A few months ago I was introduced to two guys through a mutual friend of ours. They have devoted a significant amount of their time while at and after university to the development of products which assist those with the most common forms of colour blindness.

The two Lukes (as they are known) generated algorithms to simulate the effects of dichromatic colour blindness, and they have just launched an iPhone application, Huetility, which allows you to effectively simulate how nearly 1-in-12 men, and a smaller proportion of women see the world.

The app is being promoted as an educational aid for parents, teachers and opticians to demonstrate and understand the effects of colour blindness, however there is no reason why this should not be part of every designer’s toolkit. All too often overlooked - badly thought out design decisions can prove difficult to those with an inability to perceive colour - and although not every design is colour critical, a quick check using this tool can help to eliminate these problems.

At £1.79, I think it’s a snip. You can find out more about Huetility here, or you can download the application from the App Store today.

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If you’ve ever created a PDF using OSX you’ll know that it’s very simple. Macs come with out-of-the-box PDF support which means you don’t need a program like Adobe Acrobat Reader (or anything more heavyweight) to open or save your files as such.

However, you’ll also know that emailing the files it creates takes much longer than it should - the created files are massive in relative terms.

I’ve created one-page invoices using PDFs for a long time, and thankfully, due to this great little PDF compression plugin, they are crunched down to a sensible size from the outset. However, I recently switched to let Billings handle my invoicing and it uses the default OSX PDF creation tool to generate it’s PDFs - big files ahoy.

To give you an idea of the difference in file size between a compressed one page document - Billings chucks out a 1.4Mb file, whereas my compressed versions of the same documents are about 19Kb. Not ideal when you quickly want to output an invoice, attach and send it.

So how do you solve it? Well there are some nifty features in OSX that you may not be aware of (or at least not use), namely Folder Actions. Essentially folder actions allow you to run a script every time a file is placed in or removed from a folder on your Mac.

This creates a great little hook on which we can run a script to compress the files in a specific directory then move them to a ‘Compressed’ folder once done.

Step-by-Step: How to Do It

1. Download and Install Compression Plugin

Download and install the PDF compression plugin. It’s a Quartz filter workflow that uses well-chosen settings to reduce your file size down. You will also now benefit from the use of it everytime you encounter a save dialogue from now on.

2. Create an Automator Workflow

Automator is a free program bundled in every OS X Mac (have a look in your Applications folder). It allows you to run series of tasks automatically in a single process. You simply need to create a workflow consisting of:

1. Get Specified Finder Items (once added to the workflow, click Add to select the directory which will contain files to be compressed.
2. Get Folder Contents
3. Apply Quartz Filter to PDF Documents (Select ‘Compress PDF’ from the drop-down - this will only appear if you have installed the plugin as above)
4. Move Finder Items (change the location to a place where the final, compressed files will be automatically moved)

3. Test The Workflow

Place a test PDF in your ‘Compressor directory’ (specified in step 1 of the workflow) then run it. It should compress this PDF, then move it to the ‘Compressed directory’ you specified in step 4, leaving the ‘Compressor directory’ empty.

Once you’ve got that working, you can automate the process, so this executes every time a PDF is saved or moved into the folder. Click save, and Save as Application (as opposed to Save as Workflow, otherwise every time you run it, the Automator program will want to load up fully instead of run in the background).

4. Create A Script

You now need to create little AppleScript which can run this workflow application.

Go to /Libaray/Scripts/Folder Action Scripts/

Duplicate one of the existing scripts, and rename it to something sensible like PDF - compressor.script

Open it and paste the following. You must manually alter the path to your Automator application as appropriate.

The code below is wrapping because of my thin blog layout. Best idea is to copy and paste directly, or View Source of this page to determine where the line breaks actually are if you are not sure.


on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving added_items
try
tell me
do shell script “open -a /Users/Andy/Documents/My\\ Mac/Compress\\ PDFs.app”
end tell
end try
end adding folder items to


Note! All spaces in the path must be double backslashed as above. To test if your typing is correct, paste the bit between the quote marks (e.g. open -a /Users/Andy/Documents/My\\ Mac/Compress\\ PDFs.app) into Terminial and run. If it runs the Automator application you created, your script will work. If it doesn’t, check the path you have typed.

Save it and close the Script Editor.

5. Set It Up

Find your ‘Compressor directory’ (specified in step 1 of the workflow) and right-click on it. From the menu that appears, select More > Configure Folder Actions…

Tick the ‘Enable Folder Actions’ box, then press the Add icon (+) to add the ‘Compressor directory’ as a trigger folder. Select it, and make sure the ‘On’ tickbox it ticked.

Next, click the Add icon (+) for the right hand pane to add a script. You should be able to find and select the AppleScript you have just created (something like PDF - compressor.script).

6. Done!

Close the window and you’re done. Every time somebody pastes or saves into the ‘Compressor directory’, the folder action will kick in, launch the AppleScript and that in turn will execute the Automator compression tool and move the compressed version of the PDF into the ‘Compressed directory’. Sorted.

Of course, there is lots more scope with this. Automator means you don’t need to know much AppleScript to get this going, but you can really push the boundaries if you are willing to experiment. This setup suits me, but it’s likely you’ll need to experiment to get it to the way you need it.

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I once had an urge to write. It was probably born out of a frustration that (at the time) everything creative I was involved with either was being hand drawn and product shaped, or laid out using a computer.

It’s been exactly four years since I wrote my first post on this blog, and not much has changed except I’ve lost my almost insatiable desire to write. It’s not that I don’t have ideas and thoughts, but everything these days appears to be summed up in 140 characters and I rarely think of a topic that I want to elaborate on, at least in a written form at least.

I know this won’t last forever. Twitter will come and go like everything else on the web. When I think back over the past seven years I have actively used the internet and consider all those things I used to visit/were so important to me at on time or other: DeviantArt, amused.com, Rojo, Friends Reunited, My Yahoo!, my Angelfire and FreeYellow websites, BoltBlue, Facebook - you realise things can only last a finite (and apparently increasingly short) period of time.

I also know I will get back my desire to write again one day. I tend to get these bursts of energy which have to be captured in words, but I think since I started running the business as a full-time occupation, that energy has been channelled via other routes.

I really have thought long and hard about the future of this blog. I’m not sure I want it all to remain online, especially in it’s current form. Malarkey did something a few years ago which was to archive anything interesting for anyone who really wanted to find it, but otherwise stopped it being immediately obvious. That appeals more and more.

Realistically, I don’t have to do anything about this site. It’s not doing much harm to anyone, except to me. Every time I visit it, it looks so forlorn and badly kept that I feel bad I don’t make many contributions to it anymore. But then again, for the two years that it truly shone I was in a state of overdrive and made commitments to write near daily - no matter how poorly - so comparisons to ‘the good old days’ are simply unrealistic.

I suppose also that in a way I feel like we (the ‘interneteers’) have created a bit of a primordial swamp over the past few years. Our general creativity, outpourings, projects that never went anywhere, willingness to ditch one web-based product for another at a moments notice and slimy trail of media (videos, podcasts, blog entries) can now be viewed with some hindsight. We’ve really worked hard since we got our hands on the controls, however now behind us we’ve left a soup of semi-useful stuff and we’re finally venturing out a little from it’s murky waters. Well, perhaps we’re not even that advanced. Maybe we’re just developing fins or something. A lot of effort has gone into getting us to this point, including a significant number of my own hours that went into this chronicle that I’m now seriously considering wrapping up on.

I wonder what the value of all of this will be in years to come.

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I’ve not seen one in the flesh; that wouldn’t been possible, but the brand new Macbook and Macbook pro lines are mouth-watering. The hardware upgrades, the change in look, the improved graphics; that’s all nice, but really peripheral to the one ‘feature’ I find intriguing. This ‘unibody’ idea is beautiful.

Anyone who has worked milled aluminium knows how gorgeous the stuff feels, both before and after it becomes a product. Working it down from a solid chunk into a final form is infinitely more satisfying than working with any other material in my opinion. Milling can be frustratingly slow, and if you get it wrong, it’s impossible to make a seamless fix. With CNC you cut that out, but you swap that for a level of precision that is hard to rival even in the most highly-skilled handmade version - the result is a million miles away from a sheet or cast metal construction. It genuinely feels more organic, sharp, natural and real - a single body is infinitely more sophisticated than something that feels like it has been bolted together, no matter how well that has been done.

And that’s why I’m dying to pick one up and hold it. I’m not actually that fussed about forking out to own it - my current model still does more than well enough for my needs (though it’s not like I would turn one down if anyone is offering) I just don’t need an upgrade. But the fact is that you can plainly see from the photos, the videos (especially the manufacturing one) that this a beautifully engineered and solid piece of construction. This technique is to be rolled into their two new notebook products, and that means that even by Apple’s previously high standards, this casing is going to bring the feel of this laptop into a league of it’s own, because as far as I am aware no other company has done this in mainstream laptopware before.

Admittedly, the Macbook Air has used a similar technique for a while (again a stunning product to hold), but I think this technique will lend itself even better to the thicker design of these new products. It’s a bit unusual to be more excited by the manufacturing method than the complete product, but I am.

There is one caveat though. I can think of a number of reasons why other manufacturers might not have gone down this route in the past, and although I can banish most of my qualms about it, there are couple I still don’t have an answer for.

This process is more complicated and initially more expensive to setup due to the hardware involved, but over time it’ll pay for itself and any machinery can be re-tasked for future models. The complexity of the assembly is going to be considerably reduced at the pre-digital component stage.  The thing that gets me is the waste and energy required to produce it this way.

My gut feeling would be that in waste terms, the system is actually going to be pretty efficient - Apple wouldn’t want to be squandering all that expensive material it’s paid for. Although you might be essentially removing a large percentage of the mass as milled-out swarf, that can be melted down and reused, and I would imagine that is what Apple will be doing. The gold and silver trade became incredibly efficient at this a very long time ago. But even if that is the case, the big drawback of this is that you constantly have to keep re-melting down the material, as opposed to the current method of applying a smaller amount of heat for a shorter period of time just enough to form a shape. And that’s expensive. The closest thing to an analogy I can think of is boiling a kettle of six cups for every time you want to make one just for yourself.

For all their talk of green, I do wonder whether this will erode at their other credentials? I mean keeping metal molten for long periods (whether its in their own factories or further up the food chain) is not that efficient. I just imagine it can’t be particularly energy efficient even if their other production processes are. I’d love to know, but I don’t believe tours of the Apple factories are that easy to come by.

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If there is one thing in my digital work and life that continually frustrates me is the lack of synchronicity between devices - namely my iMac and my Macbook.

Files have been catered for a while, and I thoroughly recommend SugarSync for that (continuous cloud backup, with recent revisions), but the killer flaw has been the lack of Address Book and iCal balance.

Finally, lifehacker has handed me an olive branch. I’ve tried some of their other recommended services before, but I’ve not been overly impressed until now (Calgoo was shockingly bad). Fruux is incredibly lightweight preference panel application which keeps contacts and events synced. I’ll stop short of a full recommendation as I’ve only just tried it out, but it’s been astoundingly simple to setup and get working. The best thing about it is that it just gets on with it, in the background, no hassle.

If it delivers what is says it can, and (as it is right now) for free, I will be a very happy bunny.

UPDATED: The link was wrong. Cheers Stuup!

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Here’s another tip.

If you didn’t know already, you can now combine multiple Hotmail / Live email accounts into a single account (or pretty close to) - which means you only have to log in using one account to check the mail in all of the others.

For someone like me who rarely uses my Hotmail accounts these days, it’s handy to speed up the process by merging my hotmail.co.uk and hotmail.com addresses.

You can do this by:

1. Logging into Hotmail as usual
2. Click on your email address in the top right hand corner of the page (right above the Sign Out text link)
3. From the drop down, select Link other accounts
4. Follow the instructions to tie in your Microsoft Passport/Hotmail/Windows Live Mail

You will be asked to enter your password and email address for the other account, then once the process is complete, you will be able to click on the same menu as in step 2, and change to your other email account inboxes on-the-fly.

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Maybe I’d missed this before, but I’ve just discovered a fantastic little app (that runs on Windows, Mac and ‘Nix) that allows you to watch all the UK channels for free, live.

Zattoo just requires an email address, and the funky little program allows you to watch the following useful and semi-useful channels:

• BBC One
• BBC Two
• BBC Three
• BBC Four
• ITV 1
• Channel 4
• five
• BBC News
• BBC Paliament
• Al Jazeera
• CBBC
• CBebbies

According to the website, it’s completely legal and I’ve been really impressed with the quality so far. It comes with an inbuilt schedule too.

My advice? Go try it.

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