From time to time it becomes necessary to take pictures of a website in full view. Sometimes to show a client the current design from a local server, sometimes to print out the full page and make changes on paper, and sometimes to make group notes via PDF. However, there is one common problem with taking web screenshots, most websites are too tall to be captured on a normal monitor.

Paparazzi! to the rescue! Paparazzi is a free light weight application that allows you to take full size web screenshots and save them out as images or PDFs. It’s incredibly convenient and a joy to use (it takes about two seconds to learn the interface). Check out the example to the right of what Imulus.net looks like in full view.

For the past few years I have been using the Firefox Web Developer toolbar to help me pin down problems and bugs when developing websites. It has been and continues to be a great tool. However, recently one of my buddies turned me on to a new utility that works in Safari and Firefox and offers some additional functionality. It’s called XRay and is a CSS / HTML structure discovery tool.

Basically to install XRay all you have to do is drag the XRay link from http://www.westciv.com/xray/ to your bookmark bar. From there you can open it up on any website and quickly find out information about the page structure by clicking on various elements of the site. It will tell you div id names, widths, heights, margins, paddings, parent elements, inheritance information, etc. All of this information is nicely highlighted in a lightweight inspector.

While XRay doesn’t overtake the Firefox Developer Toolbar, it does offer some functionality that compliments it nicely. And considering it’s free and super easy to install I strongly recommend checking it out.

Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web. – Microsoft

They just don’t seem to get it! Microsoft has released Silverlight as a rival to Adobe Flash, yet I can’t help but feel this product is doomed. I went over to the Silverlight microsite this morning to see what all the buzz was about. My dismay started immediately when I couldn’t watch the video on my Mac, but wait, isn’t this supposed to be a cross-platform / cross-browser product. Then why can’t I learn about it on my Mac?

I’m sort of used to this kind of thing from Microsoft so I went over to my XP machine and IE7 locked up on me when I went to the site. Next, I tried Firefox 2.0 on the PC and I could finally see the video. Given the fact they made me work so hard to see this video, it better be worth it…. but it wasn’t.

The video shows impressive visualization but I finished the video only more confused then when I first visited the site. Is this tool a video editing tool? Does it do 3D visualization like Anark Studio? Is it a 100% clone of Flash?

God, I wish Microsoft would innovate something worthwhile or at the very least if they are going to rip off rival products then at least make them better!

Chris Jordan has completed a series of work which helps to visualize large statistical measures in our society. My favorite is the plastic bag series.

“Depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the US every five seconds.”

I just finished listening to Tom Kelley’s “The Ten Faces of Innovation.” Kelley is the General Manager of IDEO, one of the World’s foremost innovation and ideation consulting companies. The book discusses IDEO’s 10 faces, or personas which are utilized in their projects to gain a full, insightful and original view of any challenge, situation or problem. (more…)