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Linux for Designers

a blog by Eckhard M. Jäger

Posts tagged with "windows"

IE 8 Development Slowness

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After end of August Microsoft barely offers the secound beta of the Internet Explorer 8 now they answered to the question about "What’s After Beta 2". The answer is "We will release one more public update of IE8 in the first quarter of 2009". Wow thats really slow! I believe at this time we will have Firefox 3.1, Opera 9.7 (may with a better GUI) and a much improved Webkit/ Safari (and IE 8 is just another beta or RC).
What will be available when IE 8 reaching the final state?

Typography on the Web again

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Besides Sifr, which is based an JavaScript and Flash, a new method embeding custom on websites poped up: typeface.js. Basically this method rendering text with Javascript, <canvas> and SVG/ VML. Check out the examples too. The bad thing about this method is that you can't select and copy text in a easy way :frown:
Myslef dreaming about the upcoming @font-face support included in Firefox 3.1 (and still available in Opera or Webkit (Safari)). May M$ get it ready in IE8 too.




Firefox 3.1 beta is coming

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For me one of the best features of the upcoming Firefox 3.1 is the support for @font-face. This will bring real typos into the web and let web designers create more cool sites. So now we have @font-face support in Webkit (Safari), Gecko (Firefox) and Opera. That's great!
All about the new features of Firefox 3.1 can be found at the Mozilla Developer Center.

Browser War

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After we getting the Beta2 of the Internet Explorer 8 and Googles Chrome Beta now the fight about the fastes browser is opened again. This Time it is now about rendering HTML, this time it is all about JavaScript. 2 Day's Chrome take the throne of speed but the new build of Firefox 3.1 with TracMonkey is very close. Check out that stats:
http://scr3.golem.de/?d=0809/Firefox_TraceMonkey&a=62200

Some older performance tests:
http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/
http://scr3.golem.de/?d=0809/Google_Chrome&a=62163

Ok you notice the difference between 17866ms of the IE 7 and 1209 of Google Chrome, but can you notice the difference of 200ms? In fact that Google collects so many data, i didn't like the vision that Google collect any step i make at the web.

Firebug Lite 1.2 for any Browser

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Firebug is, besides Web Developer, one of the best extensions for web development on Firefox. A week ago Firebug raised from the death and this week another beta update of the 1.2 brunch shipped. A lot of potentials developers formed now the Firebug Working Group. They got a new member too: Azer Koçulu.
Azer Koçulu is the developer of the JavaScript tool pi.debugger. He startet now bringing Firebug to The Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera. This port called Firebug Lite and is now available for download.

Updated CSS font matching list

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I updated my Linux-Mac-Windows CSS font matching list to support Redhat's Liberation fonts. Now i have to add this to CSSdev for Gimp too.

Read more...

Ubuntu-berlin Get-together at the BELUG

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I will be at the next get-together of Ubuntu Berlin at the BELUG on Wednesday the 2nd July 2008. So if you are in town let's meet there :smile:
BTW the appointment of my workshop about open source graphic software is now finalized: Grafikprogramme unter Ubuntu

CSS font matching with Vista

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Looking around the web about an update for my Linux-Mac-Windows CSS font matching list i found the interesting post "Are Vista Fonts Ready for the Web?". Windows Vista shipped with new screen optimized fonts that are only available there and it seems at the moment there aren't equal fonts on the other platforms available.

Wine 1.0

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After 15 years of development and 5 release candidates Wine is published today as 1.0. In the release candidate phase so many bugs were fixed and Wine runs really smooth now my favorite Windows apps. If you ever had problems with older versions of Wine you should give it a try again :smile:
Read my post about the smoothest way getting you Windows app running too.

CSS Compatibility and Internet Explorer

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Well the different Internet Explorer versions and their interpretation of the CSS standards can drive you crazy. So this overview at MSDN about the CSS compatibility may help you staying cool :smile: IE 5 up to IE 8 are listed.

OS's and wallpapers

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William Jon McCann has collected an interesting overview about operating systems and their bundled wallpapers - a lot of eyecandy.

Open Source only on Linux?

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Who is using GIMP, Inkscape. Blender, Scribus & Co? Linux people only or Mac fans and Windows users too?
Check out my poll at the side bar :smile:

Microsoft emails Blender

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Again M$ has a "new" strategy for "opening" there formats and APIs. So at the moment they contact open source projects for some kind of "help" and took as an example for moving towards to open source their OpenXML - very strange behavior at all. They contacted the Blender heads too . Read the article at Groklaw about the true goals of M$. There is a discussion about that email at the Blenderartitst board too.

Wine 1.0 RC1

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Wine 1.0 RC1 is now available for download. After 15 years of development it is planed to publish Wine on the 6th of June as final. Help the Wine project finding bugs and getting 1.0 stable.
Here is a short howto:

* Make sure Wine 1.0 RC1 and your favorite Windows app are installed
* Open a terminal and start your application with
env WINEPREFIX="~/.wine" wine "C:\Path\To\Your\app.exe"
* Check the output in the terminal and copy it per action via Ctrl+C into a text editor
(an example http://www.neeneenee.de/wine_photoline1451.txt)
* Go to the Wine bugtracker create a account or login
* First make sure the bug isn't submited yet
* If the bug exist create a comment and append a link to your textfile of the output

If you do not have any Wine experience check out my post "Getting your Windows app running on Linux in a easy way". You can tweak the Wine GUI too to give it a more Ubuntu styled look.

Photoline 14.51

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If you are missing features in Gimp and didn't like to pay a lot for Photoshop you should definitely tryout Photoline. It's powerfull and stable as Photoshop itself, has the best PSD file support i ever saw and it is really cheap.
The only bad thing is you need Wine to get it running on Linux. At the moment i getting some problems with the icons of the toolbars and sometimes the cursor is not visible. I think this could be fixed soon when a new stable version of Wine is available.
All about Photoline 14.51 can be found in the release notes.
UPDATE: I added a bug report to the bugzilla of the Wine project.

Getting your Windows app running on Linux in a easy way on Ubuntu

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Here is the summary of my talk about WINE at the Ubuntu Hardy Heron release party Berlin. It includes all links and describes the best way getting an app like Photoshop running smooth.

Read more...

Hardy is great!

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Yesterday i had my talk about Wine at the Ubuntu Hardy release party Berlin. There were a lot of other interesting talks too and i met very nice people interested in graphic design, web development and Wine (greetings to Marcus, Renee and Gabriel :smile: ).
On some demo PC's i played around with Ubuntu Hardy Heron and i geting the feeling its very fast and runs much better then Gutsy did.
Soon i will publish my talk about WINE and getting Windows software running here.

Wine glitches

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The last two versions of Wine 0.9.58 and 0.9.59 didn't work well with Photoshop CS, there are a lot of problems with Ctrl+Click (may selecting layer transparency) or Shift+Click (Wand tool). So i downgraded Wine to 0.9.57 which i downloaded from the archive and used

sudo dpkg -i wine_0.9.57~winehq0~ubuntu~7.10-1_i386.deb

to get the older version running while the newer was installed. Wine 0.9.57 runs for me very well :smile:

When you use wine for the first time you can tweak the Wine GUI too to give it a more Ubuntu styled look.

Photoline 14.50

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If you are missing features in Gimp and didn't like to pay a lot for Photoshop you should definitely tryout Photoline. It's powerfull and stable as Photoshop itself, has the best PSD file support i ever saw and it is really cheap.
The only bad thing is you need Wine to get it running on Linux. All about Photoline 14.50 can be found in the release notes.

Wine Photoshop page

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Many people ask "What's the smoothest way running Photoshop on Linux? How you get it?" - the answer is easy: Check out the Wine Wiki: Running Adobe Photoshop on Wine :smile:

You can tweak the Wine GUI too to give it a more Ubuntu styled look.