Convert to uppercase

Sometimes the project you're working on requires you to type things out in all caps. Maybe it's required by the client's lawyers, maybe it's just part of the design aesthetic. I've had projects where the designer wanted all of the text in caps, but all of the legalese and copy was handed over to me in Sentence case. When I'm handed a 3-4 page document of rules or terms, the last thing I want to do is spend my night typing it out.

For this, just open up Microsoft Word, paste in the text to be converted to uppercase, select all and Shift-F3. VOILA! I use this method because, for the life of me, I can't find the "To Uppercase" function in Word 2007.

Yes, I know I could probably do this dynamically in Flash, append ".toUppercase" to some code in my ActionScript, but not all projects are Flash and having to do that seems silly.

Software Pimpin' #1: SyncBack Freeware (PC)

We live in an age where all of our memories, all of our work, everything we do, is on our computers. I remember going through dad's tall file cabinet when I was younger, rummaging through all the years worth of photos he had in that second drawer. Now, everyone has a digital camera. Gone are the days of 30 or so processed rolls from your youth. These days, youngsters are going to have their entire lives broadcast and memorialized, through hundreds of thousands of digital photos and videos on YouTube. You can't see my sister's walls in her home with the absurd amounts of photos she puts up, I can't imagine how many photos she'd have if she actually had a digital camera.

At home, I have schoolwork and projects back from 1998-1999. Websites and artwork from my college, portfolio pieces from 2000, years and years of my life in work, taking up 0s and 1s on my computer's 7 year old hard drive. A lot of it really awful, but I keep it around for the memories behind them.

That said, this last week my coworker booted into her Macbook Pro and a cute little folder with a question mark popped up on her screen. What wasn't so cute is that this icon was basically telling her that her hard drive crashed and was DOA. Everything she had on it, gone. A year's worth of work, PSD files, Illustrator files, her own stock artwork and originals, gone. Can they get that back? Maybe, but I doubt they can recover the entire drive and even if they do, have you looked into how much hard drive recovery costs these days?

So this has lit a fire under me. I have 9 years worth of digital photos, 10+ years worth of artwork and portfolio pieces, 10+ years of important documents, sitting on that old Pentium 3 in my office. My life and memories can be gone in an instant.

Today I stumbled across a program called SyncBack Freeware (PC). It's as easy a backup program you could ask for, allowing you to automate backing up to external drives, FTP sites and more. It took me literally 20 minutes to setup, and now my computer at midnight, every night, will backup my work and my life to my Dreamhost backup account and an external hard drive. I really wanted the new HP EX487 MediaSmart Server, but going this route for now will save me about $600+ dollars.

I found an article about it at Lifehacker, where you'll find a link to it as well: http://lifehacker.com/software/geek-to-live/geek-to-live-automatically-back-up-your-hard-drive-147855.php

Maybe you're already backed up. I hope you are. For me, I just had this feeling like I needed to do it, but it really wasn't a rush. My coworker, although it sucks that she became a guinea pig for data loss, really proved to me that I can't put this off any longer.

Fullscreen Flash Flickering

Something's been bugging me ever since I made a Flash site go completely 100% browser window. In Internet Explorer, when I would resize the site, the browser window's content would flicker black all the way from full size to as small as I could make the window. The site was more than usable, but the flickering was enough to annoy the hell out of me, and make me wonder if someone was going to call me out on it. I checked through all of my Flash code and I couldn't figure it out. You could still hear the site, but not see it, nor were any of the buttons clickable. Resize a little more, the site comes right back. Resize as small as the window goes? Gone again. I swore it had something to do with my full Flash black fade, but I removed that layer and it persisted.

This only happened in IE, so it made me wonder if it was an HTML issue.

Anyway, the short of it, I added two lines to my body CSS (which are also in my HTML CSS):

height:100%
width:100%

The flickering is gone. Whew.

I could sit here and tell you that it has something to do with the way that Internet Explorer renders its viewport, that the body is really just another container within your HTML hierarchy, so making sure both your body and HTML CSS have these percentage values..blah blah..blah....

But then I'd be making things up. I really have no clue.

"Allow Smoothing" on all bitmaps in library

http://mrsteel.wordpress.com/2007/06/12/flash-jsfl-script-allow-smoothing-on-all-bitmaps-in-library/

The JSFL file located at the above link lets you enable "allow smoothing" on all of the bitmaps in your Flash library. You can also adjust it to make all your bitmaps lossless, or jpeg, or whatever you need. This probably saved me an hour.

Update:
This code is awesome, but be aware exactly what it does.

Here's the code:

var libItems = fl.getDocumentDOM().library.items;
for (i = 0; i < libItems.length; i++){
if(libItems[i].itemType == “bitmap”){
libItems[i].allowSmoothing = true;
libItems[i].compressionType = “lossless”;
}
}

With this line in place, it adjusted the compression on all of my objects to "lossless". Meaning my site went from 1.5 megs to 4.5 megs!! Lossless is great, but expensive, and on some objects, it just doesn't make sense.

I got the site back down to 2.5 megs so far (and falling!)

Website Pimpin' #1 - Kenny Bellew and soundObjects

http://www.kennybellew.com/tutorial

Every time I find myself needing to use soundObjects in Flash, my Googling always leads me to Kenny's website. Kenny breaks down soundObjects into really simple and easy to use tutorials. Everything I've ever needed to know about soundObjects was within his site, and everything that isn't there was easy enough to figure out once you step through his tutorials and learn how everything works.

Photoshop Feature Request #3

I'd like an option, somewhere under "Window", to see all of the fonts used in a PSD file listed, as well as their true filename. There are times I'm asked for "Helvetica", when I have 20 different versions, both TTF, OTF, etc., on my machine. Plus, I'm often dealing with a few hundred layers, I don't really have the time to go through them all looking for fonts I used, or fonts someone else might have used if I'm opening their PSD file.

Need that logo in vector?

If you're like me, companies and brands seem to never want to give you their fonts, logos and other assets on time. So you end up either having to work with some bitmap you found on Google Images or you try your luck at Best Brands of the World (http://www.brandsoftheworld.com/). Best Brands can be a lifesaver (although it's legality is questionable), and most designers know about it and use it. The problem is, often the logos are very good, but even more often, they're missing the exact one you need or it's a bit off.

A technique I've learned lately is pretty much spot on. Basically, Google the name of the company and limit your file type to PDF (filetype:pdf). If you keep an eye on the URL, you'll often end up snagging a PDF document off of their website, in which their designer obviously used the official version of their vector logo. Download the file, and open it in Adobe Illustrator, deleting everything you don't need (or just copy and paste where you want it).

I realize this can also be abused, but as a designer, this holds priceless value. Now if only you can be lucky enough to find a true RGB version of that vector logo. Google doesn't let you limit your search to colorspace yet.