Distant Parts

Colors on the Web (via) is great site for working out what colours work well together. There are tools to check generate colour combinations, and also explanations of what different types of combinations should be used for.

I just discovered this article via Waxy.org: Links, which does a great job of explaining why so many new sites look rather similar.

I’m not planning to throw away any of my existing designs, but more use of softer colours and whitespace is something that I’m going to have to give some serious thought to.

I’ve been doing most most of my daily computing on an iMac G5 since Spring 2005. One of the features of Mac OS X that I can’t do without is Exposé. It makes Alt-Tab and the Windows task bar seem like a waste of time.

There’s already been an effort to reproduce this functionality for Firefox tabs (foXpose) , but when I tried it, it just seemed a bit too different from Mac Exposé for me to be comfy with it.

There’s now a competitor in the shape of Reveal, which maps itself to the F2 key (Exposé uses F9), and it seems to be far more similar to Mac Exposé. I’m impressed so far, and it might make me finally start to use tabs (instead of multiple windows - much better for Exposé switching) and Firefox on the Mac (while Firefox was in the 1.0 versions, I switched to Camino and haven’t gone back.

I’ve just read through Paul Graham’s latest essay, and as usual, I agree with 95% of it. Subconciously I think knew most of what he says already, but he does a great job of distilling the essential nature of the world into an easily digested form.

If you’ve never read any of his other essays, check them out. Particular favourites of mine are: How to Make Wealth, How to Start a Startup, What Business Can Learn from Open Source (this one had significant influence on me leaving corporate employment - there were of course, several other factors involved), and What Languages Fix (interesting and funny).