My day started today by finding out that I had accidentally saved a crop of a website design yesterday. In the perfect storm of backup redundancies not working (including the most important one – my brain) I was left with one of two options: a) Spend a day rebuilding the file in an already tight timeline or b) finishing production from memory.

Turns out there’s an option 3.
Step 1) Open the affected PSD
Step 2) Increase Canvas Size

Turns out, this recovers around 90% of the data. While I’m unsure of why some of it was saved, and some of it was lost, I’m just thankful to have my file back. To best of my examination layers that I had drawn pixels in with the pencil tool, or “fill with background colour” were lost while smart objects and objects build with the rectangle / circle tool(s) were maintained. The biggest issue is that a lot of the masks were messed up, but nothing that an hour can’t fix. Maybe some adobe junkie and shed some light on this?

Clients don’t always realize why the picture they took on their cellphone or old 3.2 MP digital camera can’t be blown up for use on a trade show booth. Even in the hands of a skilled photoshop artist the picture can only be blown up so much. But 600%? There’s a group of Photoshop actions called Re-Sizer that claims to have Photoshop actions that will allow you to resize a photo up 600%. I don’t know all the ins and outs but at $10, it’s worth a look.

PicLens have just notified us of the recent additions to their free software. You can now browse, watch videos, and shop online in 3D. Well… sort of.

For those who aren’t aware of PicLens we blogged about it here.

Hopefully I don’t have to sell anyone ’round these parts on the benefits of using Firefox. Firefox version 3 was released today and Mozilla is trying to make history by setting a Guinness World record for most software downloads in a day. That is, if you can get through to the server. I had to refresh 5 times to get the download page to work (currently downloading the 17.2MB at a whopping 6.7kb/sec…22 minutes to go!) and the promotional site, www.spreadfirefox.com/ is down. See the dreaded “Http/1.1 Service Unavailable” error message above. Go get your copy, if you can, and lets hope it’s worth the work!

Our recent designer Leigh Peterson (who we miss dearly) and her partner, software developer Jeremy Karlson, recently launched a free Mahjongg Solitaire game called Ivory Mahjongg for Mac and Windows. After hunting for a decent free version for a year, they got so frustrated they designed and developed it themselves.

All I really knew about Mahjong is how noisy the swishing, stacking and flipping of the tiles could be (I grew up around Chinese families in Richmond). At least this version isn’t so noisy. But the real surprise came when I discovered how addictive this simple game could be! You could spend hours with this game.

Gee, thanks Leigh and Jer.