Adobe CS3 Icons

Honestly I don't like them. CS2 Icons are far better and yes eye candy. Now the creator might have many logics behind doing this, one of them might be make them look web 2.0 ish ... he he . Might be this is better. But I don't like them. Let's see what others say.

Some likes them ... Veerle Pieters and some hates them ... Jason Santa Maria

But when I compared the new icons with these babies I was confident enough to say the new ones are not at per the reputation of Adobe.
But anyway the representation of the apps with Periodic Table is a cool thinking anyway if you get the metaphor :)

Adobe Apollo

Once adobe acquired macromedia people were busy talking about which product will survive, what will fate of the discontinued producs and some talked about who will be the off spring of this merger. well it seems that we are about to get the answer.



Adobe Apollo



This technology has the power to redefine how web works ... web apps will no longer be dependent on Browser, they will have is own crome. seemlessly integrate with other desktop work flow, and even drag drop.



a whole new breed of apps and companies will evolve. And those who might question about the burden for Adobe about installing the apollo runtime in all machines ...well i would rather say adobe has a quite experience in that.



Apollo scheduled to release on Q2 2007 for developer. I am waiting in anticipation to get my hands dirty with it :P

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CSS is now a 10 years old boy !!! Happy birthday CSS

w3 first published CSS Level 1 specification on 17th December, 1996. And now its 10 years over. CSS have matured a lot and we are now on the verge of CSS 3. A lot has changed.

Although browserd still struggling to support proper CSS standards, but let's hope good days are very near when all major browsers support same standard.



Happy BirthDay CSS



Cascading Style Sheets ... Celebrating 10 Years with Style :)

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CSS Advisor Beta

Nice initiative by Adobe. http://www.adobe.com/go/cssadvisor

Some good advices from adobe guys . although no where exhaustive but good start.I really liked the Internet Explorer thread. Lot of good discussion and tips there.

A very useful piece of info goes here.



Background image flickers on hover. - http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/communityengine/index.cfm?event=showdetails />

I wish I had this link few months before when this issue seems like impossible to solve for me.

But anyway somehow I fixed it , not in the method mentioned above though, but it would have saved a lot of my time than.

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Microsoft Website makeover

At last it came ..the new microsoft website is officially released. It's cute , its elegant and it's too DHTML :)



Things I liked :



1. Less clutter than previous design.

2. Excellent Navigation system design ..though there is definitely an one time learn.

3. Very nice placement of one liner news.



Things I didn't like much:

1. the navigation shifted to right side ...does we ideally have navigation on right side, and as a matter of fact I completely missed the nav bar at the first look ...I was wondering where it went.

2.Again a heavy image on home page looks cute ..very cute but not of much use.

3. the alignment at the top of the page can be improved i guess.



But overall its a huge change and the best this its completely CSS now :)

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Future is here!!!

From my small experience ...what I have derived is, our future is not going to be a complex use of technology. Where you can just wow your peers with the complex system you use.

But its going to be very simple. On top its just basic. Just meet your need, thats all.

The future is personalization and collaboration and sharing. It's already here and gaining maturity. We will be soon experiencing access and time anywhere ...doesn't matter, how when, why you are accessing content. You will just get it, just in the way you want.

More level of abstractions will come. If you take care of a particular layer of technology ...you gotta work there and only there.

Mobile and wireless technology is booming. And watch out the so called developing country market. It still untapped, waiting for exploitation.



Actually for technologists future is here , we just need to recognize the opportunity and leverage it.

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James Kim found deceased

http://news.com.com/2009-12-6141617.html?tag=rsspr.6141629



Very sad news indeed. 7 days of wait should not have ended this way :(

My deepest condolences to James Kim.

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Simulation or Real

Joshua, the “give a damn” is the key. You are spot on there. We’re not fans of simulation—we’re fans of real. And the only way to get real feedback is to launch.

I was going through this post and found this reply from JF(37 Signal)



http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/137-design-decisions-basecamp-help



The agenda is 37signal does not do usability testing with users as they think simulated environment is of no good. But this cannot be a universal statement I guess and not applicable everywhere too. As by nature 37signal products are web hosted and controlled by them, this looks quite practical and i am sure it works as 37signal is not just another company, they have really revolutionized web usability.



But I am pretty sure this doesn't hold true when it comes to product usability which is installed in remote client system, and you really cannot keep on releasing small usability change hot fixes. then there will be thousands of versions floating around. In such scenario, I believe usability testing still holds it's position. It's just the context where you are using.

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Back in business

Am back in business ...was very busy for quite a few days. Went home during puja, enjoyed a lot. Soon I will post some of the pictures. Going to Munnar in this Christmas, with my parents. Looking forword egarly for the day :)

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Magic Mirror

Adding secondary functions to mirrors isn't a new concept, but Craig Barr has literally made a dream -- or at least a fairy tale -- come true. The animatronics guru that produced the King Kong ride at Universal Studios Florida has channeled his creative powers to Themeaddicts, Inc., a startup company that makes it their business to turn wild fantasies into take-home products. The "Magic Message Mirror," aside from being a decoration of stunning novelty, doubles as a security monitor in which Basil, your on-screen tipster, gives you the low-down on what's happening on your premises. The mirror is connected to a series of triggers and cameras mounted around your domicile, and when those alarms are activated the system springs to life while Basil magically appears to alert you. This conversion piece is mighty sophisticated, and even Barr admits he's aiming this at "cribs like you see on TV," so we're not surprised that pricing is not disclosed. If you consider off on-the-wall security devices and home decor must-haves, then Basil should fit the bill quite well. You can catch the mirror and its inventor at the CEDIA Expo this September.

Very nice home decor binging fantacy to real world :)

Seminar at KASC

On saturday (14th July,06) I went to Kangu Ats & Science College for delivaring a seminar on MVC Architecture & PHP Framework.

It is sad such a interesting programming language such as PHP which has tremendous industry value is not tought in any university of India. We teach Java, .Net which is re-tought again upon joining industry where as if we could teach PHP we could have open new avenue for the professionals. The basic concept being the same and, PHP being relatively simpler than its parallal platform it would be possible to let the students understand actually understaing the underlaying the technology rather than investing considerable amount of time understanding mamoth programming laguages like Java.

But to my utter surprise the students of KASC responded very well. It was great to look at their enthusiasim and interaction with me and each other thats quite encouraging for me.

I was also moved by the participation of the ladies who usually remain silent ,participated very actively and brought up many new dimension to the discussion as a whole.

The workshop also seems to be very productive. I specially liked the way the students managed to setup eac and every system alloted without my intervention. I directed once and the students proactively took the responsibility and setup the other systems. I liked the thrive in them to learn a new prgramming methodology and put forword their opinion about it.

Really great experience and i would be more than happy to visit KASC again.

Protein-coated discs could enable 50TB capacities

We know that it shouldn't come as a shock anymore when researchersannounce new storage technologies that promise to hold tantalizinglylarge amounts of data, but we were still pretty stoked to learn that arecent breakthrough at Harvard Medical School may eventually lead toDVD-size discs whose capacities approach an eye-popping 50TB. Unliketraditional optical or magnetic solutions, the disc developed byProfessor V Renugopalakrishnan and his colleagues is coated withthousands of light-activated proteins called bacteriorhodopsin whichare found in the membrane of a particular salt marsh microbe -- andwhich temporarily convert to a series of intermediate molecules whenexposed to sunlight. That property allows the proteins to act asindividual bits in a binary system, but since they have a tendency toreturn to their grounded state after mere hours or days,Renugopalakrishnan and his team modified the requisite microbes' DNA toproduce proteins capable of maintaining that intermediary state forseveral years. Unfortunately we won't see this technology come tomarket anytime soon, and even when it does, 50TB capacities will stillbe a ways off, so it looks like we'll have to settle for thosedisappointing 200GB Blu-ray discs for the foreseeable future.

The only concern is how much scratch proof it will be and how many person other than media professional would need that amount of storage, maybe in the next few years. Let us just watch and see.

Million Dollar Bed

Well here is chance for a person to float, well really.

Dutch architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars has designed a magnetic bed that floats on air, basically suspended enatirely by magnet.

Well thats interesting, but hey what about the price. It's $1.5 million only. He he did I mention only. Now we need to look for a person who will be passionate enough to buy this and claim himself the only person who does not sleep on earth.

Mighty Microsoft proves to be sloppy here

Microsoft is also not always right. nad the pictures below clearly shows their lack of homework or testing whatever.
They just cannot ignore that there are many browsers other than IE.

Windows Vista Site in IE

Windows Vista Site in Firefox

Windows Vista Site in Flock

Windows Vista Site in Opera 9(Worst Among the lot)

Map mania

My House

My College

The last Samurai

I am SAD today ...really I am. We 35 guys came from West Bengal to Chennai... young, entusiastic, dream in eyes and now only I am left, staying still in Chennai. Everybody left ...everybody. Today one of my mansion mate(last bengali)is leaving and as he said I guess he is leaving permanently leaving his job :(.

I remember those early days now... lively, full of fun, training in SlashSupport was awesome. Excellent guys, and we have heard some trainers of Slash commented that this is the best batch in training ever in Slash. Yes really we were.

But the good things didnt last long. We seperated, somebody like me joined Sutherland. Some continued in SlashSupport.

Time passed and we started feeling homesick. Tamilnadu seems to be a foreign country me. The main problem here is lack of ability of adoptability of people. People are too conservative and self-community-centered. Language is one major problem apart from that food is also a problem.

I am still surviving and with this new job I will stay here and no plan to leave now. But I feel very alone, like lost in the woods.

Now again I recall what this BPO industry have to give to youth(most of my friends used to work in call centers) ... They are really ruining Indian youth, it's dismantalling a whole generation. And I hear that someday after 10-20 years our then President will utter "Opening too many BPO industry was a Historical Mistake" like our formar Chief Misinster Mr. Jyoti Basu commented, on the issue of abolishing English at school level syllabus in early 80's that eventually paralised a whole bengali generation and we are suffering now.

I feel lonely at the same time scared too .

Google Video free Today

Thats quite interesting. I saw few videos. infact this is the first day I visited Google Video. Wish it is free forever and I can watch all Charlie Chaplin movies ...

Is BPO Industry ruining Indian youth

Actually I was thinking why are we so excited about BPO, i.e. Business Process Outsourcing.

If I am not wrong BPO in word means when a company outsource part of its job to another company specialized in than.
Now this defination doesnot contain any term called Call Center.
But I am sure you all know today atleast in India BPO is synonymous to Call Center.

Now if i am right, the average age of ppl working in call center is23-25 years. And most of the company have very high attrition rate.Why? BPO can earn you hell lot of money if you are good at (every bodywant to be good when comes to job), you can enjoy a diff lifestylewhich many has dreamt of in his/her teens, ppl at your native will beamazed how fluently with a strange accent you speak english.
Then why ppl leave job...pressure is everywhere and you know beforejoining that you have to work at night shift. Then where is theproblem.

I think problem is not with the yought but with nature of the job.Its ruining the youth, its making them unsocial, unimaginative, infactunproductive.
What do they produce actually ...nothing. Helping a stupid foreignerwho dont know what is Icon, what is Power button is worthless. Is thisis the cause that our parents admit us to colleges?????

To spend the most valuable amount of out time over phone, readingthe same script and dealing with fat, rude and a rich guy who think wecannot speak english, whereas British who actually speak english loughat that english in pity. arghhh...,is mear waste of time I belive. We need more entrepreneur who will not do job but produce job.

I Dearm of that India ...

Principles that form the foundation of good design.

While searching I found a very good section on UI Design and Usability in IBM website. I found this article named Design basics very helpful. Its quite a long article and captures some pretty obvious facts but a good read for newcomers like me. So I though why not share the essence or points i learnt or gatherd from the article. It may be helpful for ppl who dont have time to read such a long article.

And you may also take a look at other sections too. Nice read, I belive.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Keep the interface simple and straightforward. Basic functions should be immediately apparent, while advanced functions may be less obvious to new users.

In addition to providing assistance when requested, the system should recognize and anticipate the user's goals, and offer assistance to make the task easier.

To give users control over the system, enable them to accomplish tasks using any sequence of steps that they would naturally use. Don't limit them by artificially restricting their choices to your notion of the "correct" sequence.

Users should not have to learn new things to perform familiar tasks.

Where you can, use real-world representations in the interface.

Users should feel confident in exploring, knowing they can try an action, view the result, and undo the action if the result is unacceptable. Users feel more comfortable with interfaces in which their actions do not cause irreversible consequences. Encourage User

Offer a preview of the results of an action when it would be inconvenient for a user to apply the action and then reverse it.

Users should be protected from making errors. The burden of keeping the user out of trouble rests on the designer.

Personalization: Allow users to customize

The following are visual design principles that promote clarity and visual simplicity in the interface:

* Subtractive design - reduce clutter by eliminating any visual element that doesn't contribute directly to visual communication.
* Visual hierarchy - by understanding the importance of users' tasks, establish a hierarchy of these tasks visually. An important object can be given extra visual prominence. Relative position and contrast in color and size can be used.
* Affordance - when users can easily determine the action that should be taken with an object, that object displays good affordance. Objects with good affordance usually mimic real world objects.
* Visual scheme - design a visual scheme that maps to the user model and lets the user customize the interface. Do not eliminate extra space in your image just to save space. Use white space to provide visual "breathing room"

"We have nothing, nothing here,"

"We have nothing, nothing here," says Hadija Adem, 40, who has lost three children during her 10 years at the camp.

Abdi Ali Hassan, 45, recalls "We saw a foreign charity man here last year. He came with a lot of armed Somali guards. He did not talk to us but took lots of photographs, but that is the last we saw of him," he says. "We go into the city every day, we try to get work and the best paid will be one dollar a day. If we cannot find work we have to beg or look into the dustbins."

"There was one poor woman who had been trapped in her home for 15 days by the bombing. The day she came out, with her baby in her arms, she was shot. We found the baby trying to suckle his mother."

"He was a good boy. He went out to get food for his mother and brothers and sister. I ask Allah every day why this happened ..." Her voice fades away.

Is this the world of tomorrow we want ... this blog is not about discussing these stuffs but I cannot resist myself showing it to my readers.

These are the words by people of Somalia from a report published in The Independent under the heading Aid fails to reach the poorest in war-torn Somalia

I think I am in love again ... with Flock

No i am not kidding, but the counterpart is no girl ...he he as you might think. Its Flock.
I think this is what people call love at first sight. It looks cool, behaves elegently and have nice feature. What more you would like to look for in your partner.

Yes I cannot leave Firefox. I am kind of married to her ...he he like amny others. But Flock is like a fresh air ... a cute little angel at your neighbour enough to make you inflatuate at any age.

So what Flock offers. It has integrated Photo Uploader, that means you can upload and share your flicker moments directly from your browser.

It has very nicely integrated and indeed very nice looking News reader. The best feature is its full story retreaval. And its blazing fast belive me.

You dont have to worry about bookmark imports and did I say that it imports your browsing history too.

And Search facility is very good.

On the downside ..its bit slow at start, and doesnot offer you to select the page you want to go back. Thats all i point out at the first sight.

Anyway try it out. Belive me you will not be disatisfied.

Gliffy : Visio on web

Recently I found a very nice tool.Its name is Gliffy , its a flash tool to draw Flowchart,UI wireframe,Floor plans,Network Diagrams etc. It do it very efficiently and the software itself is fuzz free. Just login and draw. It has automatic versioning and you dont have to worry about accidental delete. It works fine in both IE, Firefox as well as opera.

From Gliffy Site :

Gliffy Inc. is a next-generation rich internet application company based in San Francisco, CA, USA. Our mission is to provide platform independent internet applications with rich user interfaces for collaboration. Since May of 2005, Gliffy has funded development of our technology through bootstrapping and OpenLaszlo consulting services.

Recently the software I am working on I am using it for initial UI Prototyping and me and my PM are quite happy with its effectiveness. Great work from Gliffy guys. Hope to see more extensibility, like making own element would be at my hot list.

Cheers

Represend your site structure in a graph

While digging I found this cool tool.
Have anybody tested this before. If not I would say its worth a try. What it do is simple. It represents the hirarchical tag structure ofyour website. And now how it will help you.

1. It will help you understand the structure of your website in form of a raph.
2. It will let you understand the dominance of the tag in your website.

http://www.aharef.info/2006/05/websites_as_graphs.htm

Web Operating System

It calls itself a operating System, though dont expect it to perform even .1% of Windows that we use now, but it shows that future is here. When you dont have to login to your own desktop to work on your system
LOgin form anywhere in the world and get the same desktop you use at your personal system. a OS that not only resided on your system but also on the web.

As of now this OS ... EyeOS dont do much expect basic stuff, not even a virtual office but it shows what is coming next.

In fact it has a feel of a desktop, file save, delete feature, messaging, even you can ceate your own aplication ...cool huh

take a look and yes do I mention it looks very nice and elegent too

Microsoft Vista and Office 12 screenshots from cnet.com

Cnet.com has got awesome screenshots of Microsoft new products ... they look so beautiful. They also accompany very informative descriptions.

Windows Vista Beta 2 gallery
Powerpoint 2007 Beta 2 gallery
Word 2007 Beta 2 gallery
Outlook 2007 Beta 2 gallery
Excel 2007 Beta 2 gallery

Real pleasure for eyes :)

Useful links for web development.

In my very few days of experience in industry I came accross a few usefull web destinations which are quite useful I tried to lest out them according to the site design methodology.

1. Data & Content Collection(Word,Excel, Google, net,Cleint & leg Work)

2. Project Defination Document.(Budget,schedule,client staging,team, project plan,project scone,in scope-not in scope)

Useful :
http://www.web-redesign.com/
http://www.sitepoint.com/books/freelance1/
http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/

3.Site structure (Visio, Word, Excel, Photoshop, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Frontpage, Homesite, Notepad)

Useful:
http://iainstitute.org/tools/
http://www.aiga.org/
http://www.nickfinck.com/stencils.html
http://www.yourtotalsite.com/archives/information_architecture/free_visio_ia_stencil/

4. Design Visual Interface(Photoshop, Imageready, Fireworks, Golive, Dreamweaver, Flash)

Useful:
http://www.adobe.com/
http://www.good-tutorials.com/
http://www.pixel2life.com/twodded/
http://www.photoshopsupport.com/

5.Build & Integrate(Dreamweaver, PHP, ASP.Net 2, Java, JSP, EJB, PHP Framework, CakePHP, Seagull, Symphony, MVC, Mojavi, CMS, drupal, e2, joomla, oscommerce, zencart, XHTML, CSS 2, DHTML, XML, SGML, SVG, XUL, XBL, RDF, RSS, Web Services, AJAX, Prototype, Ruby on rails........................)

Usefull:
http://developer.mozilla.org/
http://devzone.zend.com/public/view
http://www.alvit.de/handbook/
http://andybudd.com/links/well_designed_css_sites/
http://prototype.conio.net/
http://cakephp.org/
http://www.rubyonrails.org/
http://www.artypapers.com/csshelppile/
http://www.symfony-project.com/
http://seagullproject.org/
http://itredux.com/office-20/database/
http://www.maxkiesler.com/index.php/mhub/category/

duhaa !!!!.................

Testing and Usability(WebXACT,Web Developer extension,Open source Testing)

Useful Masala:
http://opensourcetesting.org/index.php
http://webxact.watchfire.com/
http://chrispederick.com/work/webdeveloper/

Web 2.0 application listing sites

There are many new cool web application out there ... using latest technologies like AJAX and they do maintain web standers. I was looking for good listing of such application and came up with few equally good links.

Mashable is a blog covering Web 2.0 startups, peer production, user-generated content, revenue sharing, social software and the web as a platform.

Web 2.0 Zen

Office 2.0 Database

Nice lists.

Vista Transformation Pack 4.0 Released

This is awesome. It makes your desktop look close to Microsofts new Operating System Vista.Although it doesnot have all the Aero effects but pretty close to it.

Enjoy it.

Rapidshare Download link
The Home Page of Vista Transformation Pack 4.0
Windows Vista Home Page

With Expression - Day 1

Last night I downloaded the new Microsoft Expression 3 CTP. Its a huge 224 MB download but later I understood it's worth every bit of it. In the next few days I am going to explore and cultivate the all new Microsoft Expression and also will share my journey with all of you...
So lets start.

The installation is pretty simple as usual. My system has Windows XP Pro SP2. And it installed without any hickup. I has .Net Framework 2 installed previously.

The startup is also pretty smooth and quick.



Once you are in you are all set. Ready to design. Only thing I found missing is the welcome wizard that every Microsoft product seem to have. but thats not of much importance though.

Now I tried to make a new document.Now the biggest setback. its all ASP.Net. In dreamweaver you have different choices, much more than this.This is where Expression will loose to Dreamweaver a long way.






Once you setup the new page then designing page is pretty simple. Just drag and drop unlike Dreamweaver where you just have to Single click it. here you have to double click ...not much pain though huh !!! :)

The code is very clean and starts with minimum tag necessary in which you can add style or properties. All the panels are well layed out. The first time visible panels are Toolbox, Style, Properties(Tag and CSS) and Folder List.

Removing or editing a tag is quite simple. Once you place cursur at any position on the top you will see the full tag structure. Select the tag and click on the small arrow beside it and you will have all the options you can do with that Tag. Pretty simple fast and elegent :)



Thats all for today. I need to get breakfast now :). More tomorrow.

List of frameworks and CMS

In Wikipedia I found a very exhaustive list of Web Application frameworks and Content Management Systems.

They inludes frameworks in all languages i.e. PHP,Python,Java etc.
Take a look

List of web application frameworks

The CMS list is not just a list its a comparison chart very helpfull to get stated.

Comparison of content management systems

PHP Framework

For few days I was in search of a PHP framework which is easy to use as well as have enough features to complete small and medium scale projects. After few look around I short listed few frameworks and downloded them and tried it.
The frameword I downloaded are

• Zend
• Symfony
• Cake
• Seagull

Among them finally I sticked to CakePHP for the following reasons.

It's simaple as promised
Setting up is relatively simple unlike Symphony which even require some commands to execute.
Its although still under development but somewhat complete for small and medium projects, unlike Zend which seems to be missing many functionlity.
It has native support for AJAX which is missing in Seagul.
Good documentation although not vast as Symphony.
Very active community
The development is done by a core team thun maintaing staibility.

I have come accross a good comparisons and articles about PHP Frameworks listed below.

Gráfica Comparación Frameworks

Yahoo My Web 2.0

I just came accross a new service by Yahoo!. They are calling it My Web 2.0.

My Web 2.0 is a social search engine. What does that mean? It means that we've combined the power of search technology with the power of people. My Web 2.0 is a new way to find and share knowledge on the Web — you'll find better answers by tapping into the shared knowledge of the people you know and trust.

Quite interesting. I wanted to explore more. Sign Up is not an headech at all. If you have yahoo account it will work here also. I havn't seen My Web 1.0 so dont have any idea of it. But Yahoo says that they have kept all the features of My Web 1.0 and added few new cool features like Tagging, My Rank.

I personally liked the My rank feature. Its a pretty cool feature i belive. This feature really shows how computer technology is gradually mixing with real human behaviour. Using this feature you can rank pages acoording to your importance and liking. And people connected to you, i.e. in your community may also do so.
So when you search it will take into their page rank also in consideration. Thus giving you a human touch in your serch.
Pretty cool huh!!!