I’ve been on a little vacation, visiting my cousins for the past days and because yesterday was a travel day, the news update post for yesterday, is now coming today! Image above, taken with my iPhone only, hence the poor quality.

• John Nack, the product manager for Photoshop, shared the other day some cool new utilities that work with Lightroom and ACR. A Lightroom plugin that could be of use to you if you use it with another application than Photoshop is Open Directly, a plugin that lets you send a RAW file from Lightroom and right into another editing application of your choice. It’ll become a paid plugin on August 7th, so give it a try.
   
• Something software related again, VLC (the popular media player) has finally been updated to version 1.0! You can read more about this at MacAppZone.
   
• I’m in the process of planning out tutorials and recording more videos for the site again and if you have any suggestions or ideas, feel free to leave them in the comments here! It is much appreciated.

It doesn’t matter that the latest FireFox and Safari releases support most of this. There is still a great minority using these browsers, even though most of us designers would like it to be more.

A couple of years ago now, Microsoft was supposed to push out IE7 in Windows Update to everyone for upgrading. That sounded really nice, although now, after the fact, did they really? It seems that there are still a majority of visitors browsing from IE6. 

Comparing the web design business to other businesses, we are in the group of few that needs to support older standards. In manufacturing, there is not as much of a back supporting, although it of course exists.

No, I’m longing for the day when we can actually start using these new standards! They bring a lot of cool features with them (which will be another topic) that will make designing websites just so much cooler, simpler and opens a new world!

We’ll be taking a look at some of the new and exciting things in CSS3 and HTML5 soon as well!

Something that could potentially be good for your business and your health is to outsource some work to a third-party. At a start-up time, you might not want to take on an employee with all the obligations it brings, although you still want to get that extra thing done that you don’t have the time to do. It might also be the case that you want to get your work burden down to a lower level if there is much to do. In these cases, outsourcing part or the work can be a good idea.

You Can Become Less Stressed

Perhaps the best part with outsourcing a part of your project is that you can have more time to work on other parts. If a certain part is making you super stressed, hire someone to do it for you. This is something you’ll need to think about when estimating preferably, at the start of the project, so that you still have money left in the end for yourself.

Get More Things Done

You can get more things done at the same time if you outsource parts of your project. You’ll again need to think about the costs there and be fine with the fact that you will not get as much at the end. Just think about the scenario that you have four projects running, that suddenly all needs urgent attention in a certain stage. Might be worth it with the outsourcing.

Tip: Look For Start-Up/Learning Freelancers

I know a couple of people who are just starting out and learning the trade, in my case, web design. You can do them a big favor by outsourcing parts of your project to them. You should only do this of course if you are confident that they can get it done right in the timeframe required.

Abduzeedo is the kind of site you have in your RSS Feed that constantly throws incredible things at you. On the site you will find mainly two things. Design inspiration and Photoshop tutorials. Don’t let the “two things” fool you. The works they usually post up are incredible and really spurs your creativity and gets your creative juices flowing. As if it wasn’t enough, the Photoshop tutorials show some great design effects that you usually, wish you would have known before and that raises your designs to the next level.

Like I always do on New Years and for my american readers this time of the year, here is how to shoot these wonderful fireworks:

Fireworks is a lovely thing to photograph but it may seem hard at first. I’ve been doing it for the past three years now and really feel that I’m getting the grip around it! I hope it helps to clear up some stuff if you are unsure since I’ve gotten a lot of questions about it this year, and that you go out and try it tonight, it is really cool and fun.

How To?

First off, dial in Manual mode and set the aperture to f/11 or f/13 (run some tests to see which is better), then set the shutter speed to Bulb, usually indicated by a B. Now when the firework explode, press the shutter and then when the burst has exploded and is wearing off, you let go of it. This usually makes for a nice picture of a firework.

If you wish to capture many in one frame, just keep it pressed and make sure the frame is pitch black until the next firework goes up. Adjust the aperture as fits between the shots.

Equipment?

It’s best to have a camera that you have full manual mode on but special firework modes can work, although best result is given with a full manual mode. It’s really necessary to have a tripod because you’ll be working with second long exposures that you simply can’t hand-hold. Also learning from own mistakes, never extend the center column on the tripod, even if it feels like you need to, I did it last year only with a good sacrifice in quality in the images.

It helps if you have a remote control so you don’t need to look into the viewfinder all the time when shooting, plus, it’ll give you more stability.

Depending on your location to the fireworks, either a zoom lens (70-200) or a normal zoom (18-55) is the right lens. For organized displays, I’ve found that you might get closer than you think with a 18-55, which allows you to get close enough in the sky (if you are close) and also to get some foreground in there as well if you want to, without changing lenses, something that is a no-no! You just won’t have the time.

Position and Preparations

Get to the fireworks display in time and make sure that you know where they are going to be shooting from and set up in a good place where you can see the display and if you want also include some foreground such as the water or something alike. Also make sure you have clean memory cards that are formatted and that they work, also make sure to have your batteries charged and working! 

I hope this little article can benefit you and it is really fun to photograph fireworks! Questions? Leave them in the comments!

I’ve known about Audioboo for quite a while but I haven’t really gotten around to test it, so when I was reminded of it as I was watching TWiT Live, I decided to give it a spin for real.

Audioboo is a free service that lets you record and publish "boo’s" from the iPhone! It comes as a free download from the App Store and once over on the phone, it is simply to just record your own clips. On the phone, you can also view the latest boos and listen to them.

The website gives you more browsing capabilities where you can follow users to get notified when they post news boos. What’s brilliant with it is that it generates an RSS feed for you so that people interested can subscribe to your boos. With some usage of other services (like Feedburner), you can tweak the feed up for iTunes! In essence you could make a podcast from using Audioboo, from the iPhone.

From what I hear, they are working on a Videoboo that would work the same only with video, from the iPhone 3GS.

I’m using WordPress as the back-end both at this website and many others that I build as a designer. What keeps getting better is the customization functionality of the posts and pages output. WordPress template fields that controls the posting is built around “The Loop” which is in all fairness quite a standard PHP loop with special PHP tags you insert into your HTML template to dynamically get the post information. Something that you can add to each post and page in WordPress is custom fields, basically fields that you have full control of. Today, we are going to talk about the basics of them.

What Are Custom Fields?

Custom Fields are available when you create a new page or post from the WordPress admin panel. You enter in a key, the name of the custom field as well as the value. The key will be saved so that you can reuse it from any page or post in the future (choose-able from a drop-down menu) while the value is something that is specific to each post. 

What Can You Do With Them?

The quick answer would be, everything and a bit more. The more explanatory answer would be that you can use them to extend your post with content that WordPress by itself does not allow you to enter, without the extensive PHP knowledge needed to create a plugin.

Example: Over on the MacAppZone website, there is a 180×180 pixel image next to each post. If you were to put this in the content of the post and just left align it, you would end up with it only to the left of the post content itself, not the title. Nor would you be able to place the post-metadata under it. This is where custom fields come in handy. You can set up a special field where you for each post insert a URL of the image you want, in a specific size. Then in the template for the index page, you simply add the image tag where is needed in the HTML code, and make its source to be just a tiny bit of PHP code that we can get from the WordPress Codex.

How Do You Include Them In A Theme?

It’s quite a simple process. First create your values in the new post page in the administration panel of WordPress. Once you have your key set, make a note of it, in this case I call it “newsimg”. Navigate to where you want to put it inside of your theme (say the index.php) and insert this code.

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<?php
	$newsimg = get_post_meta($post->ID,"newsimg",true);
	echo $newsimg;
?>

Let’s go through what the code above does. This is my preferred way of doing it by loading the value into a variable and outputting that as I feel it gives a simpler outputting code (and I can place the making of the variable somewhere else on the page).

First, we state the variable called newsimage and says that it is to be equal to the code that gets the post meta (the custom fields) from WordPress.

The function that is called get_post_meta has a few settings. It’s options is outlined like this (as a generic default):

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get_post_meta($post_id, "key",$single = true);

The first option specifies the ID of the post that we want this to load the custom field from. In the case of the code we put in, we are calling the WordPress ID of the current post, then after the comma, we enter in the key that we have set up in the post surrounded by quotes (as it is a value). The final option can look a bit daunting and confusing but it really isn’t. It lets you tell WordPress if you allow multiple instances of this custom field. If this is set to the value of true, you can only add one instance of “newsimg” per post. If you instead set this to false, you tell WordPress to, if there are many instances of “newsimg” in the custom fields for the same post, load these into a PHP array that you can then output as you want. In our example here, we are doing it basic and thus leaving the setting as true as we only need one instance per post.

Wherever you have put this code, it must stay within the WordPress Loop or it will not work. If it is placed outside of the loop, nothing will happen as it cannot call some core post values it needs in order to display the field.

In future weeks, we’ll be taking a look at more advanced uses of these custom fields, including array outputting and when you might want to use these. We’ll also take a look at how this site’s tutorial display system is built, all using custom fields and a little bit more PHP coding. 

It is summertime and that can be a complex time for being a freelancer. On the flip side, we have the ability to take out our vacation whenever we want, however, on the down side, vacations can be hard to schedule. Being in the middle of this scheduling period myself, both as a blog writer and designer, I’m going to share some tips on how you can gear up for a vacation and take some time off!

Blog Writer

• As a blog writer, you have a big advantage unless you cover breaking news stories. You can schedule posts. I’m sure you might already to that on a weekly basis already so it won’t be much new things other than the fact that you might do it for two weeks in a row. Think about topics well in advance, several weeks before the time you plan to go away (at least a couple), and start to write the articles for those weeks. You’ll be doing double writing for some time, but just take the time and do it well in advance! It’ll lower the stress levels later on.
   
• Currently what I am thinking about myself is regarding the social media. It is really the first major summer holiday time that we’ve had the big influence in Twitter for example and how to manage it while you are away is now a new problem that you haven’t really been faced before. I don’t believe that scheduling tweets over the day is the way to go. I’ll even go as far as saying it is destroying the principals of Twitter. I very well think that you can have an automatically posted tweet when a new post goes live (which I have myself). What I am thinking of doing is ask some friends to help me promote some of the tweets by retweeting and generally linking for me. Otherwise, depending on the vacation, I might log into Twitter too as it is more of a fun thing than a work related thing for me. You can also just announce that you go away and won’t be tweeting for a while (but be mindful of the fact that burglars could read your Twitter).
   
• As for emails, comments, possible advertisement requests and more you might get. I’d just set up an auto-responder on my email address announcing that I am on vacation and when I am returning, thanking them for the email. It’s the age-old trick that still has a good purpose.

Web Designer

Here it gets a bit more tricky. When being a designer, developer, writer or anyone who has to look after clients, you have deadlines to meet and clients to make happy. You might also have incoming estimates that, if they don’t get a quick reply, might not opt to wait. I would do a couple of things to prepare here as well.

• As before, with the email, you are probably going to have to put an auto-responder on your email account saying that you are on vacation and when you are going to be returning. You might not think it, but a lot of clients will understand it. The ones that don’t you may not want to work with either way.
   
• Make sure to plan out a schedule for what you want to have done by when and alert your client about the fact that you are going to be away, well in advance. Let him/her know the planned process and try to make it as good as you can. Preferably, have your vacation planned out a long time in advance so that you know when it crops up that your client might just have to expect that week or two delay in the project, or not scheduling anything then at all.

Planning is the key for any type of freelancer or blogger. If you carefully schedule and plan your regular activities during this/these week(s) you are going to be away, you can likely have a relaxing vacation without needing to check back on everything all the time. The most important thing is that you can get some time off, fully off, and recharge your batteries.

This week, I wanted to send you over to Terry White’s Tech Blog. Terry is a world-known tech author who also works for Adobe. He knows a ton about tech (and of course the Adobe products) and shares that on his tech blog. Just this week, Terry launched a new design on his blog (made by myself, XLD Studios). Well, he posts a lot of in-depth reviews and thoughts about different kinds of tech equipment that he uses.

It’s a valuable resource if you are interested in tech and want to read great, thoughtful content! Check out Terry White’s Tech Blog!

Before we start, let’s take a look at the effect that we are going to create.

Create New Document

First, we want to create a new document. I’ve chosen a medium icon size of 128×128 (you could also do: 256×256, 512×512, 64×64. Any multiple of 8 is the key for icons).

Set the Colors

First, we set the foreground color to a light blue (#4c97e9).

Then, set the background color to a darker blue (#23497c).

Fill With Foreground Color

Next, we are going to fill our blank canvas with the light blue color. To do so you can use the keyboard shortcut, Option + Backspace (PC: Alt + Backspace) or you can go into the menus, Edit > Fill.

Select Foreground to Transparent Gradient

Now we are going to set up the gradient. Chose the prebuilt foreground to transparent gradient in the gradient editor and after that, click the X key on your keyboard to flip the foreground and background colors around (so the dark blue is now your foreground).

Apply The Gradient

Drag in from the bottom right, in a diagonal angle. Do the same from the bottom left. Then complete the fading gradient by dragging one from the bottom and straight up.

The Type

I’ve chosen the font Hypatia Sans Pro (from Adobe) as it gives quite the similar look of the "Ps" text in the photoshop icon. I’ve set it to be semibold at 94pt and I’ve also reduced the tracking slightly (-40). The color is set to a dark grey (#2e2e2e).

Duplicate, Color Change and Move

To create the little etched look, duplicate the text layer. On the bottom one, change the color to a light blue of the same shade as the background. Then with your arrow keys on your keyboard, nudge the layer one pixel to the left and one to the bottom (hit the left arrow key once, then the bottom arrow key once). Finally finish off with dropping the opacity until you have just a nice outline.

Adding Inner Shadow

Finally, we are going to add a subtle inner shadow to the text which further enhances the etched look. Go to the top text layer, right-click to get into the Blending Option and go to Inner Shadow. You want to set the distance to 0px and then play around a bit with the size and opacity until you get just a little depth in there.

Final Effect

Here we have the final Photoshop icon replica!