Sam Gerdt
Useful Tools – Adobe BrowserLab
As a developer working with Mac OS X, I run into the occasional wall when it comes to cross-browser compatibility. It isn’t easy running Internet Explorer in OS X. I’ve tried using Parallels to run Windows and OS X side by side, but the slowdown was unacceptable. Until recently, I had been using the Browsershots website (http://www.browsershots.org) to look at screenshots of our pages in each browser. Browsershots is good – and slow. On average I waited 5 minutes to see a set of screenshots. A CSS discrepancy could take an hour to fix. I needed a faster way of viewing my pages in IE.
Descriptive Language
I’m working on a project at the moment for another artist and I am struck by how easy it is to get a vision for a project when the person I am working for has the ability to put ideas into words I understand. Are artists any different than accountants or salesmen. Why do we use different words? As I thought about it I immediately began recalling all the times I’ve been told that something needs to be different without much explanation to back it up. Every freelancer would agree – this drives us crazy sometimes. So what can we do about it?
