• Introduced improved handling of missing or incomplete HTML elements.

• Made a change to the method used to capture the slide description. Instead of trying to step through the child nodes of the <dd> element, the entire innerHTML string is captured. This enables the use of anchor tags and other formatting within the image descriptions.

• Added support for unordered lists – <ul>, as well as definition lists – <dl>. Using unordered lists means that there will be no image description; only the image title and the slide number will be displayed.

• If no alt attribute is supplied for the slide thumbnails, then an attempt will be made to parse the filename from the image path.

This is made even more exciting for me as I’m using new slide show software that I have designed and written myself. For the last few years I’ve been using an open source solution called Gallery to display my artwork. Despite being an impressive piece of software, some time ago I came to the realisation that it’s not the best fit for my needs. It’s very feature rich, and with that comes a level of complexity that isn’t justified by the number and type of images that I want to display. It also uses a lot of hacks to maintain compatibility with older browsers, and despite my best efforts I haven’t managed to set it up so that it produces standards compliant HTML, something that is very important to me.

Some months ago I had the seed of an idea for creating a very simple, lightweight browser image viewer that can be configured just by editing very clean, simple, standards compliant HTML (or XHTML). This seed has grown to become Image Engine 4.0, and sees me returning to a home grown solution for displaying my images after nearly 5 years using Gallery.

I’m very pleased with the results; I think it looks nice, and it has made adding more than 100 images very simple indeed (it only took me a couple of hours to add all the images, including typing all the descriptions). I’m so pleased that I’ve decided to make the Image Engine available as free to use software. It’s still in the early stages of development, and there are a number of features I’d like to add as time goes by, but at the moment it works, and works well. I will be adding content to the Project Page over the next few weeks, so if you would like to use this software on your own site, please check back soon, or contact me.

However, my Javascript skills are rather out of date, and my understanding of OOP is weak at best. So I could really use some help with the coding side of the project. If you are a web developer with good Javascript/DOM skills who would be willing to help me out, please get in touch. Unfortunately, I can’t offer any financial reward, but you would get ample credit for any and all work, a prominent link to your portfolio, and heaps of praise on this site. I’m also willing to discuss some form of skills exchange if you need any artwork; for example illustration, icons, or design for another project.

I know it’s small beer in terms of recompense, but at the moment it’s all I can offer. Please let me know if you think this is something you’d be interested in.

Bobbin has priced it at a very reasonable £2.99, and it’s available now on the iTunes App Store. For more details visit the Air Cadets web site.

For instance, I constantly use the cmd-space and cmd-opt-space shortcuts to zoom in and out while working, usually by drawing a marquee around the area I want to zoom to. What I just found though is that if you draw the marquee in the wrong place (something I do quite regularly), then releasing space bar and pressing it again (keeping the cmd and/or option key pressed) allows you to reposition the entire zoom marquee. Release space again and you can continue resizing the marquee. Genius.

While playing with this discovery, I also found that after pressing cmd-space to select the zoom tool, you can release the space bar and the zoom stays active. Am I stupid for not finding this sooner?

Iridium gives all application windows a smooth, uniform theme. I combine this with a 50% grey desktop background to give me a subtle interface that stays out of the way and doesn’t interfere with my colour perception while I’m working. If you are not a fan of Brushed Metal (why would you be?), and miss the uniform look of the Platinum UI, then I recommend giving Iridium a try.

It comes with it’s own installer, and creates a backup copy of the default Aqua theme if you want to restore the “factory” look. I have just installed this new update; everything works perfectly and looks great.

Find out more about OughtoSave.

I really wish there was a modifier key that would temporarily disable the Smart Guide snapping, like the Ctrl key in Photoshop. This would make life much easier; fingers crossed for CS3.

v4.3.3

• new program icon by Richard Smith
• fixed bug that occurred when trashing an uninstalled font
• some toolbar icons replaced
• added button to open a selected uninstalled font’s parent folder

It is a great little application if you want to browse a large set of fonts; far easier to use than Apple’s Font Book.

I don’t know if these where also released today, or whether I missed them, but there were also updates to Bridge scripts, Photoshop scripts and InDesign CS2 available. These updates have cured the problems I’ve had switching to the Adobe Help Centre and Adobe Bridge from within Photoshop and Illustrator. The problem affected people like me who (for security or other reasons) work from an account that doesn’t have administrator privileges.