Just a quick note today that I'm slowly building a new front page design for this website. My goal is to create more of a "Tumblr" design, where I can list everything that's new on the front page, including blog posts, bookmarks, short text blurbs, source code snippets, and photos. At the moment, all that shows up on the front page are blog posts, so if you only see the front page, you're only getting a very small idea of "What's new" here.
After looking at my website (alvinalexander.com) yesterday on my iPad, I thought maybe I should create a custom version of the website for mobile devices. However, after looking at the stats, it appears that there's a 10:1 ratio of stationary devices to mobile devices, which you can see in this graphic, courtesy of Google Analytics:
Very cool, Jonathan Ive of Apple discusses a television show named Blue Peter, and the process of design, while looking at designs from young children:
Just a quick note here today on the inline CSS syntax, which I can never remember. To add CSS to your web pages using the inline syntax, just add a style tag to your HTML tag, including your CSS styles within the quotes of the style tag as shown here:
<div style="border-style: dotted; border-color: #ccc;">
The CSS styles you define within your quotes are defined just as you would in an external style sheet, but they are all on one line, as shown in that example.
Apple minimalist design examples: Over the weekend I finally got around to upgrading my iPhone 3G to the new iPhone operating system -- iOS 4, specifically iOS 4.01. I expected the iOS 4 to be slower than the iPhone 3.x operating system I was running, but to my pleasant surprise, it actually seems faster.
Twitter iPhone App 'trending' FAQ: Help, how do I stop that insanely annoying trending bar in the latest Twitter iPhone app?
If you use the Twitter iPhone app, and find the new "Trending" bar to be insanely annoying, you can't seem to get rid of it, but you can at least slow it down a little bit.
A long time ago a friend gave me a copy of a book named "The Design of Everyday Things
jQuery FAQ: How do you create a textarea using jQuery? Also, how do I insert content (text or HTML) into a textarea with jQuery?
I don't know if this will make any sense without showing my HTML, but I just used the following jQuery code to (a) get contents from a specific div tag, (b) add a textarea just before that div, (c) put the HTML contents into the new textarea, then (d) remove the original div. So, in essence, I created a new textarea with jQuery and inserted HTML into that textarea, but I got the HTML from my original div.
As a quick note, I just posted two new videos on YouTube about how to draw circles in Gimp:
These videos are essentially a companion to my How to draw circles in Gimp tutorial here on the devdaily website.
(Note: This article was originally written in 2005.) As far as design goes, products like the Mac, TextMate, and JFormDesigner have really opened my eyes to the possibilities of great design, and it's impact on people (I was going to say "users", but that say more inhuman than ever before), and my personal feelings about using these products. At the moment I don't really ever want to go back to using a Windows PC ever again, in spite of the few things I don't like about Mac OS X.
Back here at the devdaily.com world headquarters I've been working on fixing some "issues" on this blog, and one of the minor things I just worked on was finding a new icon for my RSS news feed. It turns out there's a lot of free RSS Feed icons out there in the world, you just have to google them, then follow tons of links.
If it will help save anyone the trouble, here are the best RSS Feed icons I found today, in sorted order, starting with the ones I think are best.
Nothing too major today, I just wanted to note this site that features stylized line drawings. I like this form of art, and didn't want to forget the name/type, as well as this artist.
Secrets of Apple design: A Steve Wozniak quote on designing products to work the way humans work.
I wrote recently that for some areas of design, we need to get away from thinking like humans -- with our inherent physical limitations -- if we're going to make the next great inventions. (That article is no longer available, but it consisted of excercises like getting down on the floor, and looking at the world from the perspective of a child or a small animal; or standing on a desk, and seeing what things would look like if you were 10' tall.)
If you've never heard of the "Golden Ratio" and how it applies to user interface design, you may want to search it up at google.
Here's one link where the author refers to it as the "Golden section ratio (phi)". It doesn't get into the UI part, but has a nice history with references to Euclid, pyramids, and Fibonacci numbers.
“Apple was very close to bankruptcy and to irrelevance [but] you learn a lot about life through death, and I learnt a lot about vital corporations by experiencing a non-vital corporation,” he told the British Business conference. “You would have thought that, when what stands between you and bankruptcy is some money, your focus would be on making some money, but that was not [Steve Jobs’] preoccupation. His observation was that the products weren’t good enough and his resolve was, we need to make better products. That stood in stark contrast to the previous attempts to turn the company around.”
~ Jonathan Ive on Steve Jobs turning around Apple
At first I was surprised to read about Jony Ive’s interest in satellite design, but then I realized that you probably can’t have a more “pure” selection of materials than what’s needed for a satellite. When I think about “integrity” in the choice of design materials, I can understand it in this context. (Maybe because my degree is in Aerospace Engineering.)
“Don’t cut corners. People will feel it.” (from the book Inside Apple)
“It’s the best thing for the product.” ~ How an argument about a product at Apple is often settled. (From the book Inside Apple)
“To do the best design you have to live and breathe the product.” ~ From the book, Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products.
