Author: Steven Garrity

Today in (My) History

by Steven Garrity

Inspired by Peter Rukavina’s post in which he looks through the history of his weblog on November 19th, I would like to do the same:

November 19, 2003
Like Peter, I was celebrating the launch my friend and co-work, Daniel Burka’s weblog Delta Tango Bravo. My witty post title: “DeltaTangoBravo.com? Roger that.” It’s been a great site since – especially when Daniel talks about me.
November 18, 2002
I didn’t post anything on Nov 19th in 2002, but on the 18th I posted a reply to Joel Spolsky’s Law of Leaky Abstractions. My clever post title: “Abstract Abstractions”
November 19, 2001
I posted about a Windows XP billboard that had been hacked to read “Suddenly Everything Sucks”, which also made for a great post title. The site I linked to no longer has the image, but they were kind and wise enough to link to a new location for the photo.
November 19, 2000
In 2000, when this weblog was only a few months old, I posted about CBC Newsworld’s Alternative Election Debate. This alternative TV debate included many of the fringe parties not included in the primary televised debate, including the Community Party, The Marijuana Party, and The Natural Law Party. Boring post title, with lame all-lowercase capitalization: “tonight: the real debate”.

It’s fun to look back. Thanks Peter.

 

The Photoshopping of Firefox

by Steven Garrity

Yesterday’s Firefox launch garnered a lot of press. I noticed a peculiar pattern emerging on some of the news sites. There seems to be a whole weird underworld of hastily-photoshopped graphics for news sites.

Here is a collection of some images from some Firefox 1.0 launch news articles I found across the website with color commentary. It’s too bad Salon.com hasn’t done a story on Firefox, because their article graphics are like works of art.

Enterprise Linux IT Screenshot of Firefox

Enterprise Linux IT (day 1)

I call this one “Firefox Christ”. If I’m interpreting it correctly, it depicts the ascension of Firefox back to heaven after having spent three days in hell.

Enterprise Linux IT Screenshot of Firefox

Enterprise Linux IT (day 2)

Apparently not content with their apocalyptic graphic from day 1, the Enterprise Linux IT site went tech on day 2. We can assume that the ones and zeros are some kind of “data”.

Linux Insider IT Screenshot of Firefox

Linux Insider

One of several sites that surrounded the logo in a blurry halo. This is somewhat understandable, as it was probably a way to mask the edges of the logo since they probably had to just crop a low-res version from the Mozilla website. That doesn’t excuse the Times New Roman text title here.

News.com Screenshot of Firefox

News.com

I get the “1.0” road sign, but I’m really confused about the little Firefox rolling in the background. Maybe it symbolizes the “roll to 1.0”?

VNUnet Screenshot of Firefox

VNUnet

I like what they did with the close-cropping, but they went a little crazy with the JPEG compression.

CNN Screenshot of Firefox

CNN

A simple image of the logo seems like something that would be hard to get wrong. CNN.com decided it needed a peach/orange background gradient. Maybe that was a screenshot from somewhere I don’t know about?

BBC News Screenshot of Firefox

BBC News

The best of the bunch, but I think that mostly because this is a screenshot of a graphic I made for the Mozilla.org home page. Still, it is simple, straightforward, and doesn’t include any wacky photoshopping.

 

Firefox 1.0 is here!

by Steven Garrity

It is 4:51AM Atlantic time and I am sitting in bed with my laptop on my lap. One minute ago, Ben Goodger gave me the final word and I made this CVS commit to the mozilla.org website:

steven%silverorange.com 2004-11-09 00:50
People of Earth, I give you Firefox 1.0

It’s been a long time coming, but Firefox 1.0 is here. See 1.0 announcement posts on Mitchell Baker’s weblog and Ben Goodger’s weblog.

It is an honour to be a part of this announcement.

 

Icon Illustration In Practice

by Steven Garrity

Jakub Steiner is an artist that works on Linux icons and interfaces at Novell. He is responsible for much of the look and feel of the Gnome icon set.

This week, he posted a fascinating movie of his illustration process. He was drawing a small dog/puppy icon for a notification panel applet and recorded the entire illustration process.

As he suggests, you should watch the video at a high speed, since it would be a bit long to watch the whole thing in real-time (about 10 minutes). I’ve re-encoded his video at a faster speed: download the high-speed version of Jakub’s video.