Archive for the ‘Apple’ Category

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Apple text emboss

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

Back in the days of OS X 10.1 I wasn’t a really big fan of the striped backgrounds, overblown transparency, and over-the-top animations Apple was using to show off their new desktop. However, in the last few releases they’ve tightened up the look of their OS, made it much more consistent, and have ended up with a really nice design that I find very inspiring. The OS X aesthetic has of course translated over to the iPhone, where it’s even more elegant.

One of the little touches that I really like is that label-style text on a gradient or colored background has a slight emboss effect that really makes it pop off the background and gives everything a nice 3D physicality without being too overt. You can see examples on the iPhone, in button and header text as well as the icons on the top bar:

iPhone button emboss

I fiddled around in Fireworks for a while trying to replicate the effect, but I couldn’t quite get it right until I asked a friend at work, who quickly pointed out that it’s really just a simple drop shadow, not any sort of emboss effect. I guess my eye had seen a more complex effect than what what actually there. Anyway, it’s pretty simple: you add a drop shadow with no fuzz, 50% opacity. If you have light text, you add a black shadow that is cast straight up, and if you have dark text, a white shadow that’s cast straight down. That’s all there is to it!

shadow

I went ahead and applied this effect to the “BRH.numbera.com” text on the top of my site, and I really like the way it makes the text pop off of the background.

Now that I knew how to do it, I decided that the low-contrast menu text on my site could also benefit from such an effect, but I wasn’t going to go and replace every bit of text in the menu with images. So instead, I used a CSS3 property that’s supported in Safari 3, Opera 9.5, and the upcoming Firefox 3.1: text-shadow. I’d already used text-shadow to put some soft drop shadows on the links across the top of my site and the section header, so it wasn’t too hard to add them to the links. All that was required is:

text-shadow: 0 1px 0 #C9DFF3;

So that says to make a shadow straight down (0px right, 1px down), 0 fuzz, and the color #C9DFF3. I had to pick that color because text-shadow doesn’t have an opacity property built in. Of course, using another CSS3 feature, HSLA colors, I can make a shadow that works on any background:

text-shadow: 0 1px 0 rgba(255, 255, 255, .5);

And for light-colored text:

text-shadow: 0 -1px 0 rgba(0, 0, 0, .5);

I ended up keeping the hand-chosen background color in addition to the HSLA version since Opera supports text-shadow but not HSLA. So now I have a cute little enhancement to my site that users of cutting-edge browsers will get to enjoy.

Comparison of Apple Text in different browsers

Note that Google Chrome, despite being based on the same WebKit core as Safari, doesn’t support text-shadow since Google had to provide their own rendering layer (Apple uses their own proprietary renderer).

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Posts I haven’t written

Tuesday, October 14th, 2008

I haven’t been updating this blog too much recently. I never meant for this blog to run on a schedule, but I did intend to post more frequently than this. My original idea was that the blog would serve two major purposes. First, it is a place for me to announce new projects or updates to software and websites I’ve already released. It’s done that quite well, though I haven’t had much to announce recently. My job has been taking the majority of my development time, and most of the projects I’ve been working on at home are either private or haven’t been released in the form I’d like to because my employer hasn’t approved them for release yet.

The second major purpose for my blog is as a place for me to record the solution to problems I run across while developing software, so that others won’t have to spend hours Googling or using trial and error to come to the same conclusion. I didn’t intend to rehash things that were easily found or that had already been discussed – only to post when I felt it was something that added value to the internet that hadn’t been there before. So a lot of the blog posts are not really a narrative or running commentary – they’re not meant to be subscribed to, but found individually. It’s for this reason that my most popular posts tend to include the exact text of error messages. This type of post has suffered both because I haven’t been doing as much development, because I can’t discuss a lot of what I’ve learned due to the nature of the projects I’m working on, and because I’ve been learning new stuff (like Ruby on Rails) and haven’t done enough to have solved problems others haven’t already posted solutions for.

The third reason I have this blog is to occasionally talk about my thoughts on different technical topics, from web development to video games. Again, I don’t like to make a post unless I think I’m adding something new, and most of the topics I’ve wanted to talk about have already been covered. I had a lot of draft posts sitting around about web development, web standards, and the evolution of browsers, but then I discovered Alex Russell’s blog and it turns out he’s already said most of what I wanted to say, and better than I could. Other stuff, like my impressions of Windows Vista, critique of stackoverflow.com and suggestions for the Xbox Live Arcade lineup, have been covered to my satisfaction in plenty of places. Maybe some of them will end up posted, but probably not.

Another part of the reason I haven’t posted much is the sheer weight of unfinished posts I have. Right now I have 64 drafts and only 52 real posts! So I’m going to attempt to clear things out by writing a little about what I haven’t posted. A lot of this stuff wasn’t posted because it fell under that third point above, but some of it I was just too lazy to flesh out into real posts. Some of it’s just random stuff. So here’s what’s been happening in the last year:

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Why you can’t access Mac file shares from Windows Vista

Saturday, April 28th, 2007

Update: It does work! See the note at the bottom of this post.

I’ve had this post in my “drafts” for about a month now. Originally it was titled “How to use Macintosh shares from Windows Vista”, but I was waiting to actually figure out how to get them working. Unfortunately it looks like it’s simply not going to happen.

Here’s the problem. You’ve got a Vista machine, and you try to visit a network share on a Mac OS X machine that has been shared using Windows Sharing. This share worked just fine with your XP machines. However, in Vista, you try to log in and it just spits back, again and again, that your username and password are incorrect.

The problem lies with the fact that in Vista, Microsoft made the gutsy but correct decision to go hardline on security. One of the targets on their list was the weak Lanman and NTLM network authentication schemes that were the default on earlier versions of Windows. The main problem with these authentication schemes is that, if a hacker can get ahold of your password that has been hashed for Lanman or NTLM (and it’s just sitting there on the drive, by the way), they can connect to remote machines using your credentials without even having to know your unhashed password. Pretty scary. So in Vista both of these schemes are disabled in favor of the much more secure NTLMv2 scheme.

There’s a problem with this on the Mac’s side though – it doesn’t support NTLMv2. Rather, the version of smbd that ships with MacOS X, even 10.4, does not support NTLMv2. You should be able to configure your smbd.conf file like Jon Belanger explains in this forum post, but it doesn’t actually work.

The problem with this is that if you do a Google search on why your Mac shares don’t work in Vista anymore, the suggestions that come up all tell you to simply decrease the security of your Vista machine. That’s really not the best idea – it just brings you back to the old insecure XP level. Unfortunately, until Apple ships a new smbd, this isn’t going to be fixed. So far I’ve just mounted my Windows shares from the Mac and it’s good enough, but I hope (and expect) that Apple will fix things in 10.5.

Update (7/16/07): In the comments, Osvaldo points out that by entering your username as “machinename\username”, with machinename being the name of the remote Mac, it works. So for me, logging in from Daedalus (my Vista machine) to Samus (my Mac), I need to type “SAMUS\brh” and it works! Thanks Osvaldo!

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Windows Vista leads me to the Mac

Thursday, April 20th, 2006

I’ve been meaning to write about my impressions of the various Windows Vista previews since I first tried it out in January. My thoughts (and my feedback to Microsoft’s beta site) have been piling up since then, but I never got around to putting virtual pen to even more virtual paper. However, Paul Thurrott’s recent article on where Vista fails really sums up a lot of my feelings here. Thurrott’s always been the type who’ll try his hardest to find the positive in even the worst Microsoft releases, but as a long time reader, I can tell that he’s very, very frustrated with Vista, and as a Windows journalist it really pains him to see something that promised so much deliver so little. He’s not alone. I’ve tried my hardest to like what I’ve seen of Vista so far, but it’s nearly impossible, especially when Mac OS X is out right now, and in many respects better than Microsoft’s late update to XP.

This is going to be a pretty long rant, so if you want more you’ll have to click inside.

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Apple Finally Speaks to Me with BootCamp

Wednesday, April 5th, 2006

The big news out of Cupertino this morning is BootCamp. It’s Apple’s beta bootloader for Windows on their previously-closed Mac platform. Now you can dual-boot Mac OSX and Windows XP, complete with drivers for the important bits of the system.

Win Mini

Putting aside why this is a great move for Apple, this really puts the company in a new light for me. I’ve never liked Apple’s marketing – they’ve always seemed more like a cold white plastic monolith than a warm fuzzy people company to me. To me the Mac, and Apple, is about lack of choice. They give you something, and that’s what you get. It’s good, but things are going to be their way or no way at all. I tend to think a lot of their growing success lies with the fact that their defaults (a stock OSX install and standard Mac hardware) are fantastic, while the default install of Windows or Linux (and the standard OEM boxes) are rather dismal. While this makes a Mac great for most people, I’ve never really cared. I can make Windows do what I want, and aside from my Thinkpad I’ve never bought a computer that was pre-assembled in a factory.

The first thing Apple did that made Macs interesting to me was embracing UNIX with OSX. That was not the sort of decision I expected from a company that had made previously shipped operating systems that show you frowny-faces on error. The fact that the Mac now had a command line suggested that it wasn’t just for playing that sliding-puzzle game anymore. Since then I’ve had a little bit of interest in the Mac, and I even have a rescued-from-the-garbage 350Mhz iMac that I test Safari on. The OS is interesting, but the hardware lockin has always stayed my had mere moments from the “Place Order” button at the Apple Store. Recently I’ve become enamoured of the Mac Mini, whose diminuative size makes it seem more like buying a toy than a computer. Coupled with the fact that it’s the cheapest Mac that comes without a built in display, it seems like the best choice for my tinkering, though the price hike for the new Intel models makes me wish for some additional customization options – do I really need to pay for Airport Express when it’ll be sitting 5 inches away from an ethernet switch?

Today’s introduction of BootCamp really got me though. All of a sudden the guys at Apple HQ are speaking directly to me – they’re letting me make a choice! Not just any choice, but the choice to run software from their sworn enemy, Microsoft, on their pristine white hardware. This from the iTunes company! It’s not really a choice, of course. I wouldn’t dream of putting XP on a Mac Mini when I could build a cheap PC for half the price. It’ll be nice for people who want a great laptop but can’t give up Windows. But for me it’s the fact that they’re opening up and letting me do something as radical as replace the operating system. I feel now that if I were to buy a Mini, I’d be getting it from Apple, a company full of cool engineers with good design sense, not Apple, a company full of snobby elitists who know what’s best for me.

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