EdgeCase is a nifty new utility for the Mac. Tons of features on the Mac rely on Fitts’s law. Notably, the Mac makes good use of the «infinite width» provided by screen edges. These «infinite width» edges allow you to quickly access the menubar, reveal a hidden Dock, or slam your mouse into a screen corner to activate Mission Control, Exposé, or another feature.

This stops working reliably once you have more than one monitor. Now, the edge between the two screens disappears. Instead of hitting the edge, the mouse moves to the other screen. EdgeCase solves this problem. With EdgeCase, the edge returns, and works as if you only had one monitor.

To move your mouse to the other monitor, hold down ctrl or ⌘, wait for half a second, or «bounce» the cursor on the edge.1

Recommended.

In this article, I’ll share some tips that I use in my work in Adobe Fireworks that could help improve the quality of your designs and workflow. Some of these tips are just quick explanations of features that you might not be aware of, while some are techniques and methods to improve the default visual results. Let’s begin!

concert review: Richard Stoltzman, Eliot Fisk — from David Bratman (Kalimac's corner) —

The Oshman acoustics were very good tonight. Maybe it was the performers and their instruments. Stoltzman plays clarinet. Fisk plays guitar. Not a common combination, and the three works they played together were all arrangements: Bartok's Romanian Folk Dances, originally for piano; some Appalachian folk songs, and something by Rossini. The common feature among all of these was an improvisationary style, as if they were just making the pieces up as they went along, with a lot of abortive false turns.

Gentlemen, if we play together we shall also play separately: Fisk played his own arrangement of one of Bach's cello suites, arranged in the spirit of one of Bach's own lute suites. And Stoltzman played a solo piece that had been written for him personally, Steve Reich's New York Counterpoint for eleven clarinets all played by himself, ten on tape and one live. These were both big successes, the Reich in particular sounding wonderful, perhaps because 91% of it was coming through the sound system rather than trying to make itself heard from the acoustically deficient stage. The audience of largely elderly people had mostly not heard any Reich before and the ones I talked with all raved over how enjoyable and energetic it was. It's such a relief to have escaped from the days when "contemporary music" automatically attacked and repelled its audience, and Reich is one of the figures most responsible for the change.

The recovery of objects obscured by scattering is an important goal in imaging and has been approached by exploiting, for example, coherence properties, ballistic photons or penetrating wavelengths. Common methods use scattered light transmitted through an occluding material, although these fail if the occluder is opaque. Light is scattered not only by transmission through objects, but also by multiple reflection from diffuse surfaces in a scene. This reflected light contains information about the scene that becomes mixed by the diffuse reflections before reaching the image sensor. This mixing is difficult to decode using traditional cameras. Here we report the combination of a time-of-flight technique and computational reconstruction algorithms to untangle image information mixed by diffuse reflection. We demonstrate a three-dimensional range camera able to look around a corner using diffusely reflected light that achieves sub-millimetre depth precision and centimetre lateral precision over 40 cm×40 cm×40 cm of hidden space.

Using CSS to create the common place folder corner effect. Pretty sure I used this effect some time in the last few years.

via Read it Later

RT @globalmoxie: "How Designers Can Help Developers": the nuts and bolts of good photoshop hygiene from @mattgemmell