BrainFuel

Ever since the dawn of time, web designers have forever cherished the image file format entitled “Portable Network Graphics image”—or PNG, for short. They delighted at it’s 24-bit transparency capabilities—which blew the water out of anything GIF had to offer. But low and behold; for Microsoft hath resolv’d to ignore yonder file format and not include it in it’s ever popular web browser—Internet Explorer! Panic strikes into the hearts of well-meaning web designers, as their newly found image format will not display correctly in IE! What will they do now?

Fortunately, some PHP wizard came up with a fix. Now is that cool, or what?

The header contest bombed horrendously, so we’re back to our normal caption contest!

Post a caption of the photo in the comments. Keep it clean, as usual.

Due to the lack of quality content up on Brainfuel today (no new posts! Can you believe that?), and also to the discovery of something to post, I am forced to bring to you a site called Hotrocket – Digital Technology Solutions. The guy who owns the site is none other than the guy who runs the Luxo Pixar Animation blog. Anyway, I thought it had a pretty good design.

Here’s what I like about it:
Nice, clean layout. Good use of photoshop.
Sensible, clean text. Simple but effective copy. The CSS he used, although minimal, compliments the design nicely (all right, enough of the designery bibble-bable).
Here are my persnickety complaints:
The top nav-bar is just one image, with what I presume to be hot-spots where the links are. It would’ve been a tad more professional if it was a CSS background image, with actual text where the links should be.
Again, on the front page: the image is contained within the html; it’s not a background image which would’ve done for more seamless integration.
Once again: an image with hotspots on the case studies page.

I should probably be nicer about things like that. In fact, that’s a fine thing to do, and it works (which is most important). However, I usually like to be on the cutting edge.
So now, using my extra-special Brainfuel Ratings System©™, I shall rate the site:
Overall (not an average): 4.60
Design: 5.00
Implementation: 3.00

Now you can stop reading this blog and do something productive.

I came across the website for the latest Gran Turismo series racing game tonight, and I must say, I’m impressed by both the site design and the video game (and yes, the picture of the car on the screenshot of the site I posted is actually from the video game). Anyway, go check it out.
I thought it was nice how they used Flash throughout the site in a way that wasn’t overwhelming or completely overkill. The video clips from the game add to the experience as well.

Got a Mac? Need an FTP program? Do you like Transmit, but are too cheap to buy it?

Tada: the solution! Cyberduck is a great, free, open-source FTP client for OS X. Works great, and along with Text Wrangler it becomes even better.

—Andrew

This is certainly interesting.
NASA has a spot up online where you can view a computer-generated image of practically any planetary body at practically any viewpoint on practically any date in modern time. (Yes, I know: there a lot of “practically’s” in that last sentence.)

Anyway, check it out. It’s sure to make your day that much more exciting.

…Or not. But check it out anyway.

BugMeNot.com provides an interesting solution to a lot of gripes about various numbers of websites: How come you have to give away your personal information (name, email, etc.) just to access a site that has free content? (Such as the New York Times).

Well, BugMeNot has the answer. Type in a web address, and you get a dummy name and password you can use (however, this is not for shopping sites, such as Amazon).

Spiffy, eh?

This is interesting. I just found an open-source “content management system.”
It’s got a lot of features, including a blogging package. Not bad.

Oh, and by the way, the mushroom header is getting kinda old (so old that the mushroom might possibly grow mold). I’ll have to change it sometime soon—or better yet, you guys should change it. I’ll have to post the Photoshop document sometime and have everyone come up with a good photo for it.

—Andrew