I’ve fallen completely, some would say hopelessly, in love with jquery. With the near 100% penetration of javascript it seems like it’s finally time to start using the stuff everywhere and the folks at jquery have ever-growing list of reasons why.

My favorite at the moment is the jquery based 3d Carousel that mimics the mac cover flow feature. It does what it sounds like it does – allows you to take a number of images and turn them into a rotating 3d Carousel. The mouse interaction is a little sluggish but is sure to get better in the near future.

Next up is the very simple WYMeditor. I started out writing html and over the last few years have really gotten into CSS. I love the idea of xhtml, but some of it just doesn’t seem very human if you get my drift. The WYMeditor is designed to allow you to produce chunks of code that won’t gum up the gears of your W3C validation within the comfort of a friendly little text editor.

And finally another simple and yet extremely useful jQuery plugin – tableHover. When it comes to interfaces it’s nearly always the simple, nearly unnoticeable things that really make a difference between a good interface and a stop-what-you’re-doing-and-call-your-mother interface. tableHover presents you with a number of options to focus user attention on one aspect or another of a table. You can set parameters for columns, rows, columns + rows, etc. Very customizable and fairly straight forward to implement as well.

Click the image below to see the entire banner.

I’ve just finished hacking my ipod touch using touchfree3. It is pretty much the greatest thing ever. I also found great info on enabling the iphone apps on ipodtouchfans.com. If you have an ipod touch you have GOT to do it.

I’ve had access to Adobe CS3 for some time, but initially was too busy doing practical stuff to experiment with any of it’s new features. Here’s a list of 5 things I’ve found useful so far.

Import .psd’s into Flash
Finally I can make a mock-up in photoshop or illustrator and import it directly into flash. Why’d that take so long. Oh yeah.

Easy 3d [Photoshop]
Photoshop now allows you to import 3d objects into your workspace. You can then rotate those objects to suit your purpose render them into 2d images. This is a great feature for designers that have to continuously freshen ads but don’t have the time/resources to create/find/scavenge new materials every time. Just rotate and recolor and you’ve got something fresh.

Layer Comps [Photoshop]
The new layer comps feature is kick-ass because you can basically create endless snapshots of compositions and revert back to them at will. I used to accomplish this by saving different versions of a file but it’s a nightmare to manage and completely unnecessary for smaller jobs.

Text Layout Tools [Illustrator]
I like InDesign, it’s just great. But for smaller projects (as in one page) I’ve always preferred to stay in Illustrator. Now Illustrator comes with some of my favorite InDesign features like text threads, paragraph/character style palettes and much more, making it easier to scale your project resources appropriately.

Import InDesign into InDesign
I always hated Quark and I’ve always loved InDesign. However it was frustrating placing multiple objects on the same page for printing because you couldn’t re-import your project into another project. Well, they fixed it. There are a lot of workflow improvements to InDesign that bring us much closer to the mythic single source publishing.

I just uploaded my first model into Sketchup. I’m trying to get it to place properly in Google Earth though… might need to read a manual or something.

My main nerve center, navigammatron.org is in the process of dying. Soon it will be no more.
Though navigammatron will surely be missed, change is always welcome. I’m going to re-register the name however I will now start the process of migrating to my new home at robotoverlord.mobi. Please visit me there sometime.

Interactive Futures is a yearly new media conference that happens in Victoria, BC. At the moment I’m working on illustrations for their promotional materials. The first is a rasterized image rendered with some delicate depth-of-field. The second is the same model, but output as an illustrator, vector graphic.