Dan Rubin's SuperfluousBanter

Month: March 2004

  • Weekend Reading (10)

  • Music and Creativity

    To me music is an essential part of the creative flow. In short: no music,
    no creativity. But I wonder — do some genres of music lead to more creativity
    than others? I guess it all boils down to personal preference. A number of people
    might go all creative listening to classical music or jazz, others might prefer
    some more alternative styles or even heavy metal. I tend to have frequent atmosphere
    or mood swings as to what music I listen to, with each having it’s own
    particular style.

    Personally, while working, I enjoy ambient music and trip hop, mixed with jazz
    and occasionally some electro or house. My favorite streaming channels come
    from the folks at Soma
    FM     and Netmusique.
    Soma FM’s Secret Agent stream is lovely and I enjoy the short sound clips
    inbetween songs from movies such as James Bond and Ocean Eleven. Close to bedtime
    I switch to Soma FM’s Beat Blender to relax and enjoy the mix. Most of
    the time I have either one of these streaming channels playing. So what music
    do you listen to while working? Any streams I should add to my favorites?

  • Style Master 3.5 Quick Review

    Style Master 3.5Due
    to rapid gain in popularity of CSS-based design among web designers and developers
    more and more specialized WYSIWYG tools are becoming available to edit stylesheets.
    Westciv’s StyleMaster
    3.5     is going to seduce both the novice user as well as the confirmed stylesheet
    expert. Style Master 3.5 has an intuitive and complete interface — configuring
    the various dialog boxes to fit my personal preferences was done in a mere 5
    minutes.

    Some interesting options include Support Watcher to crosscheck compatibility
    of different elements and Live Preview to instantly view changes in an HTML
    document. Personally I enjoyed using the Statements List dialog box together
    with the Properties dialog box to quickly make adjustments to specific rules,
    while still being able to handcode if required. However it must be noted that
    while Smart property editors (context sensitive editing) is a very practical
    tool, it will, unfortunately, considerably slow down the application.*

    Style Master 3.5 includes a number of helpful wizards that generate layout
    elements, navigational elements as well as link styles, among others. These wizards
    are great tools to learn CSS by example but also a valuable timesaver for more
    experienced coders. Style Master 3.5 comes with comprehensible help files, tutorials
    and links to online resources, weblogs and books.

    Priced at a more than reasonable $59.99 Style Master 3.5 is available
    for both Mac OSX and Windows    . The application instantly seduced me by it’s
    ease-of-use, robustness and assortment of options and features. Give
    it a try    !

    * Tested on Windows XP, P4 1.5 GHz and 512MB RAM