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Adam Merrifield

a picture of me
I am a web designer, theme designer, professional photographer and internet personality. I make many pretty things and I write a lot of content for the internet.

I am one of those guys that, because of the industry I am in, need to be connected at all times. At any given moment you'll find me posting on a forum, updating with twitter, Digging things worthy of attention, uploading pictures, or tagging cool sites.

here i am

seyDoggy Systems:
This is home base, the corporate headquarters, the hub, if you will, seyDoggy.com.

seyDesign news:
these are the RapidWeaver related posts that originally appear in the seyDesign.com blog

Uploads from seyDoggy:
these are the pictures that I upload to flickr

Merrifield Photography:
as a professional photographer I my camera ready at Merrifield-Photography.com.

delicious.com/seydoggy:
these are the websites I want to share or revisit later on. I just tag them on delicious.com.

what i am

I am the owner and operator of seyDoggy Systems, a small theme, code and design outfit based in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. We primarily develop web based technologies but have begun to dabble in the desktop realm.

what i do

I code like a fool. I design like a fool. I am happiest when I can split my time between the two (though I tire of Photoshop faster then I do TextMate or Terminal), and somehow I have managed to etch out a living doing so.

New Level of Geekdom — Executable Business Cards

new level of geekdom
new level of geekdom, originally uploaded by seyDoggy.

I am a bit of a business card junkie and a moo card junkie at that, so any excuse to print more is a good enough excuse for me. When Chris showed me this inspired design a few weeks back, I had to get them printed.

The idea is that as web professionals, our websites are our business cards, and those small bits of paper we hand out are just little notes to tell people to go there. So why not play with that idea, bringing a piece of the web to our cards. It’s not a completely original idea, you can find a few examples out there, but I’ve yet to see an executable business card (granted I haven’t really looked all that hard).

Chris’ original concept had the contact info in HTML, but it didn’t really say “me”. So I set out to make something a little more fun — an executable business card with all the code required to run my contact info in a web browser. Fun huh? Glad you thought so.

So if you’re interested in making your own executable business card (as a number of people have expressed already), I’ve made the source code available here, and you can see how it runs here. Use it as a spring board to do something really cool.

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Panic Blog » Saving Icons for Snow Leopard

Obsessive designer? You may have noticed: icons made in Mac OS X 10.6 are often washed-out/lighter.

Normally we create .png files of each icon state, then drag them into Icon Composer. But, starting with 10.6, the colors would lighten unexpectedly. It wasn’t dramatic, but with certain icons (like the one below) it was totally noticeable. The source is on the left. See how the red is washed out in the final icon on the right?

via Panic Blog » Saving Icons for Snow Leopard.

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W3C Unicorn Bookmarklets

With the just fresh news of the W3C’s new Unicorn validator I thought I would jump right in and make myself a couple of new bookmaklets to utilize the new validation platform. I thought I could share them with you.

  • The General Conformance Check (drag to bookmarks bar): Unicorn-GC
  • The CSS Profile Validation (drag to bookmarks bar): Unicorn-CSS
  • The MobileOK Checker (drag to bookmarks bar): Unicorn-MB
  • The Feed Validator (drag to bookmarks bar): Unicorn-FD
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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-25

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My Thoughts — Retouching with Pixelmator

Swinging on the monkey bars
Swinging on the monkey bars, originally uploaded by seyDoggy.

I’ve long since been displeased with Photoshop, so much so that my last version was from CS3. Until recently there hasn’t been any hopeful contenders to step in the ring, but the release of Pixelmator 1.6 has certainly got a lot of peoples hopes up.

I don’t work in photo editors all that much anymore and I don’t get much into graphics since working with Chris at DEVi8.design, so granted my needs are light. But still, I know what I want in an image and I want to be able to get it out. I want an editor that makes that process intuitive.

Yesterday I blogged about making a high pass filter in Pixelmator and honestly I had not done it the manual way in years, but I had no trouble at all finding what I was after in Pixelmator. I cannot say the same of Photoshop.

Well this is the image I was working on. All I wanted was a high pass filter to sharpen up the eyes, a little vignette (which I will blog about making a convincing vignette next week), some color pop and a little bit of exposure tweaking. I can honestly say that it took me no more time or effort then it would have in Photoshop. In fact, I’m convinced that it was far less stressful.

So how do I think Pixelmator will stack up in the pro world? It’s still a little light. Graphic designers used to making rich icons courtesy of Photoshops confused vector tools (yes that’s me) will be looking for a proper vector editor if they dropped Photoshop all together. And there is something to be said for Photoshops layers styles and smart filters which I haven’t been able to reproduce in Pixelmator (someone point them out if they exist please), but honestly those were nothing you couldn’t do with masks and a little know-how.

I think Pixelmator has a way to go before becoming every photographers sweetheart but it’s very exiting to see how far they have come in such a short time. I’m putting smart money on Pixelmator being a real thorn in Adobe’s side in 3 to 5 years.

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Getting the High Pass Filter Effect in Pixelmator

EDIT: Before this tutorial even got cold, the Pixelmator Tutorial Podcast picked up the technique and improved on it! Be sure to check out their slightly different method which allows for greater control by allowing you to visualize the sharpening effect.

I recently canned Adobe Photoshop and switched to Pixelmator. No, Pixelmator is not yet everything that Photoshop is. It is missing key items like vector tools (one could argue that Photoshop should not have had them anyway), but Pixelmator is catching up really fast. Pixelmator might even have a leg up on Adobe in a number of areas — like that fact that is looks, smells and feels like a Mac app from this decade.

One thing I found missing that I use quite regularly in photo enhancement work is the high pass filter. A high pass filter is a great way to add some sharpness to your images if you find the edges a little fuzzy. You may not be aware, but the high pass filter in Photoshop is little more then an inverted, blurred copy of the original. It’s easy enough to create manually, but having the feature built into Photoshop made it quick and easy.

So my plan is to write some AppleScript to make happen in Pixelmator. Unfortunately Pixelmator doesn’t yet have an AppleScript Dictionary, so such a script is going to have to be done with what we call menu scripting. Until I have time to sort that out though, here is how you manually emulate the high pass filter found in Photoshop.

1. Duplicate your original layer (⌘J)

image showing layer duplication

2. Name the duplicate “high pass”

image showing the renaming process

3. Remove the color

You want to remove the color but preserve the luminescence of the image, so the easiest way to do this is with Edit > Fill (⌥⌘F), then choose black, and the blending option color. Keep the opacity at 100% and click ok.

image showing color removal

4. Duplicate “high pass” (⌘J) and Invert (⌘I)

image showing inversion

5. Add Gaussian blur (Filter > Blur > Gaussian)

Add as much or as little Gaussian blur to the duplicate as you need. The radius will directly correlate to the number you would have used in your Photoshop high pass filter setting. I typically used between 4 and 20, depending on the amount of sharpening I was after, but you are welcome to go to any extreme you like.

image showing gaussian blur being added

6. Set Blending to Linear Light and Opacity to 50%

image showing blending

7. Merge “high pass” layers

image showing the merging process

8. Set the Blending of “high pass merged” to overlay and enjoy!

image showing new high pass filter

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-18

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How to Get iOS4 to Sync Your Photos

Since I went through the arduous, two hour long process of upgrading my iPhone OS to iOS 4, I’ve been nothing but thrilled with what felt like a brand new iPhone 3G. There was just one exception; I couldn’t sync my photos.

I don’t store music on my iPhone. I have little in the way of apps. I don’t keep voice recordings. I use the bulk of my iPhone’s 8 GB of storage space to carry my photos — lots of them.

As an avid photographer I have tens of thousand of photos digitally stored on my Mac Pro going back as early as 2003 (when I started scanning my film onto disk), so I wouldn’t expect my iPhone 3G to carry all that, but prior to the update to iOS 4 I was at least able to sync the photos from 2009 and 2010 (just over 3000 images). Any attempts — 3 thus far — to get any photos on my iPhone resulted hours of, “Syncing seyDoggy’s iPhone” and a candy striped status bar with no progress to report. I literally left it run overnight and woke to no advance in the process.

iPod Photo CacheClearly something was amiss with iOS 4 so I sought to solve this mystery myself. It took one quick look into the Pictures library where I was drawing these two folders from (2009 and 2010) and noticed a folder called “iPod Photo Cache”. Trashed it. Quickly looked in any other folder I may have synced with my iPhone in the past and trashed them as well.

Back in iTunes I attempted another sync and without blinking an eye, iTunes and my iPhone ticked happily along syncing my photos to phone once again. A quick search on Google for delete “iPod Photo Cache” iOS4 turns up oodles of results of others with similar syncing problems, so I clearly was not alone.

Hopefully this helps you out.

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-11

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Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-07-04

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