Mortensen brings you Isolate, a series of commands made for previous Illustrator users, althought it's also useful for the ones that never touched it. We used to work with it and there were a pair of really useful functions: Lock/Hide objects and Unlock/Unhide objects (accesible via keyboard shortcuts). Based on some of the commands available in the Object 1.0 extension by Aaron Beall, Isolate provides advanced functions to work comfortably with a particular set of selected (or unselected) layers. This are the functions you'll find in the package:

• Hide Unselected Objects and Lock Unselected Objects: This is the untouched versions of the commands included in the Aaron's set. This are pretty self-explanatory, select an object, run the command, and all unselected objects will hide or lock.
• Hide Selected Objects and Lock Selected Objects: We added this for the those nostalgic Illustrator users (like me), also quite self-explanatory, hides or locks selected layers when called.
• Unhide Previously Hidden Objects and Unlock Previously Hidden Objects: This is a modified version of the commands included in the Objects set. We loved how Illustrator handles unlock/unhide objects just because it inmediatelly selects them after running the commands, and that's how this works now.

How to install

First of all download the Isolate package, unzip it and place the unpacked folder in Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Fireworks/Configuration/Commands if you are a Windows user, or in Applications/Adobe Fireworks CS4/Configuration/Commands if you are on a Mac.

Now you just have to open Fireworks, and you'll find Isolate under the Commands menu.

Download Isolate

Updated: 04/16/09

We've been working on complex website layouts lately, such as styling content heavy pages for online magazines, radio and television clients. Since time is not something we have in abundance, I thought we needed to speed up the design process and simplify the task of managing information.

Enter the grid based design system. I decided to research the subject and apply this concept to our web design.

I found quite a lot of information from people trying to translate this traditional concept from print to the web. Digging through all this information was time consuming and having to re-read the same information with different approaches on different web pages ended up being very tedious. So I thought it would be a good idea to summarize the best resources found, so that you can get right to the heart of the matter.

One of the first quality readings I stumbled upon was a PDF presentation from Mark Boulton (of Mark Boulton Design) and Khoi Vinh (Design Director for NYTimes.com), perfect for a quick introduction if you already have some knowledge on the subject. Check Grids are Good

The Basics:

If you don't have a graphic design background or feel you need to refresh your knowledge on the concept you can check these articles:

• Five simple steps to designing grid systems
• Grids: Order Out of Chaos, Invisible Structures: When and Why to Use Grids in Page Layout

You can also visit Khoi Vinh's Subtraction for a beautiful example on the usage of grids

Elaborating:

If you've checked these articles, or if you already know something about grids, you may think it's difficult to maintain vertical rhythm within web-pages due to the dynamic character of the content. But Richard Rutter has some advice on how to deal with this

• Compose to a Vertical Rhythm

And what about liquid layouts? Again, Mark Boulton has some suggestions

• Five simple steps to designing grid systems part 5, Flexible grids

The tools:

Here's a list of tools I've found very useful to start creating the optimal grid for all needs:

• Grid Calculator
  Helps you find the optimal dimension in pixels based on these variables: Base font size, number of columns, column width, and gutter width.
• Slammer
  It's basically a customizable grid overlay you can put over any application similar to Iconfactory's xScope. I find it useful to figure out how other web-heads dealt with their grids. It's still in beta stage but the planned features look very tasty.
• GridFox
  Similar to Slammer but as a Firefox plug-in, and the grid gets sticky to the content.
• Boks
  This one is an Adobe Air aplication that gives you similar results as grid calculator and even adds suggestions. But most important, it's based on the blueprint CSS framework (see below), so after you choose your grid configuration it can export an html/css layout with some goodies.
  Anyway, I find myself using only the Grid calculator part of the app for working on my Fireworks mockups rather than to create CSS frameworks.
• GridMaker
  GridMaker is a small script for Photoshop which allows speedy development of simple grids.
  Check also Gridmaster Reboot and GridMaster for CS4

The CSS frameworks:

I personally come from a graphic design background so I look at these with a bit of skepticism. Basically because I think the best way to start creating a web-page is to work with the layout in a graphic design application such as Illustrator or Fireworks and try to get as close as possible to the end result before writing any line of code. I think this approach however, speeds up the process a lot and simplifies the code work as every change the client introduces during the process can bring new problems that you can easily indentify and solve on the mock-up. Having to go through changes in the coding process is more time consuming.

Anyway, I feel I had to mention these frameworks as they may be quite useful for some die-hard code web developers:

• The 960 Grid System
  As the creators say, the 960 Grid System is an effort to streamline web development workflow by providing commonly used dimensions, based on a width of 960 pixels.
• Blueprint Css
  Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plug-ins, and even a style-sheet for printing.

So that's it. As you see, making things look simple is not that simple, so I hope my research can help you in this quest for simplicity.

But we can learn how to use different osx tools to access this services and parse the response. First using terminal script, the main idea is using "curl", a standard program included on every unix distro to make an http request, then copy the result to the clipboard.

With this script we are going to query tinyurl, a popular shortening url service

#!/bin/sh

curl -s http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=${1} | pbcopy $1;	

Another variant of this script allows us to query a service using a basic authentication protocol, this time the example uses tr.im service, another popular one that offers the option to save your converted urls to maintain a historic.

#!/bin/sh

curl -u user:password -s http://api.tr.im/api/trim_simple?url=${1} | pbcopy $1;

A more elegant approach is to use quicksilver with some applescript magic to simplify all the process a bit more. The script is a bit complex, but all you really need is to copy next lines and paste it inside a file (ex.- tiny.scpt) on your "~/Library/Scripts/" and finally rescan quicksilver catalog.

This version sends the clipboard content to the desired service and notifies you with growl when the response is copied back to the clipboard,

set longURL to the clipboard
set cmd to "curl http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=" & longURL
set shortURL to do shell script cmd
set the clipboard to shortURL as text

tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
set the allNotificationsList to {"URL copied to clipboard"}
set the enabledNotificationsList to {"URL copied to clipboard"}
register as application "TinyURL Service" all notifications allNotificationsList default notifications enabledNotificationsList icon of application "Script Editor"
notify with name "URL copied to clipboard" title "URL copied to clipboard" description shortURL application name "TinyURL Service"
end tell

That's all. Simple enough, isn't it?

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You have to be willing to accept the consequences of having an opinion.

He also speaks of what design is about these days, and actually is a really interesting opinion that involves not only how design makes a company look like, but how a company acts and communicates.

We like it simple.

I promise larger and better articles, very soon.

The concept took precedence over the name of the brand and we are happy about it. After going over the concept many times after the initial brainstorming (simplicity is not so simple sometimes) three ideas came to my mind: 

• The golden rule of life: "Keep it simple, make it work"
• A poster I saw in the US while working for IBM: "Simple good, complex bad"
• A blog/book I read this summer by John Maeda called "The Laws of Simplicity"

That's the way we like it.

Using and admiring this well designed templates you'll understand why web design is 95% typography 

--Antoine de Saint-Exupéry