This is one thing that always annoyed me after switching from Freehand to Illustrator. I just couldn’t work out how to extend a path — eg. you draw an open path, then want to come back and add some more on the end. In Freehand, you would just select the end point, then use the pen tool to keep drawing as usual, but in Illustrator this would just start a new path.

Method #1 — Add Anchor Points Tool

This is a pretty bad one. My first solution was to just use the Add Anchor Points Tool to add a bunch of points just before the end, and then drag them around to where I really wanted them to go! Not fun.

Method #2 — Join

My next idea was to just make a new path, then join the 2 together. It works, but you don’t get to see the bit in the middle until the end. This is especially annoying if you want to make it curvy.

Method #3 — The Pen Tool

This is the proper way, that I eventually found by accident, and then in the help files as well. It’s like what I was originally doing in Freehand, but slightly different. Instead of using the ‘Direct Selection Tool’ (white pointer) to select the end point, you use the regular Pen Tool to select the endpoint first, then you can keep drawing like usual!

Why didn’t I think of this earlier? Am I the only one that didn’t know this already?

The 15th of October in 1582 was a very special day. For fun, try typing it into iCal on your mac. (From the View menu select “Go To Date…”, and enter in 15/10/1582). If you’re in month view, you’ll find it’ll show you September, an no matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to find October of 1582! If you go to week view however, you’ll find October, but something will be wrong…

There’s 10 days missing!

I can’t really explain it all, but there’s a pretty interesting article on the Panic Blog that does it pretty well.

Well yes, it’s actually 2010 now, but it was supposed to be 2009.

It finally matches my website! It still needs a bit of work, refining the style of the sidebar, (and maybe even adding some animation to it, like my old theme).

So much stuff has happened in the last year since I wrote a post. Sometime soon (maybe) I’ll write something about it…

Update: Oops… I forgot to update the copyright notice to 2010. To fix that, I replaced it with some PHP code to always display the current year, so I never have to remember again! echo date('Y');

Here’s my last photo for the year decade! It’s the 9:30pm fireworks at Wollongong harbour, as seen from Bulli tops, like my other steel works photo (my camera can zoom in a long way!).

You can download a larger version:
Wollongong NYE 2009 (3.8MB)

It’s a panorama made up from a couple of 15 second exposures. The RAW files were batch processed in Photoshop, then stitched in Autostitch.