Mikons!?

Mikons!? What on earth is a Mikon? Well I had no idea when I first heard about it but now I’m an addict.

Mikons is the brain child of Mark and Kenna Smith. The website has a built in tool which lets you create cool icons with very little effort. You can then share your creations with other members of the site - very much like flickr. It’s not all fun and games though, the Mikon Machine (as the site creators call it) is the most advanced online vector drawing tool in the world.

I knocked up the above icons in about 10mins. Give it a go yourself on the Mikons website, or click my images to see if I’ve added anything new to my gallery.

=Dave Long=

Service Comparison: Stock Photography

I’ll kick off the new Service Comparison feature with - Stock Photography.

For those that maybe unsure what Stock Photography is here is a brief explanation.

Stock photography is photography or imagery that is used repeatedly for commercial and non-commercial purposes.

When you need images for a site you may require something very specific and so take a photo yourself or hire a photographer to take the exact image you want. However, most of the time a bespoke image is not needed and a generic image is fine. You may require a picture of “a girl laughing” or “a pen” - this where stock photos come in.

You can search a database of images and find one that fits your purpose. While many like to use Google or Yahoo image search the vast majority of the time the images you find will be copyright and therefore illegal for you to rip off and use. There are some free gallery’s of royalty free images but usually as a free service they are very limited in the quantity, quality and variety of images.

For all the above reasons you will be best off with a paid for Stock Photography service. Some only include images from professional photographers, others are submitted by users of the site (although strongly moderated for quality). Here are the 4 examples that I will compare.

• iStockphoto
• Fotolia
• Shuttershock
• Corbis
• Ablestock

I will be scoring each site based on the following criteria:

Site Design (out of 25)
- Site Apperance
- Site Navagation

Images (out of 25)
- Quality of images
- Max available Resolution of images
- Range

Value (out of 25)
- Price/Value
- Restrictions on use

Editors Tilt (out of 25)

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Extension/Plugin of the month (POTM): September

POTM (Plugin Of The Month) is a new feature that I plan to post every month to promote the plugin/extension that has made the biggest impact on either the way I browse or assisted me in producing web pages.

For the month of September the Extension I’ve been loving most has been Google’s Browser Sync.

What this Firefox extension does is enable you to synchronize your bookmarks, history, cookies, saved passwords and even open tabs with your Google account. This means when you use any computer (with FF and web access) you will be able add this extension and carry on browsing where you left off!

All the tabs you had open when you last had Firefox open, whether on that computer or another one can be restored or you can start a new session. Your bookmarks, history, cookies, passwords, auto complete etc. can all be restored.

I say “can” because everything is optional. You can choose to sync as much or as little as you want and you can ask Google Browser Sync to encrypt all you info (this means the first time you use it on a new PC you will be asked for a password/pin).

A word of warning! If you use this feature in an internet café be sure to logout of Google sync before leaving.

This month so far I’ve been loving WebDeveloper Toolbar. I’ll let you know in next month if it is still my number 1 extension for October.

=Dave Long=

Hacked to Death ii (Safari)

Apologises for the lack of posts the last few days. I’ve not been on holiday, far from it, I’ve started a new contract. I will be producing for a leading media company.

This actually brings me nicely onto this blog entry’s topic - Hacking Safari. I am used to testing on the major PC based browsers (FireFox, IE, Opera and to a lesser extent Mozilla, Netscape, linx) but have never been required or had the hardware to test with Macintosh’s Safari.

For the most part if a design works in FF and IE, Safari will quite happily play along. However, on one page where I have used relative positioning to move an image up by a few pixels I encountered a problem. FF and IE6 didn’t line up. I was forced to use an IE6 hack (see previous hacked to death entry) to set a different pixel adjust for the two browsers. While this solved the problem in IE6, Opera, FF and IE7 - Safari was not happy.

While Safari had rendered the page as FF it treated the positioning of this image as IE6. As IE6 hack only affects IE6 and older Safari’s positioning of he image is not corrected. Quiet a problem.

Thus began my quest to find a CSS hack that only affected Safari. Preferably an elegant hack (if there is such a thing) still allowed my style sheet to validate and would not affect future versions of The browser.

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