Posts in category: Software
This is a list of online and offline tools which can boost design. What I am interested in is to provide the ones that work best for me, not all of them. Without further ado here’s the list.
Color
Three tools work for me when it comes to color.
- kuler
I love kuler not because I can find there thousands of schemes but because I can upload an image and extract its colors. I know there are many similar tools, but I think kuler is better when it comes to variations of a scheme e.g. a more vivid or a desaturated version.
- 0to255
A fantastic tool. You pick a color and it finds you lighter and darker versions of it. I use it all the time.
- Color Scheme Designer
Color Scheme Designer finds for you complementary colors, triads, tetrads etc. You can easily change the saturation of you base and take the variations with one click.
Grids
What would we be without grids? Nothing.
- #grid
#grid is awesome. With just a bit of JavaScript you get a coherent and discreet grid system on your screen. To be precise: on your browser.
- 960 Grid System
An alternative to #grid. It works with fluid/liquid layouts as well.
CSS
CSS frameworks don’t seem very useful to me. So I go with a homemade very simple framework. However, there are two CSS tools I use every day:
- CSS reset
Eric Meyer’s CSS reset is the best one. Just grab it.
- CSS Media Types
The link is all about the relevant article at A List Apart. It has to with how browsers can/should respond to users’ screens. I think this article could change the way we perceive mobile design in general.
Icons & Patterns
- Icon Finder
Icon Finder includes a huge database of free to use icons. What’s even better is that these icons are beautiful most of the times.
- BgPatterns
This is the best pattern generator. It took me some time to appreciate this tool but now I like it. A lot.
My list might be quite short, but tools don’t make the designer. They are only a place to start. And to return to them with the beginning of a new project. Simple as that.
So we got some new browsers on stage and the audience wants a new browsers’ war to begin. The first gladiator is the fresh Google Chrome and the other one is the also new kid on the block, Internet Explorer 8.
First of all I want to mention that this post is not a exhausting test. I just used these browsers for a while and detected some issues as a typical (or should I say novice?) user.
(And of course I don’t forget both browsers are in a beta version)
Chrome just works
Sounds natural.
How about Internet Explorer? Not exactly. The first time I tried to run IE8 I saw the following message, despite the fact I never installed anything to any prior version of the browser.
If you don’t disable the add-on you ‘ll never you use your browser.
Chrome is smart
That doesn’t mean IE8 is stupid. Not at all. I am just trying to say that Chrome makes our life easier.
My cache is empty, my history clear and I start typing the URL of A List Apart. As you can see, Chrome detects the website and makes some suggestions. I can visit the site or look for the term I begun to type.
(Click to enlarge)
IE8 doesn’t get it.
The position of the Refresh button
In all browsers the Refresh button is placed near or next to the Back and Next buttons. It sounds normal.
Chrome follows the convention which is good, because we are actually talking about usability. On the other hand, IE8 keeps the button next to the address bar, a “feature” introduced by the previous version of the browser. So, users have to move their mouse (and their hand) a relatively long distance in case they want to refresh the page. Not good.
One tab
Chrome changes the way we perceive tabs. This is the first time that when a user closes the only tab she closes the browser as well.
Internet Explorer 8 doesn’t let you close the last tab. Similar approach has been detected in all browsers so far.
According to Chrome when a user wants to close the last tab, she doesn’t need the browser anymore. Too simplistic? I think not. I like it this way.
Compatibility view
This a new feature of IE8. This button aims to help users view a website correctly even if it has been developed according old standards or techniques which are not supported anymore.
There are many things to consider here. The first thing is that a typical user doesn’t care about the button. She only wants to see the website.
The second one is that it is very difficult to see whether the button has been pushed or not.
Finally, I ‘d like to mention the button doesn’t work the way it should. I tried to test it in a bunch of websites which I know they have been properly developed and the compatibility view of IE8 just didn’t work the way it promised. I can think of a million reasons about the existence of this button but I ‘ll try not to talk about it.
Chrome doesn’t care for such details.
Browsers and system resources
Last but not least, I need to say that Chrome requires less memory. IE8 should perform better as a child of Microsoft.
So Google Chrome (beta) seems to be a better browser than Internet Explorer 8 (beta). But I didn’t write all this post to say just that. I think that one of my posts about Internet Explorer 7 still counts.
Above all, IE8’s most important mission is to kill the version 6 of the browser family. The sooner the better.
By the time I started working with my MacBook I realized that I can have so many great browsers that I almost forgot about the existence of Internet Explorer. Now, really, does Internet Explorer exist?
Why am I talking about utopia? Because all the browsers of which I am going to tell you are fast, reliable and beautiful. Above all, I am happy because I know that my websites are going to look the way I designed them, apart from minor details. The whole experience becomes so pleasant that you don’t want stop surfing.
Of course I am not going to refer to all Mac browsers but to the ones I use day by day.
OmniWeb
Omniweb is my favorite one. From the very moment I downloaded it I loved it. I loved it so much that I bought it. Yes, OmniWeb does not come for free, it costs $14,95 but it worths every cent.
The main advantage of OmniWeb its tab drawer which can open on the left. It’s fast, stable and highly customizable. Not the perfect browser during design and/or development, mainly because there are browsers more capable than OmniWeb when it comes to professional use.
Safari
Apple claims it is the best browser in the world. I am not that sure, but I know well that Safari is the fastest one and a very stable browser. Safari is a must have browser and the Windows version is also great.
The latest version of the browser includes a new menu called “Develop” which makes it good during development as well. This menu can be even better and I think it will in the near future.
Camino
I feel Camino is an ignored browser by many users and I think it deserves more of our attention. It is very beautiful, fast and it feels as a native Mac application although it isn’t. It is an open source product and this is another reason we should spot the lights on it.
I am pretty sure Camino would have been my main browser if I hadn’t discovered OmniWeb.
Firefox
Firefox managed to be our favorite Windows browser and changed the way we think of the Web forever. It became so popular because it is a really great browser and it helped us move away from Internet Explorer. The Mac version of Firefox never felt as native as it could be, but the new version of it, Firefox 3, seems far better than the previous ones.
Firefox is simply the best during Web design and development thanks to the magnificent AddOns made for this purpose, it is also a child of open source coding and it becomes even better day by day.
Shiira
Shiira reminds me those girls who look very sweet and they only need some time to become real charming. Shiira is very beautiful and it has some features e.g. tabs on the left like OmniWeb, that make it worth mentioning. It deserves at least one download to your system.
The only thing I don’t like is some unexpected crashes and the fact I don’t feel people who created really care about its progress.
Opera
Opera is an unlucky browser because there is Firefox which makes all of us tend to forget it. Opera is very fast, faster than Firefox, very customizable and often updated. The extensions developed for it make it even better.
Every Web designer who really wants to test a website should have Opera among her applications. Even for typical users Opera is a browser you just can’t ignore.
Plainview
Plainview was developed for a single reason: to enhance presentations. It is a full screen browser which can help a lot people who make presentations.
I see is as an interesting experiment since it is not the most usable browser in the world and I am curious how better it can become.
This is the end of my list. I said nothing about Flock, a browser focused on social networking and iCab, a very plain but powerful browser. Both browsers are interesting and recommendable but I think there isn’t enough space for them as long as it regards me.
If you are a Mac user, don’t miss the browsers mentioned above. You ‘ll see why I talked about browsers utopia.
I first met and start to play with Expression Engine 3 years ago. I was about to launch a great website and I was wondering whether I should build it with it. After some geek talking between me and my partner we decided to turn to WordPress. Just for the record that website was never released. I never regretted I dived into the sea of WordPress, a powerful blog engine which can be used as a CMS as well.
Through the years I ‘ve learned WordPress inside out. I designed my own themes, I even built my own plugins (just for personal use) and I am glad I spent so much time for such a worthy system. When I created this website there was no question about the way it would be fueled: WordPress was my only choice. Drupal, Movable Type, Textpattern and the rest were pretty solid engines but not quite well as WordPress. In the meanwhile I felt there was a debt to Expression Engine.
There came a moment where I said that the next version of this website would be powered by Expression Engine.
Pros and cons
Expression Engine in my mind has two disadvantages:
- It’s not free
- It has a quite steep learning curve
I never really cared about the first one since I knew that if there ‘s something which worths the money, who cares about it? The second thing is not so simple. It requires effort. Anyway.
What makes Expression Engine great is the fact it is made for designers. You can create anything in EE pretty the same way you do it in plain HTML. The famous template system of EE is unbeatable. At the same WordPress makes you feel you need to work all the time in two different modes: the design mode and the development mode. This bothers me. I need to keep my mind clean when I design.
Another attractive characteristic of EE is that it doesn’t focus to blogging. It can be a blog pretty easily but it is better when working for projects such as company websites, small e-shops or websites for conferences. At the same time, I do better SEO work, I can add or remove pages at once and I can have better support by the moment I buy it.
If I had to describe the main differences between Expression Engine and WordPress in a few words I would say that EE is a professional tool optimized for projects you do more often while Wordpress is an excellent blogging platform which can also do more if you need so.
A CMS is an easy to be used tool for non computer savvy users to manage a website. There are so many CMSs out there which do what they are supposed to do very efficiently because there are great teams of developers to support them. Furthermore, many of these systems are free. What interests me though is not which CMS is the best one but why companies keep developing their owns.
Reason #1: doing certain things with your own CMS
The “lifestyle” of small companies is limited. Customer X wants a website for the company he owns, customer Y wants to develop a personal project and customer Z to support an investment. What do companies do in such cases? They build their own CMS in order to come up to the expectations. The question is why a Web development company decides to take this path instead of using an already developed CMS? I think there are two main reasons:
- A company cannot control an external CMS. What I mean is that it is not easy to trust other people to cover your own needs.
- There isn’t any CMS which can do everything. As the needs grow a single CMS can’t cope with them.
Both reasons seem quite fair to me. However there’s an objection I need to make. Any platform, any tool needs to be supported in a regular basis by people who know it well. This is why I believe that well known CMSs will always be better than the ones developed by a team of people under a small company. It’s utopia to believe your own CMS would serve you better forever than one which is supported by hundreds of users and developers.
I do believe in open communities of developers and I do think that in the near future we are going to use far more powerful systems than the ones we have now. To add some more salt into the wound I ‘d be much happier with a team of people who can use a lot of different CMSs the way a chameleon changes its colors. This is what I call adaptability, knowledge and power.
Reason #2: marketing
Marketing, the laws of industry, hooking clients etc. are all empty words to me as long as we use them without knowing what they really mean. However, all this emptiness can be a reason for developing your own CMS.
So there’s this clever dick who thinks: “If I convince my clients to use my own CMS they will stay forever with me. It will be very difficult for them to use this system without me.”
Instead of trying to develop a good product, to help a client achieve what he needs to, to provide a solid solution and to support efficiently, this guy messes things up. In this scenario it is most probable to end up with an unhappy customer who won’t trust easily a similar company in the future. Is this business wise?
In other words we reach to a situation where one develops a product in order to trap a client. I know this thought hides a lot of in between steps, but the meaning remains the same. I am not a specialist but I am pretty sure this is all wrong.
To conclude, often a new CMS isn’t always a new tool which can make the life of people easy. It works the same way as when someone who owns some money becomes a CEO. It takes more than just a roll of the dice to do that.
Let’s see what is what: W3C is the association of people and companies who are responsible for the evolution of the Web. W3C’s CSS Working Group is another team of people who take care of CSS and determine the new editions of the platform. This group consists of W3C developers and huge companies such as Adobe, Mozilla, Opera, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Google. There ‘s no question about the importance of the group.
What really happens in there? Since yesterday there were no designers participating in the group. It sounds ridiculously dump. We are talking about people who implement what the group determines. An equivalent would be a car company which doesn’t give cars to drivers in order to test the new models.
The second thing is such companies can’t get organized easily and work together towards a common target. We are currently using CSS 2.0 and the question is when are going to move to level 2.1? Apparently, not soon.
The result of all these frictions is designers who remain still and keep developing websites the typical way whereas evolution is one step away.
The Opera & Microsoft battle
Opera now publishes an antitrust letter against Microsoft. The letter affords the whole Web community and in there Opera accuses Microsoft for harming Web standards and the whole industry by not focusing on what the group tries to implement and by keeping Internet Explorer a part of Windows. You don’t have to be an expert to see that this letter is a bomb which is going to spoil the whole effort.
Obviously, Opera is theoretically correct. All versions of Internet Explorer, except for the latest one, are far from good. This won’t make Opera create better products and the already slow moving CSS Working Group will stop for good. Furthermore, it is unfair in my eyes. How will Microsoft take it? Will Microsoft guys hug the Opera ones for their tenderness? I don’t think so. I only wish Microsoft ignores Opera.
For all the people who use CSS in their everyday routine this battle is one more car crash which leaves us behind. We do only need the CSS 2.1 specification but also the CSS 3.0, the way Jina Bolton described it in an extraordinary presentation (.pdf file - 7.9MB).
Now what?
Andy Clarke an invited expert in CSS Working Group went further and requested the disbandment of the whole group. He also talked about a new group consisted not by browser vendors but by people who care about the evolution of CSS because this is central to the success of their profession. It is difficult to say if this is going to work really.
How easy is to say “OK, I am going to disband this group and create a new one” when the current participants are the Web? How easy is to leave e.g. Google people out now and ask them later to support the new standards you made without them? It is important to understand that we don’t only need such companies but we also want them in because they are good.
As designers and developers we do need a helping hand in both the areas of creativity (call me CSS, XHTML etc.) and browser’s support. The current form of CSS Working Group needs an overhaul. It sounds rational enough to me to think of a new, smaller and much more flexible team consisting of designers, developers and browser vendors. I am afraid that what is rational is at the same time the most complicated thing in the world.
11 December, 2007,
The website analytics package, Mint, is created by a guru of Web design, S. Inman. It takes almost €20 from your pocket though. I hear people say: “Why should I pay for it when Google Analytics is free and can be easily installed?”
I admit neither I could see why until the moment I used it. The GUI and the way this software works made me happy about this purchase. Now I seldom use Google Analytics. The main advantage of Mint is that it gives you all you need to know in one page. What do you actually need to know? Who came to your page, where from he landed onto it, which pages he visited and how he found you. OK there ‘s something missing: how long he stayed there.
Mint and Analytics give quite the same results, so there ‘s no question about accuracy. To add some salt, I must say that for Mac users there are a few sweets for their dashboard as well. Thus, I use Mint every day and I only go to my Google Analytics page when I need to see some general statistics such as browsers and OS of my visitors.
All in all Mint a tiny luxury for my online life that I love to use and I think I won’t get bored of it easily.
Flickr started out as a place where each member of the website could upload photos and share them with a friend or with the other members. Photos can be organized in sets and have tags according to the photographer’s mood or preferences. There’s nothing extraordinary so far.
Commenting photos is another option provided. Comments can bring members closer to each other but again this feature is just OK. The real fun begins with other features such as notes (special spaces onto photos where comments can be added), connecting photos with places via maps and the feature of groups where a lot of members can share the same virtual space and upload images around a specific subject.
Did I say images? Yes. Flickr is not about photos only. Acting like a huge repository of any type of images is the best thing about it. Flickr now is a place concerning anything which can be shown in a computer screen: wallpapers, screenshots from applications or games, illustration, tutorials, thematic areas, you name it.
Actually, Flickr has become something much larger and important than a photo album. It’s all because of its users. It doesn’t matter if you call this Web 2.0 or Web 3.0 or Web 100.0. What is important is the power of users. At the same time people who run Flickr (you can call me Yahoo!) stayed focused on what we call “visual communication”. They could add tones of irrelevant features but they didn’t. This is the second best thing about it.
On the other hand Flickr created dozens of services concerning its users. Now anyone can show his Flickr images at his own website. He can have any image printed in a book or in a postcard or practically anywhere. It only takes a registration and a few bucks.
Latest news: Flickr introduces Places a virtual space which shows photos from one place e.g. the Eiffel Tower. There’s more: just yesterday Flickr announced online image editing. Try it, it’s free and intuitive.
What’s next? I have no idea but it must be fantastic!
Since the very first days I got my Mac I downloaded Coda and OmniWeb. I made some hard tests on them and by the moment the limited license was about to expire I decided to buy them both.
Coda
Coda is an HTML, CSS, PHP etc. editor but this description is not accurate. Coda does a whole lot of more things.
As an editor, it works perfectly well, but there are a number of equally good editors, for example Textmate. The thing is Coda includes a very handy panel from where you can edit your files both locally and on the server.
Ever better news: Coda lets you update and synchronize both the local and the remote files with one click because it includes an FTP as well! No more pain whether a file has not been uplodaed to the server.
Coda comes with some reference books (HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP) which can save you when in hurry. It also includes a Terminal for the absolute geeks.
Buying coda was a piece of cake and secure as well. It costs less than €50.
OmniWeb
I almost hear you: “How can you spend money for a browser?”
I can when it is about such a good browser. OmniWeb is so good I nearly don’t need Firefox anymore.
It is very stable, secure, fast and customizable. The most noticable feature is the vertical alignment of tabs but there are a lot of features which make it great such as the advanced security settings, the Web development tools, the highly customizable layouts etc.
Omniweb is a very beautiful browser. Only Shiira is equally slick. Unfortunately, Shiira suffers from stability problems, at least this is what I saw in it.
Buying OmniWeb costed me less than €15 and like Coda everything regarding the buying procedure went very smoothly.
Lifestream idea is an effort to scan the daily activities of the owner of a website. If he writes something in his blog, the particular activity is recorder and displayed at the Lifestream page. If he uploads a photo in Flickr, the Lifestream page can present it too. And so on.
So we are actually talking about an aggregator which works just for one. The aggreagator collects data and displays them at the relevant page. Sounds simple. No? Anyway, the idea behind lifestreams is quite interesting. I think that it could work not only for people but for companies as well.
I first heard about lifestreams at the website of J. Keith. Since then I made some efforts to create my own but I didn’t make it until today. So here it is my own stream. (It has been added to the menu as well.) Right now I collect information from this website (posts and comments), Ma.gnolia (my bookmarks), Flickr (my pictures) and Last.fm (my music). I am thinking of adding more services by time.
The specific page is a bit heavy, because I wanted to style it a different way than the rest website. It is an experiment anyway.
[UPDATE 08 Oct.] There is an enhancement in my LifeStream. An RSS Feed so you can spy my activities without having to visit this site.
You can grab it from the Homepage or the LifeStream page.
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