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You're one of the top UK creatives hand picked by Adobe March 21st 2007, mr.doob

Yey!! Mr.doob is one of the top UK creatives!! haha! ;)

Which means that "the box" is on my way. Right, I better start speaking well from Adobe now ;) I'm still shocked tho :O!! and I wonder even more about what is in the box.

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Adobe Apollo!! No thanks... March 20th 2007, mr.doob

I just don't see the point. Is this another browser? Is this going to be like Internet explorer and its customizable scrollbars feature? If this is something else... then what happens with Macromedia Central?

Sorry, but I'm confused, by now I don't see why should I even take the time to download it. I believe there are too many Adobe fans out there ;)

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Useful? Not really... Fun? Absolutely! March 18th 2007, mr.doob

Long time ago, actually, 2 years ago I had the idea of developing an API for xplsv.tv, and it took like 1 year until I finally worked on it, I think it was something like 1 day of work and I did this:

It was my first experiment using the ZigoEngine so I didn't know very well what I was doing. This weekend I had a bit of spare time, and (more important) inspiration, so, with a little bit more of knowledge about the ZigoEngine and with some tricks that I learnt while doing phodoob v2 I did a simple mosaic, while improving the API a little bit.

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In an office finally March 15th 2007, ricardo

So, hopefully I'll go back sleeping at nigh like the rest of the humanity, and working from 9 to 18 or something like that. After all is my business so I'll see how much my boss (me) ask me to do.

Big thanks to the guys at Traffic Broker!!

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AirPort Extreme Update 2007-002 doesn't let you use WPA March 14th 2007, ricardo

At least not here. I had a similar problem before they released the AirPort Extreme Update 2007-001. For some reason it doesn't let me connect to my WPA wireless network.

I would say it's a problem of AirPort Extreme Update 2007-002 cos it also did the Mac OS X Update (Intel) (10.4.9)...

Whoever dos the updates in Apple isn't doing a good job :_(

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Phodoob v2.0beta March 12th 2007, mr.doob

Pheeew! It took a while... but looks like I've finally done the base of it. If you don't know what I'm talking about.. phodoob is how I named my photo gallery system. I did the first version 2 years ago more or less, and since then I always wanted to recode it and improve it, so it could run faster, smoother...

While I was on it I also fixed the zoom algorithm (which wasn't working really well on the previous version) and also I added some fancy animations to the rollOver / rollOuts...

I've a lot of plans for this but I can't say too much yet :P By now, you can enjoy the pics from Reykjavik! :)

EDIT: If you feel like you want the pictures in a table, here its a link for you... and no, the keyboardnavigation doesn't work yet :P

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Wii? Hello? March 7th 2007, ricardo

Months ago everyone was speaking about Wii. Wii was everywere, everyone was hacking it, a lot of videos of people using it. I even thought it was the best idea of the year. But now, it looks like it was released 5 years ago. Everything has a BOOM, but I didn't expected to be like that. Does anyone still speaks about it? What was the problem? Too childish games?

Now is time to see what Spiderm... sorry, Playstation 3 have to say about all this, and maybe its because they sell it very well, but seems that they're also doing something really cool. Although I don't think I'll buy it, in the same way I didn't want to buy the Wii, and I didn't.

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Neeeeewwwss! March 6th 2007, ricardo

Sorry, I had to do it!

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The 1000 websites' man March 6th 2007, mr.doob

Yey, seems like some of the last websites I was working in Spring are finally live. After that much time I'm not that keen on the designs anymore tho :S

The one that took us more time to do was 40 Savile Row. Something like 1 year for doing it, and this is because it had a section were you are able to customise your own shirt and you even had some fancy pieces of flash to explain from where to where is each measure. I believe the one that did the best work here was david with the dev part.

Another one is Coolthermal, tho for this one I mainly se the style/design doing the homepage. Mike finished it.

Mike was also the designer of Darley Kids, and I think he did one of his best works here. For this one I did the flash games. All about horses, Jockey colours, Quiz and Word search (this one took me a while to figure out the maths for it). I also did the score system and the security of it (which is a bit hopeless when dealing with flash).

And the last one is Cardpoint. Again, one of those longterm projects that never ends :) It ended up a bit too empty maybe...

So, with these one I will probably have done 1000 websites already. Nah, just kidding, but, checking the portfolio I've actually done a lot being at Spring. Here are some:

Rolf Harris, Stargazer, I.T. lab, RS Scan, Wesmon Press, Odyssey Consulting (flash piece), Beaumont Legal, Border Energy, GSL, 4NX (flash piece), Partnerships in Care, Halo Financial, Epico, TechMondial, Best Deal, DBD Media, Isis, Faith Fantastic, Ethical Network, Financial Objects, Corpora Software (flash piece), ICH (build), Olive solutions (logo, flash pieces), CIC (design+dev), Nasda (fancy flash map :D), and many more....

Phewww!

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Becoming a professional photographer with Photoshop March 3rd 2007, mr.doob

I was checking Hamad Darwish Flickr profile, the guy that did the pictures that now Microsoft is using as Desktop images with Vista, and I noticed a lot of contrasting and retouching on the pictures. And it was funny that in some comments the people was commenting that it was ovbious how professional he was. Don't get me wrong, there are nice bits on these photos but I don't think that getting nice colours makes you a great photographer.

If you don't think the same, then here its a quite basic tutorial so you can be a great photographer too :)

Here is a picture I took one week ago in Iceland. I used a small and handy (and now old) camera and, as you can see, the place was well nice, the picture looks cool, but it doesn't give you a 'professional' impression.

Now, compare it with this, probably as a picture, is not well positioned, but the colours are great now, aren't they?

So, if you're wonder how did I do that... Here is a quick step by step process for doing it. I used Photoshop, but you can use any soft,

Lets duplicate the background layer and get rid of the colours with Image > Adjustments > Desaturate. This is not the best way to get proper greyscale of a picture, but that will do by now. Then change the blending mode of that layer to Overlay. What you have now is what a lot of people use for CDs, mainly for Hiphop covers and stuff, it would probably need a bit of sharpen tho. Anyway, the colours are still not cool enough. Lets duplicate the layer again, and then contrast it a bit with Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation... and put the Saturation to +50. Done.

The Layers panel should look something like this:

You can delete the Background layer if you want tho. Some people will may think that using the Brightness/Contrast will get you the same result. Well, it will certainly give you a similar look ,but will kill some colours and info of the pic. This method lets you have more control of the level of contrast that you want, and also the level of blacks and whites.

So, now we are professional photographers!! \o/

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