SteelSkin.net - The Ramblings of Chris Nutt

You may or may not know that I am a big fan of Opera for Windows. I find it personally to be the best browser on the system. I am free tech support to my parents, so after some nasty spyware problems I shifted them over to it. I work day to day for a large firm doing web and graphic design and Internet Explorer is always a pain. I would say however that IE7 combined with Maxthon 2 is a magic combination and really the only way you should use IE at all. I don’t like Firefox much, but it is so much better than IE6 I am compelled to recommend it if Opera or IE7 doesn’t tickle your fancy.

I recently used a Mac for testing purposes and found the multi platform browsers to be seriously wanting. After a bit of testing I decided that I liked Shiira, it is the nearest thing to Opera or Maxthon I could find that ran like a real Mac app. Safari is too light for me and few people will pay for Omniweb. Shiira uses the same webkit engine as Safari, but with a vastly better interface.

IE6 or below is not supported by this website, MS promised PNG Alpha support for years and only IE7 now supports it so if you see my banner with a gray background you have a duff browser.

My lovely sister got me two Naruto games for my birthday. I’m really enjoying Naruto: Uzamaki Chronicles so the idea of a game this slick and close to the anime really appeals. If MS starts making hardware that is reliable I might get one.

Well after some humming and hawing I decided to retire some of the more dated design elements on the blog. I liked the zing, but it felt a bit  primitive. I didn’t want to over Web 2.0 it with wet floors, so I took some inspiration from wallpapers and Korean MMORPG designs.

Enjoy :D

Whilst it has it’s detractors I really like Cleartype, Microsoft’s Sub-Pixel Anti-Aliasing  system. Personally I prefer my text to be sharp and readable in most applications. The exceptions being DTP, Illustration Apps or print previews where font accuracy is of the highest order. Shown left is a screen shot of Opera 9, Firefox 2, IE7 and Safari 3 Beta. Personally I like Opera the most, FF looks a bit heavy, IE b0rks on the ‘'’ and Safari well just looks awful. Safari behaves nothing like any windows app, it feels like running IE in Parallels Coherence on OS X. Whilst I don’t deny that OS X does many things better, more intuitively and accurately than Windows I do find it annoying when companies just up and ignore application consistency. Again the very application I am writing this post in, Windows Live Writer, ignores any pretence of consistency. Really anything above a widget or mp3 player should stay inline with the host OS by default whether the author agrees or not. One of the key reasons Linux keeps failing to win the desktop market is everyone doing their own thing in applications. It’s hard enough to learn one new OS interface, let alone some sort of shape shifting chimera. Then again Linux isn’t alone now increasing Windows and Mac Apps just ignore consistency for the fun of it.

I am in very sunny and hot Alaska! it is freaking awesome. Jeremy and Iris are great hosts, Jeremy’s lovely parents (Loren & Linda) are putting me up. I went to UAF today and visited the Museum. They have a really beautiful place, that cost a lot, but I personally think is a great testament to the Alaskans.

Photos can be found here.

I’ve been on DA for around 2 1/2 years. It is a great source for inspiration and one of the few web communities I have really stuck at. There is a lot to like, but an awful lot of really dodgy work. Hence why it has such a reputation. If you are new to it, you might think everyone is a sexually perverted 14 year old. There are however an awful lot of very talented people and here are a few you should visit:

Belldandies Great vector artwork with a retro twist.
ArtGerm Game inspired and widely skilled digital painter.
Antifan-Real Concept Artist extraordinaire!
ResidoLancin Top class photographer.

Check out my Favs for more…

p.s. the image top right is my most popular deviation.

I recently shifted to Flickr, my gallery can be accessed either from the topbar or the recent photo on the right hand side.

Flickr I find is a very useful reasource if you want to see what product looks like in real life, get insipiration from others using the same camera or just finding cool stuff.

Hay folks, as you may have noticed I’ve been kinda quiet on here and DA. Well work has been kinda busy. I’ve managed to upgrade to the latest wordpress and tinker about with bits, but really my creative thirst was being full quenched with work so I didn’t have the inclination to blog or fart around with graphics. Things are getting back to a bit more normal as Easter is slowing things down some what. Thanks to my good friend Jason I am now reading Death Note, it’s tense interesting stuff and well worth a read. Ta ta for now.