What Happens Between

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Two pens
Drawing lines
Making letters
Into words
Forming messages
Voicing thoughts
Revealing emotions
Risking much
To read meanings
Between the lines
Of the letters
Covering pages
Behind the pens
Of onetime lovers
Learning to be friends

©2014, Aaron Brown

Mac OS X Lion’s Full Screen Apps Are Cool, But Not Fully Baked

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Full-screen apps in the newest iteration of Mac OS X (Lion) are very cool things when viewed from the simplest use case scenarios.  Especially if you’re using a trackpad to interface with your computer.  Everything else gets out of the way, and you can concentrate on that one app while you work.  Excellent.

Wait. Hold on a second.

Do you have more than one display attached to your computer?  Don’t bother using full screen apps.  You’ll get that app full-screen alright, but at the expense of the ability to use any of your other screens.  That’s right: the app will zoom full screen on your primary display, while all others will display a lovely gray linen background (and do nothing else) until you come back out of full screen. Useless. Dare I say: “fail”? Yes.

Fail.

Why on earth can I no longer use my other screens for anything?

Another area where full-screen apps are less than bright and shiny is in how they deal with notifications from other (now background) applications.  In short, they don’t.  If you are, for instance, browsing in Safari full-screen, and also have Mail running full-screen in the background, you have no really effective way of being notified when new messages are received by Mail.  There’s no Dock visible, and therefore no badge on the Mail app’s dock icon to inform you there are now messages waiting.  Instead, you have to continually go switch to Mail to see.

Fail.

Yes, yes, I know you could hook up GrowlMail and let it notify you via Growl.  The point is that something like this needs to be baked into the OS itself if you’re going to suddenly take away all of the existing options for gaining the user’s attention for something like an incoming mail message.  Speaking of which, I vote for directly embedding Growl into Mac OS X, and directly embedding Growl notifications into all of the built-in apps.  Probably not feasible due to licensing restrictions, I know.  But it sure would be cool.

Do these two warts keep me from using full screen apps? No. At least not on my laptop, where I’m typically limited to one display.  Swiping between the full-screened apps is very convenient and cool.  I use it there.  On my desktop workstation, however, where I have dual screens, yes this absolutely makes me not use full screen apps at all.

I’d really like it if full-screening an app zoomed that app to the display it happened to currently be on, while leaving all of the other displays on the system alone.  I’d love to have the ability to zoom an app on each attached display.  Very useful.  I realize that this capability would require some thought on how to most effectively use the swipe gestures to switch between zoomed apps.  Perhaps the swipe could switch between apps that are zoomed on the display where the cursor currently resides?  Dunno.  Anything is better, however, than essentially taking away all of my other screens when I switch an app to full screen.  That’s just dumb.

A rant about passwords

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Okay.  Having just attempted to change my password on a site which shall remain nameless, and having my desired password be rejected, I confess that I’m upset.  My grandmother told me never to write angry, but I’m going to ignore that advice for a moment.

Why is it that some website designers, in their supposed infinite wisdom, decree that they know better than their users what can comprise an acceptable password?  It’s my password, it’s my account, it’s my information: let me secure it how I want.  It’s bad enough when you get a message that your password is not secure enough to meet the lofty requirements of the site:

“Your password is too easy for you to remember, please add more punctuation and numbers and capital letters, and don’t use any words out of the dictionary.  Here’s a suggestion for your password: @#$S59u01Cxx7*(6. Perfect! We’ll just set that for you, rather than the password that you chose.”

Do these masters of security not realize that the first thing that happens when you force someone to use a completely incomprehensible, completely non-intuitive password like that is that the user WRITES THE PASSWORD DOWN???!! How on earth is this secure?  Indeed, I submit that these types of passwords are actually less secure, because they are not easy for the person to remember, and therefore leave records for someone else to discover.

Worse, though, from my perspective are those designers that decree from their lofty perches that your chosen password can’t be used because those same designers have decided that their users’ passwords must be constructed from a very limited set of allowable characters:

“I’m sorry, but your secure password is not acceptable because you must make your password out of only lower-case letters and numbers.  Here’s a good password for you: pa55w0rd

No one will ever, ever, ever guess that one, we promise!”

Dammit, get over yourselves.  Just let me use the password that I want to use, please, and let’s both move on about our business.

By the way: when I encountered the first type of message this morning, the password that I had wanted to use was this: ‘I like gibberish.’ That’s right: it was a passphrase, rather than a password: easy and intuitive for me to remember, but very difficult for someone to guess, and also difficult to crack.  Brute-force tactics against that password would statistically take many more years to break it than either I or the designer of the site would likely be alive, but it was decreed to be unsuitable because it contained no numbers.

When I encountered the second type of message this morning, the password that I had wanted to use was this: ‘Twas brillig, and the Hobbits did roam.’ Which was rejected because passwords for that particular site had to be eight characters or less and comprised of only A-Z, a-z or 0-9.

So, putting on my professional’s hat for a moment, to give a small piece of advice to website designers:

  1. Let your user choose whatever password they want.
  2. It doesn’t matter to you what characters are in it, or how long it is, because you shouldn’t store that actual password at all.
  3. You should store an irreversible hash of the password, instead, which, when done correctly will:
    1. produce a value of a known and constant length.
    2. not reveal your user’s actual password in the event of your database being compromised by an attacker.
  4. All pages involved in either creating the password or logging in with the password should be on pages protected by SSL.
  5. You should then compare the hash of what the user submits to you to the hash you’ve stored in the database.

Okay, rant finished.

 

ashes and snow

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ashes and snow
drifting soft and low,
falling ever so end over end
drawn over the foreground,
clouded, my vision ascends

sheltered young background
o comfort and warmth we pretend,
cold memory and i, we descend
whirled in wind, o swept on down in
silence, deep abides it and i
am mute, gazing from below
thru vanes glazed and ground
glass, frosted and smeared o you see
beneath this clear ice, like unto me.

whither thee, o sleep my friend?
whither thee?

©2010 Aaron Brown, all rights reserved

Fixing Underexposed Shots in Photoshop

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As much as I hate the flash in my digital camera when it ruins a shot by firing when I don’t want it to, I hate myself more when it doesn’t fire because I’ve turned it off and then I discover later that I really should have let it fire. Does this ever happen to you? What do you usually do about it? I used to try Photoshop’s Auto Levels command (and rarely be happy with the results). Then, later I tried switching to the Auto Color command from Photoshop 7 (and still wasn’t happy with the results).

Then I learned how to travel back in time and turn the flash on!

OK, not really. But it was fun to say 🙂 And I have a trick to share that is almost as impressive when applied to an under-exposed picture.

Note: I originally learned this technique from the excellent book the photoshop book for digital photographers by Scott Kelby from New Riders Press (ISBN 0-7357-1236-0). I highly recommend it; it taught me more about Photoshop than all of the other Photoshop books I own combined 🙂

Anyway, here’s how the trick works:

  1. Use Photoshop to open an image in which you wish the flash had fired
  2. Duplicate the background layer (Control-J on PC or Command-J on Mac)
  3. Set the blending mode for the new layer to Screen:
    • Make sure your new layer is selected in the layers palette (click it)
    • Find the blending mode dropdown list at the top-left corner of the layers palette (it’s the one whose current choice reads Normal.
    • Choose Screen from the list.

Notice the difference? Pretty cool, huh? It really is like Photoshop magically turned on your flash via time travel 😉

TIP: If one screen adjustment layer still does not make the image bright enough, duplicate it (Control-J on PC or Command-J on Mac). The new layer will inherit the screen blending setting. Keep duplicating the layer until your image is bright enough…

TIP 2: If you add a screen adjustment layer and it’s not enough, but then add another and it’s too much, lower the opacity setting of the top layer (it’s the dropdown next to the blending mode one where you selected Screen). Start by trying 50%. If that’s not quite right, adjust the opacity up or down until it’s just right.

Here’s what the Photoshop help says about the Screen blending mode (in case you’re interested in what it’s actually doing):

Screen looks at each channel’s color information and multiplies the inverse of the blend and base colors. The result color is always a lighter color. Screening with black leaves the color unchanged. Screening with white produces white. The effect is similar to projecting multiple photographic slides on top of each other.

But you and I know what it’s really doing, don’t we? That’s right; it’s magically traveling back in time and turning on the flash when it needed to be turned on.

Shhh – I won’t tell. Ancient Chinese Secret, right? 😉

Quickly Whip Your Screen Into Shape For Viewing Images

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Have you ever worked really hard on an image, posted it, and then looked at it from another computer only to discover that it looks much too dark on that person’s screen? Or much too light?

Here’s a quick-and-dirty set of steps to get your monitor at least in the right ball park for displaying images with the right brightness and contrast.

calibration strip for brightness and contrast

If you don’t see the image inline with this post (hello, facebook), you can view it on my photography website.

The strip shows a range of greys from pure black to pure white. You should be able to see a clear difference between each shade of grey, ranging from pure black (left) and pure white (right). Along the top of the strips are alternate patches of black and dark grey. If it looks solid black to you (look very carefully), your monitor’s brightness setting is too low. Increase it until you can -just- perceive the difference between the grey and the black squares.

Also note that you might need to adjust both brightness _and_ contrast (if your monitor allows each to be changed independently) in order for all of the distinct shades to be seen.

Also note the important fact that this is not going to help at all to correct color problems if your monitor’s color settings are off; it’s only for getting the right brightness. For the color aspect of things, I highly recommend getting a hardware calibration device (like Pantone’s huey or X-Rite’s Eye-One); ESPECIALLY if you want to sell prints of your work.

Fixing Overexposed Shots In Photoshop

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I hate the autoflash on my digital camera. It never fails; I’ve spent a whole bunch of time framing a shot and getting the focus just right, concentrating on holding the camera steady because I forgot my tripod, well, you know the drill. So i take the shot and UP POPS THE FLASH AND DROWNS EVERYTHING IN A BLAZE OF WHITE! I’ve gotten to the point where I deliberately go out of my way to choose modes where I know it CANNOT come up and ruin my shot. But that does not do anything to save those images that I have already taken and had ruined by the stupid flash.

How about if I share something that does? (I originally learned this trick while reading the excellent book ‘the photoshop book for digital photographers’ by Scott Kelby (ISBN 0-7357-1236-0). If you find the following useful, you should seriously consider picking up a copy as there is much that it can teach you 🙂

Now, mind you, it’s not just my stupid flash that I hate for overexposing my pictures. I’m frequently mad at the sun for making things so darned bright. And at the sky for projecting light rather than reflecting it, and thus fooling my poor, simple light meter. Oops, I’m in danger of ranting, aren’t I?

Anyway, here’s how the trick works:

  1. Use Photoshop to open an image in which you wish the flash had not fired (or in which the sun was being somewhat over effusive)
  2. Duplicate the background layer (Control-J on PC or Command-J on Mac)
  3. Set the blending mode for the new layer to Multiply

    • Make sure your new layer is selected in the layers palette (click it).
    • Find the blending mode dropdown list at the top-left corner of the layers palette (it’s the one whose current choice reads Normal.
    • Choose Multiply from the list.

Notice the difference? Pretty cool, isn’t it? It’s as if Photoshop magically reached back in time and turned the flash back off 🙂

Here’s what the Photoshop help says about the Multiply layer blending mode and what it does:

Multiply looks at the color information in each channel and multiplies the base color by the blend color. The result color is always a darker color. Multiplying any color with black produces black. Multiplying any color with white leaves the color unchanged. … The effect is similar to drawing on the image with multiple magic markers.

Here’s what I say about it:

It should be called the miraculous way to fix that stupid flash in my camera 😉

TIP: If one multiply layer does not quite fix the overflash, feel free to add another one. And another one…

TIP 2: If you reach a point where the photo’s not quite right yet, but adding another multiply layer darkens the photo too much, try changing the opacity of the final layer to 50% (you can do this by changing the value of the Opacity dropdown which is right next to the Blending Mode dropdown in the Layers palette)