I have been using Adobe products for many years. From my early days in design I was using Photoshop and Illustrator, and also using Macromedia’s web design products like Flash, Dreamweaver and Fireworks which were then acquired by Adobe in 2005.

In recent years I have found the the quality of the Adobe products, particularly their web development applications, Flash, Dreamweaver and Fireworks, has been slowly getting worse.

I can’t put my finger on exactly when things started to go downhill but I have a feeling it was around them time they introduced a JavaScript API into their products. The benefit of the API is that it allows users to create add-ons for Adobe applications that can automate common tasks or create new edit panels etc, enhancing the application’s functionality and streamlining workflow. A nice idea.

Now, the JavaScript API may not be to blame at all, but how many times do so see a little ‘x’ in your web browser indicating that there is a JavaScript error on the page? And how many times has your browser hung or crashed due to a timeout error caused by a JavaScript? I can’t help thinking that the JavaScript API may be the reason the my Adobe applications seem to be less stable and crash more often than they used to. I might be wrong, this is just how it feels as a long-time user of the products.

So, back to the dialog box…

Does this mean that Adobe have now finally recognised that the stability and quality of their products needs to be addressed?

Is spying on our attempts to use their software (with permission, obviously) an indication how desperate they are to act on their users’ feedback to improve the robustness of their faltering web suite? If this is what it takes to gather enough useful data for them to be able to get things back on track then count me in.

Of course it could be that they only want to study user behaviour so they can improve the UI of their products but I seriously hope that one of Adobe’s main objects is to use the data to gather more accurate details about crashes and errors so they can focus on making their applications rock solid and stable.

In the meantime, I know there are now many other high quality affordable or open source web development applications available that I could turn to, but I don’t want to. I like using Dreamweaver. I like using Flash. I like using Fireworks.

I really hope that any data Adobe manages to collect through this program helps them resolve the issues with their products. If they are able to figure out why Fireworks crashes on me incessantly throughout the day I will be much happier (and much more productive).

Further Reading

• Adobe Product Improvement Program
• An open letter to software developers RE Adobe Fireworks
• Extending Fireworks (using the JavaScript API)
• Extending Dreamweaver (using the JavaScript API)
• Extending Flash (using the JavaScript API)

No idea why or how this happened.

Seemed to happen not long after upgrading to Snow Leopard. Had a search around and found other people had been experiencing blurry/pixelated icons too. Also, this thread on the Apple Support web site.

Anyway, I just dragged the Safari application into the dock again and that fixed it for me – weird…

Nikki’s Debut EP “Now or Never” is available to download…

Nikki gigs regularly in Oxford, London and the surrounding areas… She is currently working on her second EP which will be released later in 2009 (fingers crossed). The first one, ‘Now or Never’ is available NOW on iTunes and Amazon:

• Buy from iTunes
• Buy from Amazon.co.uk

For updates and forthcoming gigs, you can follow Nikki at nikkiloy.com, Facebook and Twitter.

PS: She’s also available for booking for your event and I can assure you she’s great! (I’m she she won’t mind me saying)

So, this is how Twitter could be useful!

I have to say, I haven’t really got into Twitter yet. My one and only ‘Tweet’ is now over 1 month old which shows my embarrassing failure to get to grips with what Twitter is all about. Yes, I’m one of the 552,828 followers of Stephen Fry (at the time of writing), but up until now I’ve failed so see the usefulness of Twitter in a real-world environment – not just to know when Stephen in going to be “Back in time for tea”.

So, hit London with 48 hours of tube strikes and suddenly it all becomes clear. Follow BBCTravelalert on Twitter and get instant up-to-date feedback on the latest travel situation from London’s commuters – much more useful that the TFL service updates which are rarely accurate.

Well, mainly because I have been really busy, but also because I’ve been spending much of my time getting lost in WordPress.

By getting lost I don’t mean disorientated and confused – in fact WordPress is a great little blogging/CMS system for the non-technical user with it’s intuitive user interface and now in version 2.7 the ability to cusomise the admin, hiding panels and options that you don’t use on a regular basis.

I’ve been absorbing myself in the code, examining plugins and themes, and getting to grips with hooks and filters. Under the bonnet, WordPress provides an extensive interface into which developers can create complex plugins and created rich, visual, interactive themes. And one thing is clear…

…a WordPress site does not necessarily have to look or behave like a blog.

Check out some of these themes and sites – they all run WordPress, honest (or at least they did the last time I looked):

• Reform & Revolution
• Seek & Destroy Clothing
• Modularity Theme
• On Demand Theme
• BuddyPress
• Typographica
• John Saddington
• Fotofolio Theme

How to force shutdown (reset) an iPhone: To force shutdown/reboot the iPhone 3G, press the sleep/wake power button first followed by the home button. Hold the buttons down for a few seconds until the screen changes. You should see the black background and white Apple logo to indicate the reset was successful.

Quit a frozen iPhone application: Very occasionally you may find that an iPhone application can freeze and lock up. To resolve this simply hold the Home button when in the application for about 6 seconds to quit it. You should then be able to reopen the application without restarting the phone.

Hope you find this useful…

This looks interesting…
Easy-to-integrate online website content management.

Adobe InContext Editing appears to be a move on from Adobe Contribute, disposing of the local application and providing a Rich Internet Application (RIA) which will allow you to edit predetermined areas of your web site, presumable defined by Dreamweaver-style editable areas. This it great as it will

• give website designers control over their design
• give website owners control over their content, anywhere with a web connection

Adobe have published only a limited amount of information on their site at present but do say that the service will use Flash and Javascript to provide an editor interface via your web browser.

I can currently find very little technical information about the service or ideas of pricing/license structures. Will it run directly on your own web server or will it work via an Adobe server, and as such will it be a one-off fee or will there be a subscription-based payment plan. At the moment Adobe really aren’t giving anything away.

Furthermore, I won’t be able to try it out yet as Adobe have decided to release the preview version only in the United States in October 2008. Why Adobe, why?

If you are lucky enough to live in the US and able to try out inContext Editing next month, please post your comments below so all of us across the pond can get an insight into this CMS solution.

Read more on the Adobe Web Site.

I had a problem the other day where my Mac only got as far as displaying the Spotlight icon before it just froze displaying the spinning colour wheel of doom.

My guess was that it was a font issue as I had recently (and stupidly) dragged some fonts from a local server into a Library in Font Book and my guess was that my Mac was trying to find those fonts but couldn’t as it they were on the server.

After searching around (fortunately I had another Mac handy) I found that if you only get as far as the Spotlight icon at startup it is probably because of a corrupt font cache or possible a corrupt Spotlight playlist.

To clear your font cache you need to delete the font caches files which are in your Library folder in the com.apple.ATS folder:

HD/Library/Caches/com.apple.ATS

In here you will find a folder called “System” and other folders with numeric names that relate to other installed fonts. Delete all the folders apart from the “System” folder. When you next start up hopefully everything should be OK.

You could try starting up in Safe Mode by holding down the shift key when booting your Mac (which should in theory disable non system fonts), then delete the font cache files.

If you still can’t boot up, and have another Mac handy, connect them both both a firewire cable and startup your problem Mac in hard disk mode by holding down “t” at startup – you should see a big firewire icon on the screen and the computer should appear as a hard disk on the desktop of your other Mac. You can then get at the font cache files to delete them.

Poole Harbour’s stunning sunsets are the inspiration for a contemporary and highly visible light display on Poole Quay this Easter. The blueness of distance is a highly imaginative piece of public art created by artist Simon Lee Dicker, a graduate of Bournemouth & Poole College.

Dicker uses LED lights to produce over 250 colours that will illuminate the old marketing suite office building adjacent to the Thistle Hotel. Over a period of three months Dicker has used a series of web-cams to capture images of sunsets and has re-presented his findings as a rolling wave of colour that will re-create the many different moods stimulated by dusk over the world’s second largest natural Harbour.

The project has been possible thanks to sponsorship from local Queens Award winning engineering company Air Bearings Limited (main sponsor), Think Signs Limited, and funding from the Art Council England’s grants for the arts programme. It is also being supported by the Council’s Arts Development office and Poole Tourism, and will run from Good Friday 21st March to Sunday 13th April, dusk till 10.00pm daily.

“Contemporary society is distanced from the ‘natural’ world through the prevalence of screen based working practice and leisure activities,” says Dicker. “this installation appropriates the technology that distances us from that world and uses it to capture and represent images of the natural world through the filter of human experience.”

For further information visit www.fireandicecreative.com.

Courtesy of FDM Records, for a limited time only, here are 2 FREE downloads from Nizlopi’s brand new album MAKE IT HAPPEN which is available now to pre-order and is released on 31st March 2008 from www.nizlopi.com/shop.

• Nizlopi – Without You (388 downloads)
• Nizlopi – Start Beginning (367 downloads)

These tracks are no longer available to download but you can buy these and other Nizlopi tracks at Amazon.co.uk…

You can also view videos on YouTube of the tracks Love Is and Without You which feature on the new album.

Check out the new single “Start Beginning” from Nizlopi to be released 17th March 2008 – animation directed and produced by Mustashrik.

Pre-order it from www.nizlopi.com/shop/ or watch the full video on YouTube…

Buy other Nizlopi tracks at Amazon.co.uk…

‘Tune Up, Turn On, Stretch Out’ is the new Album from Deirdre Cartwright Group. To find out more and download tracks, visit:

www.deirdrecartwright.com

Looking for the perfect gift for the greatest mother. Poppy Treffry have got some fantastic new handmade tea cosies which they’ve made especially…

www.poppytreffry.co.uk

For more information visit www.deirdrecartwright.com

…but after trawling the TomTom web site and Google, I managed to fix it…

The TomTom connected fine to my computer so the first thing I did was to back up all the files on my TomTom to the computer manually by dragging them across – I believe the white cross in red circle problem occurred when using the backup option in the TomTom Home application, so I didn’t want to use this in case it made the situation worse.

One thing to note is you MUST make sure you have a backup of the map files on your TomTom. I think these are linked to the actual device so if you delete them you may have problems downloading and reinstalling them.

I suspected that the white cross in a red circle error had occurred because of a corrupt file caused by a glitch when syncing or backing up using the TomTom Home application, so now I had a full backup of my TomTom files, I reformatted the TomTom and then copied all the backed up files back to the device.

This worked for me!!!

I suggest you only try this as a last resort if you cannot find any other solutions, and I accept no responsibility if you try this and are unable to restore your TomTom – all I can say is, this worked for me…

Here are some links to other references I found while looking for solutions:

• eXpansys Forums: TomTom Go 720 Won”t start up
• AVForums: Tomtom 520 error
• eXpansys Forums: Tom Tom Go 910
• FixYa: TomTom GO 720 – flashing red circle with white…
• yourNAV: 720 Hangs With Cross On Screen
• Yahoo! Answers: Help i dont no what iv done to my Tom Tom?
• Google Groups: TomTom 720 T problem
• yourNAV: Tomtom Won’t Boot Up
• Global Positioning Systems: 910 faulty after 7 months – any comments on repair time??
• GpsPasSion: TOMTOM GO 700 has had a major crash!

I recently found some info on how to unlock your iPod if you have used a screen lock code (iPod nano, iPod nano 2G, and iPod 5G models) to lock your iPod and then forgotten the code. It seems like your options are:

1. Connect your iPod to the primary computer you use it with (the first one iPod synced with), and open iTunes. When you disconnect your iPod from the computer, it should no longer be locked.
2. You can restore your iPod to factory settings using iPod Updater. This will erase all data on your iPod (so ideally you want to try option 1 first)! Then, you can add your music and data back to your iPod – providing you have your data backed up of course.

You can read more in the article on EveryMac.com.

If you find any further options for unlocking the screen without the screen lock code, please post them as a comment below.

The sale of my canvas for The Dog Project raised £2000 for Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital charity.

To see all the canvases, including some by celebrities and well-known artists such as Damien Hirst and Gary Hume, and find how much they raised, please visit The Dog Project web site.

Have a go at Line Rider…
Create a scenario by drawing line for the little guy to ride along – it’s more tricky than it looks!

www.official-linerider.com

Last chance for you to bid on my Dog Project canvas!

You have until the end of today to bid on my dog canvas. Bids will be updated online until 5pm today, any bids after that will be blind. The earliest, highest bid will win. Make sure you get your bids in asap.

Click here to bid…

The canvases will now be remaining at The Hospital Gallery until Friday 9th February.

The BBC website today featured a photo of Ricky Gervais with his canvas at the Dog Project auction. The sale of his canvas raised £2,200 for Great Ormond Street Hospital.

You can visit the Hospital Gallery to view the entire collection of dog canvases, and bid on the remaining canvases at the gallery or via the Dog Project web site, until the 7th February.

www.dogproject.co.uk

(PS. You can still bid on my dog canvas until 7th February)