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New details of the NSA’s capabilities suggest encryption can still be trusted. But more effort is needed to fix problems with how it is used.
When a New York Times report appeared Thursday saying the National Security Agency had “circumvented or cracked much of the encryption” protecting online transactions, computer security professionals braced for news of breakthroughs undermining the fundamentals of their field.
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The September edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, jQuery resources, sites to find inspiration, responsive design tools, mobile design tools, coding resources, and some really great new fonts.
Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there.
As always, if we’ve missed something you think should have been included, please let us know in the comments. And if you have an app or other resource you’d like to see included next month, tweet it to @cameron_chapman for consideration.
Type Hunting is a curated collection of vintage typography examples. You’ll find everything from retro t-shirts to antique packaging, old signs, and more.
Audobox is a tool that lets your app’s users leave audio feedback for you. It’s a great way to turn a bad experience into an awesome one.
Hopscotch is an open source framework for creating product tours for your pages. It features multi-page tours, event callbacks, and more.
These iOS 7-Inspired Line Icons are a great set of more than 80 icons in the style of iOS7. You can use them however you like as long as you don’t redistribute them without permission.
The Elusive-Icons Webfont contains 283 vector icons designed for Bootstrap that can be used on any of your projects (whether they’re Bootstrap-based or not). It’s completely open source, with no attribution requirement.
Bootstrap Magic makes it easy to create your own Bootstrap theme. It’s made with Bootstrap 3 and Angular JS, and gives you live preview, a colorpicker, Google Webfonts, and much more.
Capsule is a specialized WordPress theme that gives you a scratch document for your coding. It supports Markdown Extra syntax plus GitHub-style fenced code blocks, and auto-saves for you every 10 seconds.
StatusPage.io is an easy way to create a status page for your website or app. It includes custom branding, support for various types of system status messages, and more.
Space Ipsum is a lorem ipsum-esque generator with a space theme. It will give you all sorts of space-related dummy text, quoted from various sources.
Just Delete Me gives you the info you need to delete your account from a variety of websites and services, including Amazon, Blogger, Facebook, Gumroad, and more.
UsabilityHub is a set of usability tools that make it easier to test the effectiveness of your designs. Do five second tests, click tests, and more.
KNACSS is a lightweight, simple CSS framework. It’s minimalist, responsive, extensible, and relies on common best practices.
Web Tracing Framework is a collection of rich tools for analyzing and visualizing your web apps. It’s available as either a Chrome or Firefox extension.
GenerateWP is a set of user-friendly tools for creating custom, high quality code for your WordPress projects. It includes things like a taxonomy generator, post type generator, menu generator, toolbar generator, and much more.
The Random User Generator will create a random user for you that you can use as placeholders in your projects. It works with jQuery and other methods.
Assemble lets you combine the power of frameworks like Foundation and Bootstrap for your projects, to create exactly the kind of framework and end result you need.
Spectrum is a Mac and iOS app for designers and developers that makes it easy to intuitively design color schemes. It uses established color theory, making it much simpler to create aesthetically pleasing palettes.
UIBox is a set of curated HTML, CSS, and JS UI components. You can search or browse components by exploring tags.
Every Time Zone is a simple to read graphic that shows you what time it is in various time zones around the world, and lets you view what time it will be in various major cities using a slider with your own time.
Magic is a CSS3 framework that includes a number of animations built-in, many of which are cross-browser compatible.
This Premium Flat Social Icon Set from Jamie Peak includes 40 flat social icons in two different styles (there are 20 included in the free pack). It includes resizable vector shapes, and comes with JPG, PNG, and PSD files.
CSScomb is a great tool for sorting CSS properties into a specific order. There are versions for Coda, Textmate, Espresso 2, Vim, Chocolat, and many other text editors and coding apps, as well as an online version.
If you need a textured background for your next project, be sure to check out this Noise Texture Generator. Just enter values for the noise opacity, density, background color, and dimensions, and then download your custom pattern.
Countly is a mobile analytics platform that’s open source and real-time. It currently supports all four major platforms: iOS, Android, Blackberry, and Windows Phone.
Whatfix lets users create guides to any website online, that can be embedded into those sites. You can also run “flows” (guides) to get inside help on those websites.
Charcuterie is a family of ten distinct typefaces, including three decorative/ornamental typefaces. Two of the fonts in the collection, Charcuterie Engraved and Charcuterie Cursive, include 135 and 275 swash alternates, respectively.
Appareo is an imperfect, worn serif font inspired by vintage book typefaces. It comes in three weights, with varying degrees of distress.
Chef Script is an experimental font with fantastical elements. It includes 1463 glyphs to compose words, phrases, and short messages in small and large sizes.
Mrs Summer is a hand-drawn font with a Western touch that includes uppercase character with alternate glyphs instead of lowercase letters.
Letterpress Leftovers JNL is a font consisting of 26 vintage letterpress cuts in a variety of themes, plus a wood type border.
Drake is a serif typeface that comes with both clean and distressed versions.
Rivina is an elegant, playful, hand drawn serif, with outline and filler fonts that can be combined or used seperately.
We Are Rockstar is an aggressive, angular typeface that comes with a full character set, including most common punctuation marks and a number of special characters.
Outgunned is a dingbat font that includes gun and other arms-related images. It includes 97 glyphs overall.
Vast Shadow is a slab serif typeface perfect for advertising, signage, and other display use. It’s a solid, sturdy font, while also being just a little bit refined.
Know of a new app or resource that should have been included but wasn’t? Let us know in the comments.
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Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2013:
Setup: 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.
Thursday, Sept. 19, 2013:
All-Day Shift: 9:30 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Morning Shift: 9:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Afternoon Shift:12:00 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Takedown: 3:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.
CSEE Professor Tim Finin was one of eight researchers elected this year as a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). His election citation reads
The new fellows were inducted at the annual AAAI fellows dinner at the 2103 AAAI conference in Seattle Washington in July.
Finin's research interests have ranged widely over a the field of Artificial Intelligence during his professional career and have included computer vision, natural language processing, knowledge representation and reasoning, expert systems and multiagent systems. His current research is focused on extracting useful information from text and semistructured data and using Semantic Web technologies to enable people and computers to effectively model, share and integrate both knowledge and data. He is working with UMBC faculty and students on applying these ideas to help solve problems in security, privacy, mobile computing and social computing environments.
AAAI was founded in 1979 as an international scientific society devoted to advancing the scientific understanding of the mechanisms underlying thought and intelligent behavior and their embodiment in machines. It's fellow program started in 1990 to recognize individuals who have made significant, sustained contributions, usually over at least a ten-year period, to the field of artificial intelligence.
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This morning 500,000 premium Creative Cloud subscribers will be waking up to an update alert for Adobe Photoshop. Adobe’s flagship product has been revised for the first time since the switch to the subscription model back in June.
The big news is that for the first time the heart of Photoshop, its workflow, has been revised for the benefit of web designers.
Photoshop’s native workflow has never worked for web design. As a tool, Photoshop has been too cumbersome, requiring a mixture of slicing, layer merging and resaving multiple times to export out a design. Back in 2000, when images in the backgrounds of table cells seemed like a good idea, Photoshop was fine; but it has since been superseded by dedicated web tools like the superb TypeCast.
Sure, Adobe have flirted with the idea of Photoshop for the web in the past with initiatives like ImageReady; and it’s always been possible to save images for the web from Photoshop. It’s just that those processes always felt tacked on.
The aim of Photoshop 14.1 is to enable designers to rapidly design for multiple screens. Exporting assets is now ridiculously easy: first, you need to enable File > Generate > Image Assets; then you rename a layer in Photoshop with the name you want to use, wdd.png for example, and Photoshop will immediately create an assets folder with the image in it. You don’t even have to click Save for Web.
What’s more, asset generation is live: if you edit a graphic in Photoshop the image in your assets folder is automatically updated.
This revolutionary change to the way Photoshop works is powered by Adobe Generator, which is open source (you can find it on GitHub). Built with Node.js you can actually write your own plugins for Generator, meaning you can customize the way Photoshop exports your assets. (Adobe recommend reviewing the generator-assets file on GitHub as a guideline for any plugin you build.)
One of the demos we were shown was a gaming company that had built a plugin for Generator that exported live to their game engine. You could, by the same token, build a plugin to publish live to a server, meaning that you could open up Photoshop and live-edit images on your website just by making tweaks in your original PSD.
An additional feature is the option to specify not just a name, but options for the export. You can specify scale on the image for example, you can even specify multiple images to create a number of different assets simultaneously; fantastic for responsive design.
Adobe is expecting the community to build a lot of plugins for Generator, just as it has actions for Photoshop. However, the one they’re launching with (apart from the default image generator) is a plugin to tie Photoshop directly to Adobe Reflow; making Photoshop responsive design-friendly for the first time.
One of the biggest headaches for anyone exporting a design from Photoshop has traditionally been handling text, which can’t responsibly be images on the web. Incredibly, Adobe have also addressed that concern in the Reflow plugin by making any text exported via generator native HTML text. You can even sync everything with Typekit, to create consistency from start to finish. Shape layers have also been addressed, and will be exported to Reflow as HTML & CSS.
If you’re one of the many designers that build assets files from your main PSD you’ll find that those asset files can now be dropped into Reflow’s library, allowing you to design in Reflow with updateable assets.
In addition to Generator, Adobe have introduced dozens of additional improvements including, increased stability; Behance share is available in more languages; native PSDX support, 32-bit image support for filters; improved GPU detection; and improved anchor point selection.
As exciting as this, there’s actually more: Adobe are currently working with major browser vendors on a new image format for the web, an adaptive image format; once that format has been finalized, Photoshop and Generator will support it. The holy grail of web images may be just around the corner.
If you’re not already a Creative Cloud subscriber, I’d suggest you sign up for a 30 day trial today.
Adobe have taken a lot of flak recently for their decision to move to a subscription model, but it’s the Creative Cloud subscription model that allows awesome updates like this one and if Adobe continue to innovate in this way, the naysayers will be silenced before long.
Photoshop was the number one design tool for web designers for many years, but its print-based workflow, and dated export options made it increasingly irrelevant. Adobe Generator turns the tool on its head; it’s one of the most exciting updates I’ve ever seen for an Adobe product.
Suddenly, Photoshop is top dog again.
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