I’ve been running IE 7 beta on test machines for a while now, but just installed it on my production machine through auto-update.
It was a smooth update. The poor bookmark UI in IE 7 however, is the one thing that keeps me using Firefox as my default browser. That’s too bad. I really like the DOM explorer add on for IE versus the Firefox developer toolbar extension).
After installing IE 7 you may notice that Dreamweaver does not remember your FTP passwords for your sites. Adobe … released an update that’ll fix the disappearing passwords.
(1) Buy more ram for Photoshop. I know many people are skeptical if you’ll see much performance difference when using 1 gig of ram versus over 1 gig of ram. But, if you’re running Photoshop with large files you will benefit from more ram. I’ve been running 1 gig of ram on my Dell 9150, Pentium Dual Core 3Ghz for about 8 months. It’s been nice, but lately, I’ve had to work with 100+ layer Photoshop docs and things were getting slow. The extra gig I just added (for a total of 2 gig) has increased my typical Photoshop tasks 30% to 250%. The time savings will pay for the $99 gig of ram update in no time. Below is my very unscientific benchmark test of Photoshop speed before and after the ram upgrade.
Seconds taken to perform my common Photoshop tasks with 1 gig of ram versus 2 gigs of ram. The file that was tested is 45 megs, with 100+ layers, rgb, 72dpi and 1000×1800 pixels.
|
Seconds taken using 1 gig of ram |
Seconds taken using 2 gig of ram |
Percentage increase in speed with 2 gigs of ram |
| open the file |
175 |
121 |
144% |
| action: duplicate the file then flatten it |
7 |
4 |
175% |
| save for web |
5 |
2 |
250% |
| save as new file name |
138 |
105 |
131% |
(2) The next tip. Buy your ram from The Chip Merchant. I remember buying my first ram upgrade for my Mac Quadra 700 from The Chip Merchant in 1991. They had the best prices and service then, and still do 15 years later!
I had a ram slot question about my Dell when I went to install the new 1 gig module so I called The Chip Merchant. Within minutes their tech support knew my exact Dell model and everything about the installation. He explained some nitty gritty details for options I’d have down the road and we were done. I love The Chip Merchant.
Check out the new (free) beta download of Microsoft Expression Web Designer. It’s looking quite nice and heck of a lot cheaper ($0 currently) than Dreamweaver. Vitamin has a good review if you want to see screen shots before downloading.
If you’ve tried to use rounded corners on the ASP.NET 2.0 menu control you’ll notice that the control renders a white background behind the entire bounds of the drop down menus (in IE 6). There is no user interface in Visual Studio (or Visual Web Developer) to get rid of this white space. (more…)
I just started writing this blog. Stay tuned for more nitty gritty on PNG post processing (lets hope Macromedia whips Photoshop PNG output into shape), how to format CSS for ASP.NET 2.0-centric developers, storyboarding rich AJAX UI’s and hopefully some more (no promises : ).
