viziblr

These CSS3 geniuses work true magic. So many great examples these days … but this one really deserves some recognition. (Beware: It works in Chrome but IE9 and IE10 seem to have a lot of difficulty with it).

http://www.midwinter-dg.com/blog_demos/css-isometric-text/

See more comments at HackerNews. The comments there link to an even more impressive demo: http://beta.theexpressiveweb.com/css3-web-font

 

While the text that is standing up (facing towards the right) is static, the text that is facing up is completely selectable (and yes copy/paste/undo work) and editable in the browser. For example see below ….

SELECTABLE:

Selection

 

EDITED:

 

 

After installing Visio 2013 Preview I wanted to see how my VisioAutomation library handled the new version.

The good news is that it works, there aren't any fundamental compatibility problems that I see.

There is one thing you need to know: In the Visio 2013 technical preview the “Dynamic Connector” master is no longer in the Basic Shapes stencil. Instead you'll have to find that “Dynamic Connector” is in the Connectors stencil (“connec_u.vss”).

I'll be fixing my unit tests not to rely on Basic Shapes any more so moving forward to Visio 2013 should be easy.

 

Lots of interesting Visio-related news this week.

Visio team's blog has moved

First, the Visio blog is moving from Visio Insights (an MSDN blog) to Visio Blog (an office blog).

URL for the new blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visio/

 

 

Visio 2013 Preview was Announced and Released

The official announcement was here and you can download the preview from here

The release was covered in several places

• John Goldsmith's visLog
• bVisual

 

A Visual Tour

The Visio team will blog about the new features, but in the meanwhile, I've installed it and assembled some screenshots and samples so you can explore the preview without actually installing it.

Keep in mind I am running on Windows 8 Release Preview, so there may be a few difference in what you experience on Windows 7.

Start Menu and Icons

 

Launching Visio

 

Let's open the Welcome to Visio template.

Notice the pin icon.

Now I see a preview of the template:

 

Then click Create

The drawing opens up like this

By the way, ignore the POWER TOOLS tab in the ribbon, that's an Add-In I created and not part of Visio.

 

The Ribbon

Home

 

Insert

 

Design

 

Data

 

Process

 

Review

 

View

 

Developer

 

Timeline

 

RIGHT CLICK ON SHAPE

 

FORMAT SHAPE

This is amazing. Click on Format Shape and you'll see this pop up on the right.

 

Expand the options …

 

Let's check out Gradient Fill

Oh my. We're about to get taken to a dream world of magic

And hey, what is this Gradient Line option?

 

EFFECTS?

What is this strange icon I've never seen before …

 

 

This can't be happening.

 

 

 

Welcome to the New Visio indeed

 

 

I go here: http://www.logicalincrements.com/ –  the Logical Increments PC Buying Guide. FYI –  this is one big image.

I look at the column called “GPU”…

 

And scroll down to the row labeled “Good”

 

And then at the intersection of that column and row, I buy what it says

 

 

I've been very satisfied with my results (at the time it I bought my last video card the AMD HD 6850 was in the “good” range):

On the Beauty of Bulletstorm

Mini-Review of the Sapphire AMD Radeon HD 6850 PCIE Video Card

 

Guides aren't a replacement for personal judgment and diligence –  choose wisely. Still, this is a pretty useful tool. :-)

 

 

 

 

This is a library I've been working on for a year – originally to help provide better automatic generation of colors for charts and reports. I found it was useful in several other projects so I've made it available as a NuGet package called Colorspace. It supports an number of conversions as shown below.

NuGet package: http://nuget.org/packages/Colorspace

Documentation: http://sdrv.ms/M7AE9g

EXAMPLE: RGB TO HSL

var a = new ColorRGB32Bit(255,0,0);
var b = new ColorRGB( a );
var c = new ColorHSL( b );

EXAMPLE: RGB TO LAB AND BACK

var workingspace = new Colorspace.RGBWorkingSpaces();
var a = new ColorRGB32Bit(255, 0, 0);
var b = new ColorRGB( a );
var c = new ColorXYZ(b, workingspace.SRGB_D65_Degree2);
var d = new ColorLAB(c, workingspace.SRGB_D65_Degree2);
var e = new ColorXYZ(d, workingspace.SRGB_D65_Degree2);
var f = new ColorRGB(e, workingspace.SRGB_D65_Degree2);
var g = new ColorRGB32Bit(f);