Linked List: June 7, 2006

Wednesday, 7 June 2006

Painter’s Picker 2.1 

$16 artistic color wheel plug-in for Mac OS X’s system-wide color-picker; lets you easily find complementary colors. (Via MDJ 2006.06.07.)

Yojimbo 1.2 

Free update to Bare Bones Software’s outstanding data/bookmark/archive organizer. Highlights include a bunch of improvements to the first-run experience (including a demo movie of how the app works); an “x-yojimbo-item:” Launch Services URL scheme that allows you to link to Yojimbo items from any other application; bookmarklet support for creating bookmarks and web archives with just one click from your web browser of choice; and a slew of Bare Bones’s usual fixes and improvements.

Yojimbo is quite simply one of my very favorite apps.

XML Tools 2.9 Scripting Addition 

New universal binary update to Late Night Software’s excellent freeware XML scripting addition for AppleScript. Also updated: Late Night’s freeware Property List Tools 1.0.6.

BBEdit Embed Tag Converter 

Free AppleScript from Bare Bones:

The script uses BBEdit to automatically open, scan, and edit all HTML files dragged onto its icon, replacing <object> tags containing <embed> tags with JavaScript calls to load the QuickTime content referenced in the replaced tags.

This script is necessitated by the new version of Windows IE that no longer loads content in <embed> tags automatically, as part of Microsoft’s settlement of a lawsuit.

Vox Luv 

Andre Torrez is beta-testing Six Apart’s upcoming Vox thingmajig, and he likes it a lot.

Andy Rutledge on Redesign Competitions 

His opening analogy is good, too, but this is the core of his argument against design competitions:

The results of redesign competitions support the idea that design is nothing more than decoration or eye-candy. How could it indicate otherwise? Design is a process that begins with research and discovery. Every aspect of the client’s needs, aims and desires, along with the brand’s needs, context and purpose; in addition to the current and desired target audience’s expectations, needs, desires, culture, etc…. MUST be weighed, measured and considered thoroughly before any design solution can present itself.

In other words, redecoration is not redesign (and Slashdot’s recent contest was clearly a redecoration contest, not a redesign contest).

The Road to Hell: Now Paved with Innovation? 

Michael Bierut on graphic design contests:

Ah, the big score. Unpaid competitions have been a way of life in other creative fields like architecture and advertising, but they’ve been resisted, barely, by graphic designers up until now.