Optimising Mail.app for low bandwidth usage

Update: Turns out the reason Mail.app was downloading everything was due to to an malfunctioning plugin (JunkMatcher). Uninstalling this fixed it all, thankfully! (more…)

BBC News: 20 Hidden Tourist Gems

BBC News: 20 Hidden Tourist Gems in Great Britain. (I say GB rather than the UK as the Isle of Man is not part of the UK – it’s a British Isle.) And yes, you really can see England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales from the top of Snaefell on a clear day.

Debunking Daryl Cagle’s criticism of the LA Times

Debunking Daryl Cagle’s criticism of the LA Times’s font usage.

The ugliest British banknote ever

BBC News has a good overview of the new £20 note. It has to be the ugliest British banknote I’ve ever seen. The front isn’t bad but the rear, oh my, where to start with this monstrosity?

What the hell is going on with that illustration in the centre? The guilloché behind it makes it far, far too busy, it makes my eyes hurt just to try and figure out what’s going on.

The profile portrait of Adam Smith is remarkably ugly; look at the previous 20′s portrait of Edward Elgar and scratch your head as to why they couldn’t come up with something more tasteful.

What’s going on with the stroke around the “£20″ in the top right corner, and why has someone just peppered a load of EURion constellations around it with no effort to make them fit in?

Who was responsible for the punctuation of the horrible condensed sans text that reads “The division of labour…”, and since when did it become normal to end a sentence with a colon, only to follow it up with bracketed, uncapitalised and unpunctuated text? (Is that colon pointing at the design, or what?)

And finally, is that “Twenty Pounds” and “Bank of England” set in Bodoni? Now you’re just taking the piss…

New Garmin Forerunner 305 device software

New Garmin Forerunner 305 device software (firmware), for all you GPS-tracking fitness junkies out there. Via the MotionBased blog Full list of changes after the jump:

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CR: Record sleeve designs of the week 5

Record sleeve designs of the week from Creative Review.

The LA Times resembles a ransom note

Cartoonist Daryl Cagle points out that the LA Times resembles a ransom note, with a staggering 22 different fonts above the fold on the front page! via Veer.

Things to avoid when building a website

Josiah Cole has an excellent rant over what NOT to do when building a website. He’s bang-on for the most part, though I’ll contest no. 6 in that, rather than print designers specifically, he should really be having a go at people who blatantly don’t know what they’re doing but think that they do. While everyone has to start somewhere, and “winging it” a little is part of life, were the individuals he describes to show some humility and admit to not knowing it all, they’d go a long way to convincing people that they’re not assholes.

I’ll add a couple (of tongue-in-cheek digs) to his list:

• Don’t require users to log in to post comments. If they’re first time visitors and have something to say, any barriers to them saying it will mean they stay silent. And if you do insist on logins, implementing OpenID is as good a compromise as any.
• Following up on the “you’re vs. your” common misspellings point, don’t mix up “here and hear”. (See the copy in point 6.)

Neat Lightroom trick for cloning out dust

A neat Lightroom trick for cloning out dust:

Zoom in to 1:1. Starting at the top-left of the image, press the “page down” key. The window will move down the photo until it gets to the bottom… and then jump across and up to the next previously-hidden part of the image. This’ll repeat until you end up at the bottom-right of your photograph. Fantastic!

It’s the perfect way to quickly scan for and spot out dust; you can tell these guys are really passionate about a great user interface. Via an interview with Mark Hamburg, founder of Adobe Lightroom.

New version of Menalto Gallery

The popular web-based photo album organiser “Gallery” released version 2.2 today.