Posts filed under 'Design'
It’s a scary scenario which I read while coming to work. This news paper was carrying an article about the need for corporate bloggers to maintain restraint while writing on the Internet. In our enthusiasm to write we tend to forget our responsibilities toward the organization we are working. The story of Dooce is quite famous in this context. In 2002 Heather Graham was fired from her job as a web designer because she wrote satirical accounts of her experiences under the pseudonym Dooce.
Amongst the many IT companies that have stated their guidelines for bloggers, I found IBMs the most comprehensive. Read this article written by James Snell for a detailed look. You can also have more information on blogging ethics on Charlene Li’s Blog and also on the Sun policy of Public Discourse.
Continue Reading January 4th, 2006
For me, the discovery of the
RSS Feed was the single most brave achievement of 2005. The readers gave me an opportunity to compile several chunks of good information from the feeds at one place. I first began by using
Newsgator because of it’s online capabilities and I was quite happy with it. Later I switched to
Mozilla Thunderbird (yes you heard that right) which is also an excellent RSS reader. it also allows categarization in folders so I can have all my
Apple Macintosh related feeds sitting pretty in a folder by the same name. Thunderbird was by far the most loved one but it required installation and wasn’t available online. Not that I travel much but it’s helpful if I can check the same feeds from home as well. But if you are looking for an installable reader, switch to Thunderbird.
Here comes Google Reader. It allows me to import all the RSS feeds in OPML format which I can easily export from within Thunderbird. Instead of the folders we have labels in Google Reader, much the same like Gmail. You only require a Gmail ID to use the Google Reader which I am sure most of us have by now. The brightest improvement from the other readers is the clean GUI of Google Reader which never distracts you from doing your tasks.
The application however doesn’t allow multiple labeling of several feeds at one go. This is very tiring in case you have hundreds of subscriptions. Moreover it also doesn’t allow editing the label titles if we have typed something erroneously. In any case this is a Beta version and things will improve in the coming days. If you haven’t discovered RSS Feeds in 2005, there’s still a week left. Here’s your last chance to do it now :-)
December 27th, 2005
I had always liked retro figures right from my earlier website and I had also got some good reviews regarding the same. I decided to move away from it because I wanted to try out something different. Now that the earlier design has outlived my expectations it was time for a new set of rules.
Firstly I had to re-install Wordpress on my local machine which wasn’t as tedious as I initially thought it would be. Installing it offline meant that I can carry my design development on Wordpress without disturbing the original website. For those of you who are interested in knowing more about it, click here. I had always had a colour scheme in my mind which was more youthful then it’s previous avatar and I just had to build a theme around it. The RetroGal - as I like to call all my retro figures, is also back on the header. The entire development took me just over a day & the end result was very satisfying. I hope this small change would enhance the user-experience to a great extent.
December 18th, 2005
Here comes
Kapsules, a freeware desktop
widget engine built exclusively for the Windows system. It is built upon the Windows Scripting Technology and is reliant on the
.NET framework for it’s working. While
Konfabulator was earlier written for the
Mac OS X System and later ported for Windows, Kapsules is exclusively designed to be used by Windows components. Check out the
widgets available for Kapsules and also preview the Mac OS X
Dashboard Widgets.
December 12th, 2005
This would be the greatest revelation as far as I am concerned. All this while I was feeling proud about Apple not succumbing to the market gimmicks of using Flash on their website. They have a novel way of seeking aesthetic value even in the most simplest of things. The fact that Apple was not using Flash anywhere across their website was a very challenging thought in itself because it was able to achieve good results without using the SWF technology.
Not any more. Apple has just launched it’s new software called Aperture and has used Flash beautifully on the official website. The black colour lends a certain entertaining aura, much to the liking of any photographer. If you are a designer and you want to see aesthetics marry usability then visit Apple.com.
November 9th, 2005
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