Due to so many malicious attacks on MT's servers lately, I've been having to check lots of client sites for malicious code and in the process, I've found Google's Webmaster Tools and their Safe Browsing Diagnostic Page to be wonderfully helpful.

It is kinda of cumbersome having to keep the Safe Browsing URL around and prepend it to every site I wanted to check, so in an effort to ease the pain, I threw together a dashboard widget that allows you to enter a URL and check it against Google's service. I know, I know. Google actually has an API for safe browsing that allows for quite a bit more functionality than this ... but for now, this is all I needed. Maybe you'll find it useful too.

You can download the widget here (you'll need Mac OS X and Dashboard to use it), but remember that all of Google's logos and stuff are copyright of them.

SafeBrowse

This afternoon I got a chance to watch Day 2 of Google's IO Developer Event (the Android Keynote, in particular) and I have to say that I was thoroughly impressed. Not only was it great to see such a strong commitment from Google toward an open platform that is working to strongly support Flash, but the sheer momentum of their device and user-adoption numbers was enough to have me wondering about Android-based iPhone alternatives (e.g. the sweet looking EVO).

After all was said, done and Vic Gundorta had finished taking stabs at Apple (and I had heard some Mac fanboy responses) , I definitely find myself among those interested to see how Apple responds in a few weeks at WWDC, where we will hopefully see a next-gen iPhone announcement. For now though, enjoy this Google IO wallpaper that I whipped up really quick like, because I love the vibrant simplicity of Google's branding for this event.

My entry for this past Illustration Friday topic of "ahead" actually comes in a couple of parts. I initially started out with idea of creating a typeface to demonstrate the word, but ended up being distracted by the minutia of the lowercase letters not matching up to what I liked about the uppercase letters. I eventually took the letters I did like and worked up the vector illustration you see here.

If you are interested, you can download the vector letters in the current incomplete form in their Font section of the site. Overall, I liked their look and might go back and finish building the whole font later ... but probably not. The main illustration piece is all vector (really just me getting more comfortable with Illustrator's Gradient and Blend tools) and initially consisted of just the main colored piece. I only added the background text areas because it felt like it was trying to escape from somewhere.

On a fun side note, each of the three text sections also matches the "ahead" topic, in some fun way. The first is an excerpt from the Farmer's Almanac for the 2010 Winter forecast, the second is the article about Henry VIII's wives, and the last is about the future of space exploration and the status of the current "Space Race".

**You might have noticed that the enlarged images don't link out to Flickr, but instead enlarge right here. I still use Flickr for lots of stuff, but I noticed that if you are using the Illustration Friday Link Viewer (which I frequently do), it takes far too many clicks to get to the big size . This is my way of trying to make your life easier. You are welcome.

This has been sitting in my "to finish" folder for quite some time and now thanks to all of the daily pieces I have been working on with the Blob Brush, I finally found a style I was okay with for this something special for all you iPhone users out there. Get ready for the Halloween season by putting this little moster guy on your shiny Apple screen.

Download the full 320 × 480 size here.

With all the wonderfulness that happened recently, celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, I thought I should join in the fun.

Here is a nice 512 pixel icon of the Apollo 11 mission badge, with a tad bit of Photoshop rendering added in. Download it for your OS X Dock, your Finder sidebar or your Moon-ready project folders. There is even a 48 pixel size for the Windows user among us ... there's probably at least one ;).

You can download the icon files below, and once you've got your Dock all prettied up, I would recommend either putting on a space classic like Ron Howard's Apollo 13 or if you haven't already seen it, checking out NASA's great We Choose the Moon presentation.

Apollo 11 Icon - Mac OS X & Windows

Rocky Ricardo from Oscar Cortez on Vimeo.

Here is another piece done in the wonderful Brushes iPhone app, on the way to Cocoa Beach. I didn't have any specific inspiration for it, but did think about that scripture in Mark:

The Parable of the Sower
Again Jesus began to teach by the lake. The crowd that gathered around him was so large that he got into a boat and sat in it out on the lake, while all the people were along the shore at the water's edge. He taught them many things by parables, and in his teaching said: "Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up.

Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants, so that they did not bear grain. Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, multiplying thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times."

Then Jesus said, "He who has ears to hear, let him hear." - Mark 4:1-9

If you want, you can download it as an iPhone-size wallpaper.

Of course, it was mainly so that I could use them in conjunction with the great Xounds APE haxie from Unsanity ... there is just something comforting about hearing again those old sounds I spend so many hours of my youth listening to. Since I doubt Apple will care and I figure that someone else out there might want them:

Mac OS 9 Platinum Sounds

Pretty much anytime Mel and I start talking about anything Yeti, I have to draw it. It's like I have this Himalayan fever and the only cure is letting it out with pencil, pen or Wacom stylus.

For this piece I did my typical pencil drawing, covered over with felt-tip marker and then digitized with the normal "Brush" tool in Illustrator ... but once I got to that point, I wasn't entirely happy with it. So I decided to give the solid colors and limited lines look a try (a difficult or at least different style for me) ... it was only going alright until I dropped in CS4's new "Blob Brush" then things really took off. The simple filing and inside selecting goodness it brings has me happy enough to switch my shortcut for the "b" key to Blob for the time being. Hopefully that will mean more goodness like this for you guys in the coming days.

Two side notes. One, you should probably know about the I Love the Yeti blog and two, Norm and I were completely enthralled by the awesome augmented reality fun that is the Living Sasquatch project.

I also went through a few minor revisions of this piece in making it nice for the iPhone, including moving a few elements out of the way of the lock and date overlays. That was made much easier with the iPhone Photoshop template that Adam Jones put out. I realized there wasn't an Adobe Illustrator version of an iPhone template, so I whipped up a quick one, which you can download below:

iPhone Desktop/Wallpaper Template for Illustrator CS4 (.ai)

Since Kane was asking about it, I went ahead and created a desktop version of the Poise piece, in a variety of sizes. Visit the downloads section to get at 'em.

During the DFP lab session yesterday, Norm and my students were having issues validating their XML data files using a couple of the services we normally recommend. Namely, their XML files were showing no errors, despite adding intentional mal-formed tags and whatnot.

It just so happened that Norm was reading through one of FlashTuts newer posts about different methods for setting up a Flash Development Sandbox and discovered a great Eclipse plugin for writing and validating XML documents, called XMLBuddy. If you download the 3.1 version, it works pretty seamlessly with the current Flex Builder environment ... so well in fact, that it lead to me writing a Document Type Declaration (DTD) that our students could use as a schema to validate their first project's data file against.

Since Panic's beautiful Coda app has been my code environment as of late, and since I like my code to be wonderfully colored, I decided to try my hand at writing a Syntax Mode for DTDs. Coda's syntax coloring is built on SubEthaEdit's "Mode" model, so it really wasn't too difficult. Regular Expressions are still a bit of a mystery to me, but with Grant Skinner's RegExr AIR app handy and Ruby's yummy <regex> being used, it worked out nicely.

If you've got any DTD writing planned in the future, feel free to grab a copy of the syntax mode file and enjoy! It get installed here: ~/Library/Application Support/Coda/Modes/

Coda Coloring Mode - DTD

Also, if you are in need of a great (and free!) Mac app that parses and validates your XML files, check out Validator by Robert Crews. Nifty indeed.