There is a meme popping on Twitter and the blogosphere where some Web professionals are wondering if it is a good thing to listen to music while working or not. I had been reflecting on that very thing recently so this comes at a timely moment for me.

Of course, to a point this comes down to personal preferences but it seems that, musicians like me respond to music in a different way than non-musicians which makes it harder for us to concentrate on the work at hand when listening to music. For example, look at the quote from Mark W. Shead in the “Should we listen to music while working?” post on Designer Daily. Thanks to Mirko Humbert on Twitter for the heads up on that article. He makes the point that if background noise is needed, the sound of waves or rain or something equally neutral is better than music as he states that he simply cannot perform tasks requiring high levels of concentration while listening to music.

I myself generally like to listen to music while working but whether I do or not depends directly on the kind of task I am working on at that moment and how I feel on that particular day. If I’m more tired for example I’ll have a harder time concentrating to begin with so I may prefer the silence. Furthermore, my music listening habits have evolved over time and as my circumstances changed. When I was still a student living with my parents, I used to need to put some music on at a reasonably low volume to “shield” myself from the noises in the rest of the house. That “wall of sound” effect permitted me to reach incredible levels of concentration. When I was in the “zone” like that, a train could have passed in my room and I would not have noticed. I’m not exaggerating. As a teenager I could reach levels of concentration that I simply cannot attain anymore which makes me very jealous of my teenage self…

Nowadays, I’m a full time freelancer working from home in a very quiet environment. I need no shielding from ambient noises but I still need the music a lot of the times for different reasons not the least of which is that it can get lonely working alone in complete silence. But what I listen to is directly related to what I’m doing. For example, when I’m doing simple administrative tasks or anything around the office not requiring great concentration I’ll listen to either my MP3 player on shuffle (very varied stuff in there) or to XM Radio (I particularly love XM Café and the alternative channels). But if I’m in developer mode writing HTML, CSS, JavaScript or ColdFusion code, I usually switch to mostly non-vocal music and for that I really love the XM Radio Chill channel. The fact that I do not know a lot of the music helps me “ignore” it better. Like I said before, I’ll often just turn off the music if I don’t feel it is helping at a particular moment.

When I’m in design mode, I usually like more upbeat or heavier music. I rarely design in silence. The musical stimulus really helps idea generation. The style here is very varied and depends a lot more on my own mood than the type of project I’m working on. Again here, I often turn to XM or to my MP3 player but with a more focused genre depending on the day.

So, what about you? Is music part of your work process too or do you need complete silence to be able to work?

I've been reading a few more comments about Google Chrome last night and this morning and have kept using it for browsing since yesterday. Here's a few more points :

• My comments from yesterday and today take into account that Chrome is a first beta. People have to remember that this is not yet a replacement for anyone's regular browser. Many comments say that it doesn't support extensions like Firefox, IE or Opera (they may call it diffferent things but you get my gist). It also has some annoying rendering bugs that seem to be due to Webkit and misses basic functionality like a way to turn off scripts which is a very good point that a commenter to my previous post brought up. All valid points but remember that this is a FIRST beta. Chrome will evolve.
• I saw a comment today on Jeffrey Zeldman's site that summed up my first impression of it : "At  present this seems like a solution waiting for a problem". The more I think about it, the more I think that's true. Did we "really" need a new browser in the market?
• The above ties in with some of Zeldman's comments as well as Tantek Celik who commented on the same post. Both say the same thing which is that, in order to compete, a new browser must offer something that others do not. They then discuss ways a browser may differentiate itself and Tantek brings up the point that, with a similar feature set, a browser may win market share by bringing better performance. So far, this seems to be the main thing Chrome brings to the table. But is it enough? 
• While Chrome is certainly much faster than Firefox, even Firefox 3 which improved its prdecessor's very sluggish performance, is it really much faster than Opera 9.5? Not in my experience. On some pages, Opera is actually still faster than Chrome. So again, is it enough?

Like I said yesterday, only time will tell what impact Chrome will have when it reaches gold status and reaches a wider audience outside Web professionals and hard core tech geeks. Will people be willing to swicth? Personally, I have my doubts, especially if Chrome's differentiation factors are not more visible than just speed. That may be enough for some people but most IT departments will probably keep using IE and those who moved to Firefox, Opera or Safari may choose to stay with the devil they know...

I just downloaded and installed Google Chrome after reading the comic book that explains the details of the project. I had been hearing rumors about it last week but I didn't pay much attention to them. In the last couple days there had seemed to be much anticipation (and over-hype) about its release and what it means. I must say I was prepared to be underwhelmed... and, as a Web designer, thinking, who needs yet another new browser to test sites into? But after using it for a little bit, I must admit I like what I see.

My initial hesitation came mostly from the fact that, aside from its search engine technology, I haven't been impressed by much of what Google has released in the past. I don't use GMail and I don't use Google Documents for the same basic reason. So far, I still much prefer desktop applications for email and office type tasks and my communications and organizational activities are pretty much centered in Outlook 2007. It works very well for me and my data is on my own machine where I want it. I never liked Web based email to begin with.

But Chrome is different because it is a desktop application and the foundations and ideas on which it was built are very interesting. As many noted and despite a lot of over-hype (what else is new in the tech world...), Chrome has a lot of things that were already in other browsers. My main browser is Opera 9.5 and I really have not seen any other that is as fast or feature-rich. But Chrome is fast too... damn fast actually, especially with JavaScript and I really like the minimal interface. This is a first beta and can only improve with time. Also, so far all my sites I looked at with Chrome display correctly and pretty much the same as Safari, FF 3 or IE7. Its text rendering seems identical to Safari which is normal since both are based on the WebKit rendering engine.

So, in summary, Google Chrome seems like a solid entry in the crowded browser world and will only get better. But, I would take the premature previsions of some pundits that Chrome will cause the demise of MSIE with a huge grain of salt... Haven't we heard that one before?

Won't tech commentators ever learn that "regular" people are creatures of habit and are unlikely to change browsers just because a new player's in town? Don't they get that Microsoft is entrenched in the business world for the foreseeable future? Those who should be worried by this are the other smaller players IMO, like Opera and Firefox and maybe even Safari which seems to be as entrenched on the Mac as MSIE is on PCs... for now.

Anyway, only time will tell how Chrome will affect the browser wars but it is a good piece of software that brings welcome competition and innovation. And did I say it was fast! I'm writing this blog post in it through TinyMCE now which unfortunately doesn't work in Opera yet. Good going with this one Google!

An overview of the last year on pixelyzed.com

Now that 2008 is just about to start, I thought it would be a good idea to write a pixelyzed.com style year end review.

There's been a lot of activity in our little world last year as well as in other areas of the software industry. Throughout 2007, I discussed products and technologies that can help our work flows and processes in new ways and my own process has evolved significantly. Now I'll try to summarize some of it and share some of my best finds of the year in several categories. There are some new things in here I didn't discuss before so enjoy!

pixelyzed is growing

Although I still am not a very prolific blogger, Pixelyzed has grown in readership last year and I have made an effort to share my more interesting discoveries as they apply to Web designers and creative professionals. I have also tried to write about more varied topics and I will keep doing so in the new year.

2007 has been a year of growth and change for my career as well. I have tackled a couple of large Web design projects and have started doing sub-contracting work again.

Behind the scenes, I have been working on a new version of my professional site webfocusdesign.com and started marketing locally more aggressively. Once the new version of that site goes up sometime in the next few months, I will intensify these marketing efforts.

Another project I've been working on is my wife's portfolio site as she is a gifted artist- painter. I've gone through a few design iterations and we finally decided to go with a very simplified and uncluttered look. I've looked at dozens of painters and photographers' Web sites and realized that the better ones really put the emphasis on the artist's work and everything else recedes. We also decided to go Flash all the way which means I'll have to re-acquaint myself with it and give myself a quick crash course. If anyone has good advice on good Flash books, I'm all ears. I don't want books that go through the basics but books that teach solid techniques for real world projects and functionality.

The year in software

This is a really quick overview as I will write a separate post dedicated to the year in software to be published later. I must say that 2007 has been a very exciting year for me. Here are a few of the standout products I've been using last year which have been helping me get my job done more efficiently.

Adobe Creative Suite 3

The major new software suite release from Adobe... and the first iteration of the integration of existing Adobe products and former Macromedia ones. There was a lot to get excited about here as most products received serious upgrades. Standouts for me include Illustrator and InDesign.

Fireworks CS3

In spite of all our speculation, Fireworks is still alive and got better under Adobe's care. After the extreme disappointment that Fireworks 8 was, Fireworks CS3 was an encouraging release. But Adobe still has a lot of work to do to fulfill Fireworks' early promise as key areas of the application have been neglected for years and still have got no love in CS3. Looking forward to CS4, there are several key areas I'd like to see improve. More in my next post...

FreeHand MXa

Creative Suite 3 is the release that finally and officially marked the death of FreeHand and the official word from Adobe is that FreeHand users should now migrate to Illustrator. This decision leaves a lot of long time FreeHand users who feel that Illustrator is not an adequate replacement in the cold and I feel for them. Removing competition is never good for any industry and this is no exception. More later...

MindJet MindManager 7

MindManager is my best software find of 2007. It's the application that had the biggest impact on my process and work flow. It is a fantastic knowledge and information management tool that is flexible enough to help through all phases of a Web design projects. I would really encourage every creative professional to at least try it. I will keep sharing tips and ideas on how I use MindManager in my own work through the new year so stay tuned!

JCVGantt Pro 3.0

The perfect companion to MindManager, JCVGantt can both be use as a standalone application and as an add-in for MindManager. Planning and scheduling projects has always been a hard and tedious task for me. JCVGantt Pro makes it a lot easier and integrates seamlessly with MindManager. It is extremely flexible in how it lets users set resources parameters like working and non-working times and days, hourly and fixed costs and more. It updates the Gantt charts, total costs and the MindManager maps it is tied to in real time as you make changes to resources or tasks. A great discovery for me.

Studiometry 5.0

The other piece in my project management and administration puzzle. I've been using Studiometry since mid 2006 to track and keep client and project information, track communications but also as a timer for billable time and then for invoicing. Studiometry does a lot more than that and it got a major upgrade to version 5.0 in 2007. Check it out!

FeedDemon 2.5

Control information overload and get the latest info from all your favourite Web sites in one place. I've been using FeedDemon to subscribe and read RSS feeds for a while now (since it first came out) and I couldn't live without it. It this age of information overload, it's the main "hub" through which I get industry news and more. It has too many features to go into here but if you use Windows, this is the only feed reader you need to consider...

Windows Vista

Vista got a bad rap last year for a variety of reasons but I love it myself. Moving to Vista has brought me little trouble and a real boost in enjoyment and productivity. It'S true that my new computer has the powerful hardware to support it so Vista for me is fast and extremely stable. Much more so in fact than XP ever was for me. A great surprise for me and I can't wait to see the improvements SP1 brings.

The year in music

Many of you know I'm a musician and a music fanatic in general. 2007 was a great year in music for me as well. I'll also post a separate entry on my musical finds of the last year but here's a little taste of my 3 best musical discoveries of 2007. More later...

XM Radio

2007 is the year I discovered satellite radio and more specifically, XM Radio. It is where I discovered several of the artists who's music I fell in love with in 2007. XM Radio has more varied playlists than Sirius and more interesting channels. I carry my radio from the home to my car and the office and I re-discovered the joy of listening to music for hours. I discovered many new talents on XM and I bought more CDs in the last year alone than in the prior 5 because of it. Couldn't live without it now...

Grace Potter and The Nocturnals

My biggest musical crush of the year... on more levels than one ;-). If you never heard of Grace Potter & The Nocturnals, you have to visit their site and listen to some of the samples.

They play great music lead by a phenomenal voice with amazing raw emotional intensity. And Grace is adorable to boot... ;- ) Just give them a listen if you like rootsy but intense rock music based on well above average songwriting. Current stand out songs for me include "Apologies" and "Loose Some Time" (next week it may be two other songs...) both of which are slower numbers but the band also excels at the more intense rockers that fill out the rest of the album and fuel their live shows.

The music press is simply gushing about them and her and the band apparently gives amazing concerts. Don't miss them if they come play in your city. If they ever come play in Montreal, I'll be first in line to see them... In the meantime read this review of one of their recent shows to whet your appetite.

Missy Higgins

Another young and extremely gifted female songwriter. Higgins is folksier than Potter but just as intense. This Australia native was another XM Radio discovery for me. Not long after hearing her music on XM, my wife and I had the pleasure of seeing her perform on the Australian segment of Live Earth and we were immediately hooked. Great melodies sung with a very noticeable Aussie accent that just adds to the charm of her music. I'm really surprised she does not get more airplay or exposure in North America.

Again, give her music a listen, you'll be glad you did.

The year in learning

One of the more exciting aspects of working in the Web design industry for me is the need to continually learn new things. I have discovered a few great resources last year that I will now share with you.

Some of those resources or sites that may seem pretty basic to those who've been in this business for a while but I like reading about different approaches so I can look at my work from a fresh perspective from time to time. Some of this stuff will be known to you but it may still contain great refreshers.

Less experienced Web designers would be wise to look at some of those resources closely, spend quality time at those sites and absorb some of the wisdom their creators are spreading mostly for free.

Learning keeps your mind young and fresh so, enjoy!

Before & After PDF Subscription

For any designer interested in reading excellent practical articles with great design tips and ideas published on a regular basis, Before & After delivers great value for the money and teaches you how the pros do it and why. Even pros will learn new things and will at the very least be inspired to try new approaches to solve design problems. I know I have.

I've actually been a subscriber for a couple years now but it seems the quality of the articles has kept improving throughout the year. If you subscribe you'll also get access to a number of past issues. Before & After magazine is one of the best of its kind so take a look at the sample PDF's on the site and you'll see what a great value it is.

Save The Pixel - The Art of Simple Web Design

I discovered this e-book through the feed of the "Web Design From Scratch" Web site created by Ben Hunt. Every working Web designer should probably read it as it is shock full of great tips and advice for creating efficient Web sites that succeed at creating great user experiences.

The book is very well written in that it does not just explain the principles behind Hunt's "Save the Pixel" design philosophy but also provides numerous case studies of Web site re-designs. Each case study shows the original site and explains why it wasn't exactly successful. Then it shows the redesigned version and explains why it works better and why key design decisions were made.

The book would be an excellent resource even for seasoned Web design pros but it should be required reading for all aspiring and new Web designers but especially wannabes who think that what they do is design when they have no real process and just like to make "pretty things" without forethought, planning or direction. Sadly, there are a lot of people like that in our industry vying for the same projects we're pitching for. This book demonstrates very well why real design is a lot more than mere decoration and why every pixel counts when your site tries to communicate a brand or message as clearly as possible. Best $30 I spent all year...

Start creating better, more effective designs too. Get "Save The Pixel" through my affiliate link here.

Web Design from Scratch

Ben Hunt's Web site which claims to be "A complete guide to designing web sites that work".

This site is an extensive resource that contains a lot of free content as well as paid stuff like the "Save the Pixel" book discussed above. One of my great finds of the year.

ideasonideas

A site I discovered through another site's feed in FeedDemon. IdeasonIdeas touches on a wider variety of subjects than pure design talk. One of the recent discussions centered on the pros and cons of Requests For Proposal or RFPs and started the discussion by stating why they thought they were bad for designers and why.

If you've ever had to deal with such issues (and what designers hasn't) then you know what a pain and a waste of time RFPs can be. Commenters brought up other good points and that is what that blog is about. Great discussions on subjects that matter to communications professionals and brand strategists.

Looking forward to 2008

While I don't like to play the guessing game of predicting the future, we should probably all look ahead to the future now and plan where we'd want this year to take us. Our future is ours to create and imagine so here's a few things I'm looking forward to in 2008.

Continuing growth

I'm planting the seeds of a growing business by re-designing my own professional Web site. We might all benefit from re-visiting our own branding and marketing efforts. As a freelancer it is sometimes more difficult because what we are marketing is our own expertise and our brand is ourselves. I'm looking forward to improving my own marketing skills as this will also benefit my clients.

Waiting for Fireworks CS4

Readers of this blog know how important Fireworks is to my design process. I have been a vocal Fireworks evangelist for years now. As I stated above, I think that Fireworks CS3 was solid transitional release under the new care of Adobe. But Fireworks is not without problems... In my next post which will be about the year 2007 in software, I'll discuss how I now see Fireworks' place in mine and a typical Web designer's arsenal and where I would like it to go next.

2008 on Pixelyzed.com

All in all, 2007 was a great year on many levels for me and for the industry but I feel it was a transitional year. I'm really looking forward to what 2008 brings and hopefully, some of the bigger personal changes I have been planning on for a long time will finally happen. Stay tuned!

Regarding the blog, I don't like to make promises and break them so I will not claim that I will write more often in 2008. All I can promise is that I'll keep working on building my "voice". What I try to share with people here are ideas and resources I feel are worthwhile. What this blog and site will never become is a link whore that simply links to other content with little or no new take on it. If that means I post less often than some other bloggers because I don't spread the latest "meme" without critical thought or commentary then so be it.

I will keep speaking my mind and try to strike conversations on issues that matter to me and which I believe should matter to other design professionals.

Thank you very much to all who follow this site and blog and those who have commented here or sent me e-mail throughout the year. It's good to know people appreciate what I try to share and care enough to comment on it. See you all in 2008!

While I work on giving this blog back the look of the rest of my site, let me explain why I decided to switch back to the BlogCFC software and give up on BlogFusion.

First, both blogging apps are built with ColdFusion and that is an important reason I chose both of them at different times. When i started this blog I was using BlogCFC from Ray Camden. At that time it was a very nice blog app and it was free but its functionality was a bit limited. Administering it was also not so easy because there was no graphical interface to do so. Although my blogging needs were pretty simple I decided to try something else.

I then came across BlogFusion and although it was not free, its developer had special very low pricing for non-commercial blogs. It was extremely sophisticated compared to BlogCFC at the time and had a very extensive admin interface so I decided to switch.

As I started the task of adapting the default look of BlogFusion to my site I quickly realized that the developer had taken a very diffeent approach to programming it than Ray had for BlogCF. It took me a long time to grasp how the countless files that affected the blog's look worked together and modify them to my needs. It was a real chore and I almost went right back to BlogCFC. I really liked the new functionality BlogFusion was giving me though. so I forged ahead and eventually got the customization done.

BlogFusion has then been picked up by new developers and the new version has been in beta for what seems like forever. The beta versions have looked at did not seem to have much improved the underlying mess of disorganized code that was behing BlogFusion 4.x and the app started giving me trouble. In recent weeks, my hosting provider communicated with me many times to point out several errors that were occuring within the BlogFusion app. Between database connections timeouts to other errors that were impossible for me to pinpoint or fix, the host support people felt that my blog was compromising the stability of the server my Web site is hosted on so I had no choice but to do something.

Now to be fair to BlogFusion, it is entirely possible that I messed up something in it myself as I applied the various updates from 4.0.1 to 4.0.8. I had to rely on a file compare utility (Winmerge) to apply the updates as I had heavily modified several key files to get BlogFusion to look and behave like my site. As is the case with many back end developers, the BlogFusion front end HTML/CSS code was not very standards compliant or semantic and relied on very outdated markup and formatting techniques. I'm not a standards purist by any stretch of the imagination but it was nowhere near the quality I required.

Another problem I'd been having with BlogFusion from the get go is that it made it very hard to control blog comments spam. It completely ignored the blocked IP addresses list and, despite its very sophisticated admin interface, it was very tedious to delete spam comments made to several entries. There were other things as well but the point here is not to bash BlogFusion but to explain why I felt I had to switch again. BlogFusion 5 may end up to be a lot better but it will probably end up being a lot more than I need.

In the meantime, BlogCFC has evolved quite nicely in the last 2 years. It now offers all the functionality I wanted and then some and now has a very nice Web admin interface. The app's underlying structure is also far better organized and more modular and changing the look of the app will be far easier than it has been for BLogFusion. It feels good to be back to BlogCFC and I can't wait to see what Ray has planned for it in the future.

Well, it's been a while since I posted as I have been really busy. For the few people who might have started to visit this site (I haven't  publicized it much yet), please know that I have been busy working on a few things to add to the site.

First, I have been working on some more pictures to add the pixel gallery, mostly sorting and working on the best pics from our trip to Nova Scotia in August. I took well over 400 pictures during the trip and I am pleased with many of them. Look forward to a new section in the gallery soon.

The thing that has taken most of my time is the writing of an article and a few tutorials to add to the still empty pixel forge section of the site. The article called "Why Choose Fireworks" is an in-depth analysis of why I think Fireworks is by far the best Web graphics and site layouts design application out there. It is far more than the glorified slicing and optimization tool many people see it as and this article attempts to set the record straight. I'm also tired of seeing it compare to Photoshop (or worse, to ImageReady) when it is much more than that on many levels. This should be the first bit of content going up in pixel forge soon.

I'm also working on adaptations of two Photoshop tutorials including one about creating a watermark graphic for the new 1.2 version of SlideShowPro which is the Flash component I use for pixel gallery. In addition to that I have 5 more tutorials that are pretty much at the  embryonic stage right now, including a series that will be based on the ill-fated Fireworks book I participated in that was supposed to be released by Glasshaus before their demise. I was almost finished with the two chapters I was writing for that book and tech editing was well underway. I don't want this material to go to waste so I'll publish it here eventually.

So, despite the lack of activity on the pixellog, I've been busy writing and tweaking things on the site behind the scenes. I'm starting to be very happy with it and cannot wait to have more content to offer the community soon.

Later!