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Well, you were, until I searched the intertubes and found a solution. If you’re saving anything for the web and you’ve upgraded from CS2 to CS3, you might notice that when you “Save For Web & Devices” that the images are all washed out. Now, usually this is due to the Color Profile not being correct (should be sRGB), but when I realized that I was working in sRGB, I started going crazy. It seemed like nothing I did was working correctly.

But, alas, tonight I found the answer. There are two new “defaults” Adobe threw at us web developers/designers without really telling us where they were. There are two articles that finally got me to stop banging my head against the wall, so thank you Tancredi and Adobe (make sure to check out the image attachment for the Adobe link).

So, if you’ve found yourself in the same place, hopefully this takes care of it for you.

Continuing with my “I’m dumb about some stuff, so others might be too”, I decided to finally look up what “et al” meant. I see it all the time but can’t figure out what it means in context. I looked it up today, and it simply means “and others”. That’s all. You can read a further definition at Answers.com.

There are some things that I’ve learned along the way, and to be honest I’m embarrassed that I learned them so late in the game. For instance, just this week I learned what unit testing is – it’s kind of cool incidentally. But, one of those things that confused me for a while was the concept of what a “framework” was. I knew about languages, obviously, but I didn’t understand where frameworks fit into the picture. Was it a special kind of language? Was a framework just a skeleton directory structure? For those that are experience, these are dumb questions. But I feel as though there are no dumb questions, and if I stumbled with it then someone else might as well.

So, to answer the question, a framework is simply a structured way of writing in a programming language. Let’s take Ruby on Rails for example. The programming language is Ruby – you can’t program in “Rails”. You could use Ruby and create files and classes one at a time and make your application that way, but frameworks can help out here. If you’re creating something that’s been encountered and created time and time again, there’s a good chance there’s a framework for it to help speed development along in a clean way. Rails does that. Want to set up a blog? Piece of cake. A shopping cart? No problem. How about an mp3 player? Eh, not so much. You know what’s a good framework for that? Flex. Flex uses a specific XML syntax in combination with Actionscript 3 to quickly churn out some standard Rich Internet Applications.

I’m not sure if I’ve lost anyone yet, but things like Flex, Rails and CakePHP are all frameworks – not programming languages. Each framework uses a specific programming language that’s best suited for the tasks at hand, but a framework is just a conveniently setup structure of files, methods, etc. to aid in development, and if the shoe fits it can really help speed up development time.

It seems like all kinds of libraries and extensions are being inspired by the Ruby syntax and style nowadays. I’ve been using Prototype and Scriptaculous a lot lately, and they’re heavily influenced by Ruby methods. Take a look at Prototype’s Enumerable class and you’ll see what I mean (by the way, once you get used to Prototype and Scriptaculous it actually makes JavaScript fun again).

Anyway, in the spirit of Ruby come Haml and Sass. They’re basically templates for writing easy to read/develop HTML and CSS. That page describing them is a quick read, but really shows the power of what you can do, especially with Sass. The fact that Sass allows you to define constants for a CSS sheet is a huge time saver. I haven’t used either technology yet, but I definitely will be.

Well, I got myself an iPhone. It’s great, it’s shiny, blah blah blah. It doesn’t do MMS (Multimedia messages for pictures, audio, etc). It sends email, but not MMS. Odd choice, but that’s the way it is I guess. Well, I looked into it and explored some possibilities, and there is a way around that.

Typically, each cell phone has a hidden email address, that if emailed can appear as a text message. I had a friend text my email address, and got their number for regular SMS (just text) messages. Then, I had that same friend send an MMS as an email to my phone. Now, I’ve got the email addresses for both protocols (but really all I care about is the MMS). The messages came from another Cingular user, so here’s what they looked like:
2075551212@txt.att.net
2075551212@mms.att.net

Now, my friends can send MMS messages to my email address, and I can reply because I know what those email addresses look like. Verizon’s looks like:
2075551212@vzwpix.com

I didn’t look into other carriers to see what their email address format is, but it’s simple enough to test out with a friend, so go nuts.

The downsides to all of this is that you have to store the email addresses for the contact in your phone to make it easier to send images later, and that your friends need to know to email you, not just text you. Although, if you’re like me than you only use MMS with a few friends so it’s not a huge deal. Really, when you think about it, MMS is stupid since it’s all based on email anyway. Why not just use an email address from the start instead? Good job, Apple – that’s forward thinking.

I got my Pownce invite last night, and have been playing around with it. If you’re wondering what Pownce is, here’s the description on Wikipedia:

“Pownce is a social networking and micro-blogging site started by Internet entrepreneurs Kevin Rose, Leah Culver, Daniel Burka, and Shawn Allen. Pownce is centered around sharing messages, files, events, and links with already established friends.”

So, another social networking site. Yeah – it’s true. From what I can best tell, it’s basically a stripped down social network, and offers the communication aspects that Facebook offers. You can send messages, links, files, and events out to either the entire public, or a select group of friends. Yeah, that’s neat I guess, but I don’t feel like it’s anything new, and you have to have a pro account ($20 a year, which is a good deal) to send files up to 100MB.

The interface is gorgeous though. The AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) app you can download is very sexy, and they already have a nice theme switching thing going on (mine’s been switched from the default). That drew me in enough to keep playing with it.

I’ve been racking my brain to think of how this could best be used. It seems more narrowly focused than something like Facebook in its design, so it only makes sense to use it in a narrow way. Let’s say for instance that me and 10 of my friends all rallied around the same hobby – we’ll say photography in this case. We could all use Pownce to easily share links to tips, our photos, and setup events to go take pictures around town (or something). In that instance, it acts as a much sexier email client, and a much cleaner message board. That’s what Pownce should be used for.

Now, if only I could convince my friends to use it. I have 6 invites. You want one?

Some might call it the puppy dog sale, but with the amazing production of TV Shows nowadays, I’m dubbing it the Heroin model. Here’s how it should work. For services such as the iTunes Store and the XBox Live Marketplace, you can download one of many, many TV shows. For instance, Killpoint is now on both services, and I was curious to see it. I had to buy the first episode for $2 just to see if I liked it. What they should be doing, is offering the first episode for free, making it good enough to hook viewers, and then getting them to purchase following episodes. Think about this kind of thing for LOST. For those that still have yet to see the first episode, they can view the trailer for free and be sucked into buying the DVDs and watching them in three weeks like many of us did.

It’s pretty obvious and straightforward, but I wanted to give this business model a name, albeit a bad one.

From the upcoming instructional video of how to sync and activate your iPhone. Just take a look at the pics. In the top one, next to the image of the iPhone, it does say 7.27 GB capacity, but take a look below that. Maybe it’s “shopped” for the purpose of the video, but it still raises some interesting questions one way or the other.

Well, I’ve been playing the beta for a few days now, and it’s pretty fun. There’s plenty of work to be done still, and some things need to be tweaked and polished, but overall, it’s more fun than Halo 2 and that’s what’s important.

If you weren’t lucky enough to play the Halo 3 beta for at least five different sessions, then this is for you.

This section is things that I liked:
The new game types such as territories is fantastic. The goal is to take up to 5 territories per round that are scattered across the map. The defense’s goal is to stop that from happening. This is a good game type for when the team dynamic sucks and everyone goes off on their own. Another great game type is the new Crazy King, where you try to hold the designated spot the longest but it moves around the map every so often. Some of the new weapons are great – my personal favorite is the Spartan Laser. Basically, you can decimate anything, although it takes a few seconds to charge up. If you hated the sniper rifle in Halo 2, this is the new thing you’ll be hating. The new Mongoose vehicles are fantastic because they’re quick and yet you can still ride them with a buddy, and the best part is that they spawn very quickly. The pickups (bubble shield, grav lift, power drainer) are a great addition and really change the way the game is played, although this wasn’t obvious to me until about two weeks after the beta started. For instance, if you’re playing Crazy King, it’s fun to drop the grav lift in the circle, because then people unknowingly walk over it and get launched out, giving you time to rack up some seconds for your team. The three maps we got to play were cool too, with Higher Ground being my favorite. I didn’t use this feature that much, but you can save the game films now. Basically it’s the entire round played out again. There were no controls, so you have to sit and watch the whole thing if you’re waiting to replay something cool that happened in the end, but this feature blew my damn mind. I suspect a shit-ton of machinima to be hitting the web come the holiday season.

The things I didn’t like so much:
The new missile pod slows you down when you walk, and it’s great that you can shoot rapid fire missiles, but it’s the only rockets that I can lock on with. What the hell is that about? The sniper rifle recoils making it a pain in the ass to use. The vehicles are next to impossible to destroy unless you have a trip mine or the spartan laser. Even rockets won’t destroy them in one shot. I needed four grenades to blow up a Mongoose, and that’s just ridiculous. The beta was for testing the network and the servers and whatnot, and despite the fact they spoke early on about having 32 people per gaming session, we could only get up to 16 in the beta. That seems to me like something they might have wanted to test, and didn’t, so now I’m wondering if that’s actually going to be a feature in Halo 3. Some other people have had some thoughts on what they didn’t like about Halo 3 at this point, and I have to agree with some of them.

It should be noted that most people are saying the graphics weren’t that great, and I agree. The beta was for the purposes of testing the network. I still think they’ll be blowing people out of the water with the final game’s aesthetics. Playing Halo 3 for me has just reminded me how fun Halo 2 was, so I might jump back in with that until September rolls around. If you’re not that excited, but still want to play the game when it comes out, pre-order a copy now because they’ve already pre-ordered more than 4 million copies and you don’t want to be out in the cold when everyone else is having fun. Maybe even be really smart and get two, then sell one on ebay to some poor schmuck for a lot more than it cost you.

Finalist for FiTC this year. Reminds me of a friend of mine’s work, but in a very nice Flash form.