Webdesigninformer.com

Tron Legacy: The Making of UI/Visual Effects : Josh Nimoy: In addition to visual effects, I was asked to record myself using a unix terminal doing technologically feasible things. I took extra care in babysitting the elements through to final composite to ensure that the content would not be artistically altered beyond that feasibility. I take representing digital culture in film very seriously in lieu of having grown up in a world of very badly researched user interface greeble…. In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep… Read the rest here

Practical wisdom

A few evenings ago I watched a really interesting TED talk by Barry Schwartz on practical wisdom . Although his examples were rooted in education and law, I couldn’t help but feel that practical wisdom was also the core of good design. After all, what is design except the ability to improvise novel solutions to new problems based on your knowledge of a set of rules and your ability to apply them with flexibility? The talk also made me think about my own personal feelings towards project management. I believe that project management processes are often used as a series of inflexible rules (or sticks) intended to ensure average teams reach a minimum level of performance. However this will have the opposite effect on good people, constricting them and eventually demotivating them. … Read the rest here

Big design up front

Like most designers and developers we’ve come to the conclusion that big design up front doesn’t work. Six month requirement gathering exercises which result in thousand page specifications don’t work. In the time it has taken to produce these requirements the business landscape has almost certainly changed. So new requirements appear and designers and developers are forced to battle scope creep and keep these documents alive while at the same time trying to build something that is ever shifting and changing. So instead we’ve seen a move to agile development and an almost zealot backlash against detailed planning of any kind. However just because big design up front doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean we should ditch design planning altogether… Read the rest here

Truly, it is made of unicorns

Is a Macbook Air up to the job of being a primary working machine? It has for me… Since 1995, I’ve always used a Mac laptop as my primary (and only) work machine. When at the office, I plug it into a large screen with keyboard and mouse, and then at home or travelling I’ve got absolutely everything I need with me. Having seen the new generation Macbook Air in the flesh/aluminium, and how small and light it is compared to my unibody MacBook Pro, I wondered if it could be the way forward. The fact that I now cycle to work gave me more impetus to get something that wouldn’t be so heavy on my back. … Read the rest here

Moleskine PSD

Moleskine PSD : Worth downloading (free) if merely to see how the image was created, layer by layer. Be warned, it’s a pretty complex, processor-intense piece. … Read the rest here

Lies, dammed lies and web analytics

At Clearleft we’re an incredibly business focussed agency. So we work closely with our stakeholders to understand their business needs, and then turn these into Key Performance Indicators to track. In the vast majority of cases, our clients KPI s increase after working with us. However on the rare occasion that things go in the other direction, we take it as a matter of professional pride to rectify the matter. Thankfully we’ve only seen this happen on 4 occasions in our 6 year history. … Read the rest here

Announcing The Icon Handbook

Let’s get straight to it! I’m busy writing a book called “The Icon Handbook” to be published by Five Simple Steps , hopefully at the latter end of this year. It will be ‘application-agnostic’, looking at the process of creating icons for web as well as software. It will be a manual, reference guide and coffee table book in one. For the last 5 years I’ve been wanting to write this book – I keep looking around for other books of its type on the market, but never find any. … Read the rest here

AisleOne’s Antonio Carusone: A Backup System

Eric Meyer Go to the source

AisleOne’s Antonio Carusone: A Backup System : I would imagine this is as thorough and redundant as a backup system gets. 6 copies of vital data, 3 copies of unimportant data — spread across Backblaze , Dropbox, iDisk, and a few local drives. There’s a nifty diagram , even. I’m also in the process of assembling a backup system. I went with Crashplan instead of Backblaze because of the option to have a seeded backup drive (scroll down) shipped to your home for the initial backup. Additionally, I purchased a refurbished Airport Extreme to which I’ll attach a Western Elements 2 TB drive . … Read the rest here

CSS Editors Leaderboard

I recently decided to create a CSS Editors Leaderboard , which is my attempt to rank the various editors of CSS modules based on the current process status of their modules, how current the modules are, and so on. It’s kind of a turn of the wheel for me, given that I started out my CSS career with browser support leaderboards. Now you can see who’s amassed the most spec points, and who’s made the most effective use of their time and energy. Who knows? Maybe some editors will try to game the system by pushing their specs along the process track. That’d be just awful . … Read the rest here

The handbag app that almost was

Last year, I submitted my very first app to the App Store. It was rejected 3 weeks later. This is its brief story… Wes West from Torchbox first gave me the idea to create an iPhone app for Oooh! It was a great idea, and one that would give me a learning opportunity to develop and submit my own app. It would be fun, and free! All it needed to do was to “ooooOooooh!” when shaken. While I created all the necessary graphics, Simon Whitaker of Goo Software handled the development side, implementing the shake-to-ooh function and guiding me through the whole process from start to finish… Read the rest here

Amazon launches Simple Email Service

Snook Go to the source

Amazon has launched a new API for sending email "in the cloud" called Simple Email Service . Like other Amazon services, one of the biggest draws—besides using the solid infrastructure—is the pricing. You can send up to 2,000 emails a day absolutely free. After that, you’re looking at 10 cents per thousand emails and 15 cents per GB of data transfer. … Read the rest here

Frank Chimero on the 13” MacBook Air

Eric Meyer Go to the source

Frank Chimero on the 13” MacBook Air : Frank gave up his 27” iMac in favor of the 13” Air and no external display. Here’s his reasoning: A person only flails around in regards to their rig when they don’t have a clear idea of what constitutes their work. Suitability and fit is paramount, and one is never going to find what they’re looking for if they don’t know what they need. So, I looked at my work, I watched how I used my computer for a day, and found out all I do is draw vector shapes, surf the web, listen to music, and bash words out in plain text. That’s hardly the type of activity that requires computational brute force, though I understand there are some of you out there that require just that. Not me though. … Read the rest here

Looking For Focus

In the reset revision draft I posted Monday , I got tripped up by some last-minute changes and I’m going to think out loud (so to speak, as it were) about possible solutions. The problem is that the presence of a in the first rule means that focus outlines on hyperlinks are removed. Thus in commenting out the :focus rule I restored default focus styles to form elements, but not hyperlinks. This wasn’t a problem up until roughly a day before I published, but last-minute tinkering brought it back. I’d say that’ll teach me not to tinker, but I hate to lie. I’ve come up with the following solutions. … Read the rest here

The Story of

Now that the Shelf Theme is finally launched, I wanted to write up some of the process and challenges that The Theme Foundry and I faced in it’s creation. I’d started with the intention of dribbling everything, but constantly found that I wanted to show more than 400×300px, so I started documenting the process in a Flickr Set instead. This post will flesh those out further. Creation I had a very clear picture in my head of how it should look, so my first step was to create what I call a ‘ HTML Sketch”: This is where I set up basic text and positioned boxes to make sure the layout was actually possible – a series of horizontally arranged ‘cards’ on a shelf, where the card height collapsed when the viewport was too small and the cards didn’t wrap. … Read the rest here

Boxee Box Follow-up 1

After using the Boxee Box for a few days, I had the itch to restore it to the factory version of 0.9 and see how that performed. The process was surprisingly easy, with the exception of issues connecting to my N wifi network. It didn’t like either a 2.5ghz connection, or a 5ghz, and would only connect to G. Once past that, I got to experience what the Boxee Box could’ve been. The interface looked fantastic, my local content was more important again, music and photos were back in the main menu and there were all the apps that were missing. Online videos played full screen, meaning the BBC iPlayer was usable again. … Read the rest here

Shelf, now in

It’s been an awful lot of work to get what was on the face of it, a simple idea , finally released. After 4 months of design, development and bug-fixing, my Shelf theme for The Theme Foundry is now available for Wordpress and Tumblr. This is a time of both joy, pride and nervousness! I’ve been working with Yan Sarazin of Statik Pulse , who has implemented the javascript side, and Brandon Dove who converted the HTML & CSS design into the final Wordpress Theme. Along with Drew Strojny who commissioned the theme, the team has been a joyful experience to work with! I’ve also learned a lot about using Git from this project, which has been an unexpected bonus. I’ll be doing a more thorough write-up of the process and what interesting challenges we had to solve along the way, but in the meantime, there is a Flickr Set where I’ve been documenting the process, and Drew has a written a post to introduce Shelf . Tagged: shelf , theme , tumblr , wordpress … Read the rest here

Boxee Box

The Short Review The Boxee Box is a well made, beautiful piece of hardware that plays even large mkv files without complaining. However, it has a mass of regressions from the beta version: missing functionality, downgraded UI aesthetics & usability and online content is given more importance than your own files. All issues I have with Boxee Box are potentially solvable via firmware updates though! The Long Review After waiting 11 months for it be released, it was a shock when I discovered that the final Boxee Box UI had undergone so many radical changes. I cancelled my order, preferring to try the desktop software first to be sure that it still suited me as much as the beta. However, I saw some more reviews, spoke to the Boxee CEO Avner Ronen and saw his responses to the issues and felt confident again. So, the order was back on! There are many excellent reviews out there, and I will try not to cover the same ground as those, so make sure you also read: Engadget Crunchgear Matt Apps Next, let me state the conditions and criteria of this review. … Read the rest here

Iceland Air