Design

I’m a Mac

March 31, 2009 Design General

Apple Logo Just as there are moments of great achievements in career like a promotion, getting a mac would undoubtedly rank among the higher for me – no less a promotion from a Windows system for me. The journey from knowing a Mac to owning one has been 13 years long. From my first computer lessons on a PowerMac in 1996 to getting a Macbook Pro in 2009. And the moments leading to my first Mac just made it more memorable for me.

FedEx would have delivered the package on March 23rd if Mount Redoubt had not erupted ‘untimely’. All FedEx flights were diverted and the package took a week more than usual for delivery. It was a situation beyond anyone’s control but I was getting impatient. Finally the good news from FedEx that the package had arrived in Regina early morning and was going to be delivered today. No way I was going to miss the delivery schedule (and wait another day). I requested the executive to let me know an hour before the delivery van was at my doorstep so I could go home and she agreed.

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Heading for A Change

November 5, 2008 Design

It’s been a while since I have written on my website. The time schedules apart, my motivation for new creative thinking has almost dried up.

I have been on WordPress since 2005. However I have found that it takes a lot of effort for a single person to update and maintain this highly acclaimed application. I have to take constant back-ups of my database/files/wordpress files and keep up with the current version as and when it has been released. It’s time consuming and stressful and sometimes puts me in a panic state of mind – what if the new upgrade doesn’t work for me.

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The Revival of SurfUnion

June 30, 2008 Design

I was in a discussion with a friend last weekend at her swank new office. Suddenly we came across a point in social networking and SurfUnion popped up in my mind. If I ever come out with an autobiography there’s sure going to be a chapter dedicated to SurfUnion — a designers forum of which I was a proud member and an architect. Unfortunately the founding of SurfUnion is more interesting and worth discussing than the way we managed it.

In late 2003, five of my close buddies had wanted to do something worthwhile. We were at best designers with creative skills but worked out of home; some of them like me on a paltry sum. On the night of October 2nd, we launched a ‘designers only’ forum hiring some space on Buttclencher’s server. We decided to call it ‘SurfUnion’ or a group of surfing designers. The name took the imagination of all the admins as we liked to call ourselves and later we were joined by many. One of them was a geeky guy nicknamed Bane and was located in Colombo. Five of us – myself, Kreativea (Aadesh), Buttclencher (Raunaq), RanTen (Ranajit Tendolkar) and FlashKid (Isaac) operated from Mumbai. Thus we had a majority stake in the decision making process while LimeIce (Gursimran) located in Delhi and Ryche (Fahd) in Kolkata completed the admin lineup. The fabulous tagline of ‘We put the Desi in Design’ was suggested by Ryche in one of our online sessions. During our tenure, we arranged competitions and meetups that helped bring varied talents face-to-face.

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Breathing Fresh AIR

June 23, 2008 Design

AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is Adobe’s cross-operating system runtime environment that allows developers to leverage the current technologies like Flash, AJAX, Flex, HTML and JavaScript, and enable the deployment of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to the desktop. Prior to it’s release AIR was codenamed Apollo.

Applications developed using AIR provide a delightful way of presenting live data and one does not need to be connected to the internet all the time. From the visual standpoint, AIR technology offers the power to change the interface design thus bringing a coherence between function and looks. This also greatly enhances the UX of the product and supplements any deficiencies in the original structure. It seems unlikely that the increasing reach of AIR would make the internet browser applications redundant since a majority of the internet population still relies on the software for surfing pages. However as a reminder, the developers and designers must begin earnestly to move towards web standards and help to bring about a consistency in the way content and design is demonstrated online. Till such time get addicted to AIR like me.

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Personas from Firefox

December 18, 2007 Design

In what I consider to be a breakthrough feat, Mozilla has released the Persona extension that should revolutionize the skinning of browsers in the coming days. The extension uses the JSON feed to dynamically load the URLs remotely to skin the Firefox browser. Moreover, besides making the browser lightweight it does not require a restart anymore to see the theme in action. For all Firefox fans.