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Posts Tagged ‘Software Development’

Adobe Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts

December 23rd, 2009 No comments

I have used several image editing applications over the years.  My favorite has been Paint Shop Pro, and more recently Paint.NET.  I haven’t done anything overly exotic in the past, and in fact I still have Paint Shop Pro version 7 (from when it was developed by Jasc).  Paint.NET is a completely free photo editing application, and is very impressive.  However, I am currently involved with a new opportunity and found myself diving headfirst into the power that is Adobe Photoshop.

I needed to display the copyright symbol in a footer, and I wanted to do so without digging through the character map.  I love keyboard shortcuts, so I set out to find one.  I found that you can fall back to the old “Alt-ASCII” standby!  Here are a few common ones:

  • € – euro – Alt-0128
  • ™ – trademark – Alt-0153
  • ¢ – cents – Alt-0162
  • £ – pound – Alt-0163
  • © – copyright symbol – Alt-0169
  • ® – registered trademark – Alt-0174
  • µ – micro – Alt-0181

To use any of the above while in text mode, simply hold down the Alt key, type the 4-digit code using your keypad and then release the Alt key.  The character will appear and behave just like regular text.

Do you have a symbol you can’t find?  Leave a comment and I’ll see if I can find it!

Categories: Software Development, Tips and Tricks Tags: ,

Great Javascript Tooltip Library

August 11th, 2009 No comments

When it comes to development, I typically treat 3rd party tools and libraries like the plague.  Sure they might something cool, but if you account for the time debugging their implementation you could sometimes write them yourself.  Or worse yet, you cannot upgrade the parent application without breaking the 3rd party add-on!  When it comes to mission critical applications (database, web server, etc), I champion native, fully supported solutions only.

Much like any piece of code, there are occasional exceptions.  Recently I wanted to add tooltip functionality to several web screens.  I wanted something beyond the native browser tooltips, those always feel junky and unreliable.  In the process of writing a small library, I stumbled on to Walter Zorn’s tooltip library.  I scanned the documentation, then paused.  On the surface it looked great, it had the tweaks I really wanted: cross-browser support, delay for opening and closing and HTML support.  But would it really work?

Implementation was simple enough, download the javascript files, reference them and call a single function.  Ok, I like simplicity, I like the way he passes parameters to his functions and the script files were small enough.  So I decided to give it a try…and was very impressed!  Sure enough, it worked as advertised the first time.  I tested in a few browsers (FF 3 and 3.5, IE 7 and 8 and Chrome) and the tooltips worked and looked great.  They even have drop shadows, a very nice touch.

So I must say that this library is an exception to my rule, I am very impressed and plan to use it more throughout my sites.  Tooltips are a small but elegant addition to a quality site, they provide necessary but unobtrusive help to the user.  This library gives you the ability to add them quickly and easily…download and try it today.  He has several other javascript libraries, I hope to find time to experiment with them sometime soon.  Highly recommended!

Categories: Software Development Tags: , ,