Veerle's blog

Not so long ago I wrote about Apple’s latest PowerBooks and that I will skip this update and hold out for a PowerBook G5. Well now I changed my mind and bought a new 17” PowerBook G4. The G5 is still probably a year away. We got a very good price from our Apple dealer and 14 days ago it was ordered.

It was a build to order machine since I requested a faster HD and an extra 512MB Ram. So to keep it short and sweet today all the toys arrived at the office. So now we’re also equipped to do some video conferencing :-)

So the only thing still not arrived is our Xserve G5. Apparently Apple has some delivery problems with the optional Xraid card. We need such a card for Raid 5. Xserve even duals are already arriving in quantities according to Macline.

It’s always a joy to unwrap and look at the attention to detail with new Apple products. Boy would I love to design the packaging for these products, not only would I know what’s coming but also make money ;-)

You can see a short unwrapping story of the 17” PowerBook here.

The background takes an important part of the entire webpage design. Pixel patterns are a trend these days and lots of weblogs use them as a background. I like the sharpness and crispness of it. The complex patterns do fascinate me and I tend to analyze them by making a screenshot and zoom in to see how it's drawn.

Some of them look like old fashion wallpaper, I don't always like these but still, I admire the designer who made this. It's stunning and quit difficult!

Sometimes it can be hard to create an original pixel pattern. And some of you do wonder how to make these. I have found some high quality resources about this matter. There are probably much more websites on pixel patterns, but these 2 are the best ones I've found so far:

• Squidfingers
• K10k's Pixel patterns

2 tools to help you make pixel patterns:

• Simplesetter, is free but requires the font Tenacity
• Tiles12 and Tiles16

If anybody wants to share other high quality resouces, please don't hesitate.

The developer connection at Apple has put a page online where you can quickly discover how far along CSS support is in Safari. All tags are linked to W3C for more explanation what they stand for. Even for Windows users this link can be handy since a good webdesigner should develop cross platform.

CSS support in Safari

Apparently they are if we are to believe Robert Scoble. According to Andrei Herasimchuk from Design by Fire who started all this we now have the opportunity to tell Microsoft about our daily sufferings with Internet Explorer. Maybe if we all voice-in the people in Redmond will see the light and bring Internet Explorer on par with the Safari, Firefox and other standard compliant browsers that are out there.