com/

DeviantART

The people at DeviantART.com definitely have their own sense of style, but those deviants definitely have a huge selection of stock artwork available. Especially anime ^_^

You can find me at http://designtypegeek.deviantart.com/ where I post really lame work.

MorqueFile

The stock photography at morguefile.com has a great number of categories, and also allows to search via specific colours. I’m not very familiar with it myself but it also includes a number of articles, so you can learn while you create!

Hmm… they currently have a nice collection of toy robots.

Dreamstime

Dreamstime.com is actually a real stock photography site: you become a member and you are able to purchase images for a small price but you get to use the image for anything. I did notice at least one other website that pretends to be a free photo resource but all they do is link to Dreamstime images. Luckily, they have over 100,000 free images available without requiring a payment.

They use a credit system, where you pay money to buy credits, and then you use those credits to purchase photos or images you want. They also have illustrations and vector-based artwork. Another great place for artists to make money.

You can find me at Typegeek at Dreamstime. They also have a referral program.

Conclusion

Well there you have it. My top four pic of free stock photography sites. I recommend getting involved in the communities. Flickr is a lot of fun (but be careful, there is a lot of porn in the dark places), DeviantART has a high level of creativity and things that are out there and I guess Dreamstime and MorgueFile are more of your vanilla flavour of stock photography.

I should also mention that Flickr has some sort of deal with Getty Images which includes royalty-free stock video and music as well.

What’s your favourite stock photo site? Write a comment below. You should follow me on Twitter here.

]]> http://designtypegeek.com/2010/11/top-4-free-stock-photo-sites/feed/ 9 http://designtypegeek.com/2010/11/rockmelt-the-new-browser-by-mark-andreesen/ http://designtypegeek.com/2010/11/rockmelt-the-new-browser-by-mark-andreesen/#comments Mon, 08 Nov 2010 21:47:49 +0000 Typegeek http://designtypegeek.com/?p=203

You might have heard about it by now, but if not, Rockmelt is the new web browser coming out developed with funding by Marc Andreesen.

You are probably wondering who this Marc Andreesen guy is, but you should know that without him, we probably wouldn’t have the graphical web browsers we use today such as Firefox, Chrome and even Internet Explorer. It was Marc’s research project in university to create Mosaic, the first main-stream web browser with a graphical interface but it wasn’t until Marc and some friends went on to create a little company known as Netscape [ed: wow! who knew that was still around?] that produced the first publically used graphic web browser. For you new people out there (read, under 30) in the early days of the World Wide Web the default background on webpages was grey, not white. Also, graphics weren’t available. The early days of the browser wars was a fight between Netscape and Internet Explorer by Microsoft. You you can probably guess how that turned out.

Remember when the web looked like this?

But anyway, check out the video on Rockmelt about how they’ve re-designed the web browser (although it looks like Chrome) to work the “social web”. It looks like a great idea and I’ll probably be checking it out.

Then again, didn’t Flock beat them to it?

Here is a deeper look: Rockmelt is Chromium-based.

Over the last few months I’ve been developing online, video based learning material for an introductory computer course. I started using Adobe Captivate, and then moved on to TechStudio’s Camtasia. I was a little leery of Camtasia before because I felt it was limited in what it could do compared to Captivate. Over the months I found that Camtasia was simpler to use for what I needed it for, and in fact it seemed to fill the exact need I required in this particular case and that was teaching basic software applications such as Word, Excel, Access and PowerPoint.

But I’ve learned a bit about instructional design and have been checking on Captivate since its early roots in RoboDemo and then in Captivate 2 and Captivate 4. Last week I downloaded Captivate 5 and I am happy with the redesign, and while I wish it was a bit faster, it still shines in its area of specialty over Camtasia, and that is in creating complete instructional learning objects that can include instruction, training and assessment. I’m currently putting together a small, interactive “tutorial” on the Office 2007 user interface and thought I would take the time to add in all the components necessary to make it a stand alone learning object. Great stuff! I get to try and implement what I know about instructional design and learn more along the way!

Enter the 3D Graphics

Ever since the use of Clippit the Paperclip and other Microsoft Agents, I’ve loved the idea of having sort of an agent-based learning situation. I’ve looked a little bit into the research to see if they improve learning but haven’t really found anything solid, although the folks at W/ (w slash) seem to be on the right track with 3D avatars.

So I have a bit of time, a bit of ambition, so now I’m going to place DAZ 3D’s Victoria into a learning environment and we’ll see what happens.

Yes, I am a Typegeek, but I don’t know near as much about type and typography as I’d like. That’s why I’m glad David Airey pointed out this reference to Font Shop’s Education resources.

There is a wealth of information at Font Shop’s Education site, in fact about 72 pages worth of typographic goodies and information, broken down into sizable bits. The largest e-book (they are all .pdf files) is Meet Your Type: A Field Guide To Typography weighing in at 52 pages.

The other booklets are easier to handle at 9 pages or 2 pages. I think I’ve found my bedtime reading tonight! It’s a great way to learn about fonts and typography used in graphic design.