Turn Your iPhone 4 Into A DSLR

I have a growing interest for photography and lately I’ve been wanting to try out new things and get better at it. Of course, just like with any other creative field, the possibilities are endless.

Like a lot of people I enjoy snapping pics with my iPhone, and I also own a DSLR camera. Well, now you can actually combine the two – say hello to the iPhone SLR Mount.

This case/adaptor let’s you mount your Canon EOS or Nikon SLR lenses to your iPhone 4.

I think it’s such a great idea. Let’s just hope the phone doesn’t ring in the middle of a shoot though.

Rest In Peace Steve

I got my first Mac about 10 years ago. It was a PowerBook G4 Titanium. Since then I’ve owned many many more Apple computers and devices. There is no way I could do the work that I do and enjoy working on the computer if it wasn’t for a visionary man named Steve Jobs.

You will be missed.

Tools Of The Trade

I often get emails and messages from people asking me about the tools, apps & services I use on a regular basis.

So, I figured the easiest way to answer would be to put it all right here on the blog. Of course this list might change and evolve as I discover new tools and/or ways to do certain things—I’ll make sure to revisit and update this post from time to time. I think the tools I use are simple, easy to use and effective—that’s how I roll.

Adobe Fireworks

While many web-designers swear by Photoshop as if it’s the only tool you should be using to design for the web, I actually much prefer working with Adobe Firework, and for very good reasons.

And with the number of great Fireworks Extensions out there, it really is a very powerful tool.

Don’t get me wrong, I use Photoshop every single day… to edit images & photos. For things like quick wireframing and prototyping, creating layouts as well as graphics and exporting in various formats, Fireworks is my weapon of choice (followed by Photoshop and Illustrator).

TextEdit

TextEdit is the default text editor that ships with Mac OS X. I use it to write HTML & CSS as well as to write articles and take quick notes. Of course when I need something a bit more powerful there’s always TextMate, but for 90% of my writing, whether it be code or words, TextEdit is what I use.

Fetch

There’s probably hundreds of FTP clients out there but Fetch is the one I prefer. I’ve been using Fetch ever since I started designing for the web about 7 years ago, it has never let me down.

DropBox

I love DropBox (many do). Being able to sync files across a bunch of computers and devices has improved my workflow tremendously. I use it to send files to clients, partners and vendors as well as to back-up some of my most important and valuable files and folders.

I also back-up everything on an external LaCie hard-drive, too. It may sound a bit overkill for some, but when you loose over 600 hours of work because you accidentally deleted a folder from your desktop, you make damn sure it never happens again. Lesson learned.

WordPress

This is a no-brainer. WordPress currently powers over 50 Million websites including this blog. It is an extremely flexible CMS and the community around it is the best. Of course I’ve worked with other content management systems like ExpressionEngine, Drupal, TypePad, MoveableType and others, but I always come back to WordPress.

Most of the projects I work on and the sites I build run on WordPress.

Freshbooks Invoicing

Freshbooks is my favorite invoicing and time-tracking system.

Invoicing and accounting have to be the 2 things I hate the most about running an online business, but Freshbooks helps ease the pain. The official Freshbooks iPhone app called MiniBooks also comes in handy when I’m on the road.

Typekit

I use Typekit on a lot of the design projects I work on now. Obviously some designs will wear Georgia or Helvetica quite well, but more and more people (myself included) are extremely happy with where this is all going and being able to use non web-safe typefaces in projects is a blessing.

Alfred App

Alfred is a sweet little app for OS X that I’ve discovered not long ago – I absolutely love it. It helps me find things on my computer and on the web.

If you’re familiar with apps like Quicksilver or Launchbar, make sure you give Alfred a try. You won’t be disappointed. Actually, I’ve been using my mouse a lot less since I installed it.

The Alfred Powerpack is worth every penny, too.

CrossBrowserTesting.com

I’m ok with offering only limited support for IE6 and IE7 on my own sites. I’m a die-hard Mac user and I couldn’t care less about Internet Explorer. But my clients do… and I definitely want to make sure that the stuff I create for them works and looks great in the majority of browsers.

After trying out other similar web apps out there I can totally recommend CrossBrowserTesting. Not only it will grab screenshots of your pages, it will also let you interact with the live version of the site you’re testing – perfect for checking the behaviour of things like input boxes, drop-downs and sliders.

Dot Grid Journal

Every project I take on starts by taking notes, drawing, sketching and brainstorming ideas in my trusty Dot Grid Journal from Behance.

It’s similar to a Moleskine Notebook, but instead of plain or lined sheets of paper it has a geometric dot matrix which is perfect for quickly sketching rough ideas.

That’s About It

Those are the tools I use regularly (if not everyday) and that I find are the most useful. What tools do you use?

Initial Impressions of OS X Lion & Why I Switched Back To Snow Leopard

The day OS X Lion came out I was ecstatic and had to install it right away. I was immediately blown away by some of the new features. Fast forward two weeks later and I’m switching back to Snow Leopard.

In fact, I’m still not sure how I managed to stick with Lion that long. There’s been some mixed reviews of Apple’s new OS, Lion. I think it was generally well-received by users, but after fighting with it for a little over a week I simply switched back to Snow Leopard.

Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the new stuff is awesome! The new Mail App interface is sweet and I really liked the new full-screen apps feature. Mission Control is also neat.

On the other hand, things like the inverted scroll really bugged me, but not enough to switch back especially since you can revert back to normal scrolling very easily (normal meaning how we’ve been doing it for the past 20 years).

Nah, I reinstalled Snow Leopard because Lion was buggy and slow (I have a very fast MacBook Pro, additional RAM and all that) and some UI changes didn’t make sense to me.

Also, I Liked The Good Old Aqua Scrollbars

The new scrollbars in Lion look like the ones on the iPad. That’s fine, I didn’t mind the transparency and it actually looks pretty slick (on an iPad!). What bugged me was that the scrollbars are set to disappear by default. Again, you can change this in your Sys Prefs, but why? Why?

On Snow Leopard and previous versions of OS X, the blue scrollbars were there to indicate there was more content available below and you could also grab the ‘handle’ or click the arrows to scroll up and down. Now it could be argued that you can set the scrollbars in Lion to be visible at all times, but by default, they’re absent. Which brings me to the following…

Not Everybody is a Power User

Power users won’t care about those changes in the UI and will probably just get used to it or change the settings in the System Preferences (oh wait! I am a power user and I switched back to Snow Leo, oh well…) But what about my mom? She’s got a Mac Mini running Snow Leopard, it’s her first ever computer. I showed her how it works the best I could and it took her some time to get how the Mail App works. She’s used to how things look and function and if she switched to Lion, she’d probably feel a bit lost. She’s probably not alone.

Sure Apple wants people to switch to Mac, but what they’re offering now with Lion seems like a ‘the-default-settings-might-not-work-for-you’ OS. That’s fine, but if the next version of OS X takes another step in that direction, I might consider switching to Linux or maybe (gasp!) Windows…

The Real Reason I Switched Back to Snow Leopard

So, I don’t really like those aesthetic changes. I liked Snow Leopard’s UI better and I find Lion to be a bit buggy and slow at times. Ok, so what? Isn’t it still worth it? Sure. Not for me at this point though.

The real reason I switched back is because I feel like it’s a somewhat cheap upgrade compared to the previous version of OS X. When I switched from Tiger to Snow Leopard, I felt it was stable, robust and that it could handle anything I could throw at it (and it did). I felt it was money well spent – and it was a lot more expensive than Lion’s $29.95. Now I feel I just paid 30 bucks to install iOS on my MacBook Pro.

I’d like to keep OS X for my computer and iOS for my iPad. They’re different devices and I use them to complete different tasks.

Granted, Lion is a great OS and it’s superior to Snow Leopard in many ways. It’s far from being perfect of course, and at this point in time I feel Snow Leopard is closer to what I’m looking for in an operating system than Lion. Maybe I’ll give it a shot again in 6 months.