Okay, we don’t actually expect anyone to learn Adobe’s pen tool through the study of cubic Bézier curves — but we love this cool animation of how the Bézier spline is actually derived from the mathematical equations you control with your handy pen tool. You can read more than you care to know about the […]

OBITUARY: After a prolonged battle with Mac OS X, Helvetica — along with younger cousin Helvetica Neue — was finally pronounced dead on October 28, 2007 with the release of Leopard, by Apple, in California.

For years, print-based graphic designers and prepress professionals have fought to replace certain Mac OS X default fonts with their existing PostScript Type 1 fonts of the same name — Helvetica being a primary example.

It’s been a losing battle.

Now with Leopard, the war for control of Helvetica is done, and Mac OS X won.

Over the last week we’ve had a lot of Apple laptops in our office for various repairs and upgrades — including one of our own MacBook Pros that was upgraded with a larger internal hard drive.

It is a good reminder that however skilled you are at hardware repair, you won’t be able to open a MacBook Pro case without the right set of screwdrivers. We’ve asked Creativetechs’ hardware guru, Jasson Lewellen, to compile a list of tools and training materials for people who are interested in doing basic Apple laptop repair.

So whether you run an IT team headed towards self-service, or you are an intrepid DIY home-user willing to void a warranty, here are a collection of links for you to start building your own laptop repair toolkit.

If you suspect that fonts are causing problems in your applications, an easy troubleshooting step is deleting your Mac’s font caches.

We’ve covered font cache problems before in our Garbled Fonts Troubleshooting Guide — which delves into font problems more deeply. However we did overlook a quick and easy method to delete font cache files.

Can a phone number count as a tech tip? For the last month I’ve been using Google’s new 411 service from my cell phone when I’m looking for local phone numbers or addresses. It took a couple calls to get used to the voice-recognition interface, but I use it all the time now. Google’s search […]

With great standards-compliance and cross-platform support, Firefox is becoming the browser of choice not just for end-users but for many web developers as well. Once it’s deployed inside some corporate networks, the Macintosh edition can’t see past the firewall.

Firefox may be an excellent internet citizen, but it doesn’t follow Macintosh standards too closely. Among the conventions it ignores are the Proxy settings in the Network pane of System Preferences. Instead, Firefox keeps it’s own proxy settings hidden, three levels down in its own preferences. This is the most common reason Firefox can’t seem to load web sites when Safari can.

To solve the problem, go to the Firefox menu and select “Preferences…”, choosing the “Advanced” button at the top of the resulting window. Then from the row of tabs, select “Network” and click “Settings…” to bring up the proxy configuration panel. From there it’s easy to fill in your proxy addresses, and your Firefox users will be back online.

It’s still a beta, and pretty light on features, but we’ve found the free utility, Flame, to be super handy for stuff like snooping out who has Printer Sharing turned on… https://husk.org/apps/flame/ Just start Flame to see a list of all the computers on your network that are advertising network services. (If it can, it’ll […]

Some designers (especially web developers) have more than one computer on their desk. Often they’ll use their powerful desktop workstation for the big projects, while they use their laptop to test web pages, check email, or change their iTunes playback. Julien Robert’s free Teleport utility lets you work on multiple Macs using a single shared […]

If you frequently switch between multiple web browsers, Everyday Software’s Bookit utility ($12) allows you to sync a single collection of bookmarks seamlessly across your entire assortment of browsers. A must-have tool for Mac-based web developers, and other active web users. Combine Bookit with a shared server or .Mac account, and you can synchronize the […]

Both Microsoft Entourage and Apple’s Mail application retain attachments even if you have saved them to another location on your hard drive. Plus, these mail programs keep copies of all the attachments that you’ve SENT to other people.

You can slim down your mail archives by removing old attachments you no longer need. Seperate instructions are included for both mail programs.