Station Master's Journal

Today I installed the free Firefox plugin Ubiquity and was amazed by the new concept and the possibilities it unfolds for both users and web developers alike.

Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

While you certainly can read more about Ubiquity yourself... I was very impressed by a variety of functions that have already come in handy for me.

Contemplating a trip to Central America I have had to look at many pages which are often in spanish. It's annoying to have to refer to babelfish or google translate constantly and I've often wished a translation could be done on the fly by selecting text and letting Firefox handle the rest. Enter Ubiquity.

First I go to a spanish speaking website...

I highlight the text and then type "translate" into Ubiquity. I hit enter and it translates the entire text in the page itself.

Then lastly I select the newly translated text and pull up the screen for Ubiquity and type "email" which then automatically opens up Gmail and composes an email with the text that I have selected.

All I can say is that's just plain brilliant. You can do all kinds of things with ubiquity. You can select a phrase or word and then:

• translate the text to english
• google map it
• email it
• get a definition
• look it up in wikipedia
• search Google for it
• and a whole lot more!

I can see increasingly that as web services and open API's get more prevalent that tools like Ubiquity will become an everyday part of our browsing experience. Huge kudos to the team behind the concept!

Also here's a good video on the concept:

This article is for designers and photographers who seem to be struggling colour calibration issues on the Dell 2408WFP. Having bought a Dell 2408WFP 24 inch LCD in the last few months I decided over the past few days to calibrate it. The main problem with the 2408 is that the colours are over saturated and the monitor at least to my eyes seems ridiculously bright. At first I tried calibration through the Apple Calibrator Assistant which can be found under Display > Color > Calibrate - but having no luck there I tried a combination of using both the LCD settings and found that the Wide Gamut setting in the colour profile manager seemed to solve most of my issues... or so I thought.

I recently was working on a redesign of our site which has a number of red elements and noticed upon sliding the palette onto my Macbook Pro that the colours in the red hue were most definitely off on my 24" dell display. Perplexed I tried further calibration steps - but with no luck. Utterly frustrated I zipped down to my local mac reseller and bought a Spyder Elite 3 hardware calibration unit.

The following are the settings I adjusted my LCD to before running the hardware calibration:
Gamma: Mac
Colour Settings Mode: Graphics
Preset Mode: SRGB
Brightness: 10
Contrast: 90

I know that the brightness seems terribly low but this seems to be a relatively normal adjustment for this particular monitor after finding a number of posts on the topic at MacRumors and on Adobe's forums. I have also tried manually setting RGB values to both 60 across the spectrum and also tried 70 for all values. I chose SRGB as it seems that it's the closest least saturated match to my MacBookPro.

Next I ran the Spyder Elite 3 software and ran through the hardware calibration and it seemed to behave a little better. The reds were still a few shades off what I thought the MacBookPro would be but at least they are reasonably close now.

Then I found this comprehensive review of the Dell 2408WFP. The author notes:

For those who need to simulate the standard sRGB space rather than use the monitor with its extended gamut, the 2408WFP offers an sRGB simulation mode via the OSD preset modes. Considering many users will not have extended gamut sources or content, this feature is nice....in theory. I switched to this mode, while leaving all other settings at their defaults to establish whether the colour accuracy or other settings were any better than in the 'Desktop' preset. As you can see, gamut and luminance remained a long way out from the desired levels, and colour temperature was actually a little worse at 5831k. dE was sadly not improved at all, in fact, it was worse with an average of 7.3 and a maximum of 23.0. As you can see from the CIE diagram on the left, the gamut triangle for the monitor now only just stretched outside the sRGB space, and was now pretty much in line with normal CCFL backlighting (72% NTSC coverage). If nothing else, at least this mode accomplishes that!

Then I noticed this comment:

Firstly I calibrated the screen using LaCie's software suite while also changing the monitor to the 'Custom' preset mode, affording me access to the RGB colour controls. During the calibration process the screens brightness was adjusted to 20%, with contrast being left at 50%. RGB values were altered to 92, 90 and 98 respectively. It should be noted that OSD adjustments only form part of the calibration process with the majority of changes being made automatically at the graphics card LUT level.

So I decided to give this configuration a shot. Brightness, contrast, and RGB values were once again adjusted. I found blues to be oversatured and grays just a little too bluey as well - but I've now been staring at this screen looking at colours for 2 hours and it's time to take a break.

Despite what the article says about SRGB I still find that my initial calibration I mentioned earlier in this article has provided me with what I feel is better colour correction. If anyone has found a better way to calibrate this LCD I'd dearly like to know. [UPDATE] I just found another good series of questions and answers here.

Well it's officially September and our big summer code push is almost over. We've just finished off a handful of new websites which we will be showcasing in our design portfolio this month - but the bigger news is that we're preparing to launch our first 2 big open source products. We will also be relaunching our own website with a fresh design to accommodate our new products.

There are no official timelines yet for when we will launch them, but it likely will happen close towards the end of September / beginning of October. Both open source products will be based off of the Zend Framework and will most likely be released under either the MIT license or the BSD license. The products are also uniquely positioned, meaning that both don't have direct competitors in the open-source market as there isn't anything else out there that provides the functionality that they do. We are still working on naming both products so instead of giving everything away now we've decided to wait until the end of the month.