In the last two weeks I have been consumed with freelance projects and working with a bunch of people that contacted me through my portfolio site. The site was featured in a handful of showcase galleries, so that response has been awesome. I really appreciate everyone checking it out and all of the positive feedback. I don’t really consider my work anything extraordinary, but it’s nice to hear the comments and encouragement from others.

Last weekend I also made the jump to Leopard Mac OS 10.5. My initial reaction was, “Wow, this looks beautiful.” The screenshots that I saw did not do the enhancements justice. My favorite feature might be time machine. When I purchased Leopard I also got another external hard drive, just for that. It has already saved my world once. I was having some trouble with Firefox, so I thought deleting it and re-installing would work. It did, but then I lost all of my bookmarks, passwords, usernames, everything.. Just flipped back a few days with Time Machine and grabbed the necessary files. Bam, back to normal.

I don’t know if it’s because I only did a fresh upgrade to Leopard or what, but I do notice a couple little quirks. For instance, when I drag a file from Finder onto my desktop, sometimes the icon/file doesn’t appear. I have to adjust the grid positioning on the desktop and they just magically appear. Firefox is also a pain in Leopard. I don’t think I can go an entire session without having to restart Firefox a couple times. It just locks up and I have to force it to quit. Another little thing is when I click to open finder, it doesn’t always come into focus. That happens to a couple other programs as well. I also had a problem with conflicting fonts. I have hundreds of fonts on my system and when i re-installed Leopard a couple were duplicated I guess. I just went through and deleted the problems and so that was easily fixed.

Ok that probably seems like a lot of problems, and it is, but that is expected from a new release, especially from Apple. They are notorious for releasing things that are bug ridden. But with all of that, I still really enjoy using Leopard. The look is still very impressive and I have faith that updates are soon on their way to fix these little things.

Well that’s about it for now. Sorry for the delay in postings, just been so consumed in these other projects lately. There was one post between now and last one where Leeks wanted to “F” the Red Sox but I thought it would be best to censor him. He said he was going to post about “The Man” holding the little guy down, but I just said I would censor that too. Alright well back to work.

I was able to wrap up everything for brettnyquist.com over the weekend. I’m pretty happy with the way the site turned out, but I also think it’s going to be one those little fix it here and there type of sites. I will be adding some more functionality to it and am thinking of adding another blog area for tips and tricks on designing.. not sure about that though. Alright well that’s really about it.

My Portfolio Site

Smashing Magazine is always coming up with massive lists of just about everything on the web and tools for developers/designers. Their recent posting is exactly what I am looking for. I am a huge fan of reference books and inspiration ideas. 80 percent of my library consists of books with tutorials, how-to, inspirations, latest trends, and just about everything else dealing with web development/design. Everything I know today is from teaching myself and learning from books and others. So anyways this list is 40 or more of the best books for Web development. Definitely check them out. 40+ Books for Professional Design & Development

I took my monthly stroll to Barnes and Noble last night, to pick up a copy of Web Designer. It’s probably one of the best magazines. They are always full of awesome tutorials and things to get some other ideas rolling. In this issue they had an awesome tutorial on creating a expanding photo gallery with jQuery and Thickbox, using Interface. I have piece together the final outcome from the tutorial. Go check it out and let me know what you think.

Smooth Photo Gallery

Whenever I get going on a project, it seems to consume my life for that time being. There is something about the excitement that your new site/project is going to change how people use something or just interest a lot of people in a positive way. You always want to draw a large crowd and hopefully get a return on some advertising if you can. That seems to be how most sites are funded and maintained, is by the ad revenue they bring

GoDaddy.com just announced they will be offering “Custom built” websites along with their hosting and other such services. GoDaddy is probably the leader in hosting and now people will be using these Frontpage designs. From the screenshots they have (main page) they seem to be an extension of the Myspace realm. There is this mis-conception out there that any website is a good website, and I really believe the world of Myspace has punished web

I’m kind of bored and don’t have much else going on right now. Well I do but it’s taking awhile for it to progress. So I thought I might as well re-design Smoothpiece for the time being. Kind of tired of the current layout and have had some ideas in mind. I wanted to get everyone’s opinion on what they might like to see in the new layout and just if you have any ideas at all just let me

My brother has a seminar that he’s speaking at tomorrow night so we decided to spruce up the nYq Design Studio site just a bite. Give it a fresh new feel and something with a little more substance and capable growth. The new site will give us many features we didn’t have or were limited to with the old design. Obviously the text and content is still being developed but we should have something together in time for his