Written on October 13, 2009 at 4:54 pm, by Brian Schwartz
So if you’re a designer and you’ve ever had to create a Microsoft Word or Powerpoint template for a client, you’ve felt this pain.
One huge UI improvement that would make my life easier is the ability to swap out one image for another but keep everything else the same. Size, layout, placement, etc.
If I need to export a new image in Illustrator or Photoshop because the client decides they want the color to be different (or if it doesn’t look right printed, or whatever), I end up having to reset all of these settings, by hand. Every time.
Instead of just choosing a new version of the image in Word, I’m forced to do a screen scrape and paste them in Photoshop just to be able to try a new version of the image. This is stupid and should be fixed.
Here is the screen grab of my settings in Photoshop with my feelings on the matter:
Word Failure
Written on October 5, 2009 at 6:01 pm, by Brian Schwartz
Ok, so with some time to kill (or basically being at home sick and bored with TV), I’ve mostly finished this new design and did a ‘soft launch’ of the new design as my own hand coded WordPress theme.
I have a few tweaks to finish (like a javascript bug on internet explorer that I haven’t looked into yet)… but for the the most part, this is it. I’d love your feedback… even constructive criticism, I can take it.
But with this now mostly complete, I’ll be blogging more often and I’ll be starting on my next WordPress project (a redesign of Spoke and Spoken Whirred) and probably combining them into one site.
Written on September 21, 2009 at 9:36 pm, by Brian Schwartz
I’ve got my new custom wordpress theme about half done over the weekend. The page layout is working great, a few features are different than what is live on creativereason.com right now. Definitely a step in the right direction.
I’ve got to finish the blog page layout and add in a few widgets (test in several browsers) and wrap it up. Looking forward to having this finished. It’s been my first experience with a new / from scratch wordpress theme and I’ve been happy with the progress.
I’ve probably spent about 12 hours on it thus far and will probably need another 3. Not bad at all for my first time, including design / coding xhtml / theming it.
Written on September 13, 2009 at 12:42 am, by Brian Schwartz
So I’m switching things up. This site is now blog.creativereason.com, new site is live at www.creativereason.com and I’m in the midst of a redesign.
Soon the blog will look like the new site and I’ll add some new features to the new site (recent posts, tweets, etc.). It’s possible I’ll make the whole thing wordpress, right now it’s handcoded xhtml.
I’d love to hear what you think. Consider this a soft launch.
Written on August 23, 2009 at 9:02 pm, by Brian Schwartz
Fail
Written on August 13, 2009 at 4:57 pm, by Brian Schwartz
Lately, I’ve been using jQuery and similar libraries whenever possible, instead of flash. Besides the fact that these libraries usually kick butt and make sites more usable and interactive, by not using flash these sites still work on phones.
I like this little garage door effect, and I’ve seen it on some sites and was thinking about using it for a new version of a site I’m working on (hint, it rhymes with smoke), but when reviewing it on the iphone, it occurred to me that it didn’t work*.
Since the iPhone is a growing percentage of web audiences, and the long-rumored Apple table is supposedly about to be released, which will surely use a multi-touch interface, should developers stop using mouseover effects on normal sites (ie non web-apps)?
What do you think small dedicated reading audience of this blog**?
Loading ...*Or at least not with a click, which defeats the cool UI experience
**Readership numbers are a pure guess, I’m too busy to go check google analytics at the moment.
Written on August 4, 2009 at 2:07 pm, by Brian Schwartz
Something to keep in mind when you hear President Obama and the Democrats telling us that their health care reform isn’t the start of a single player system.
Also see article here about their response to a video posted by Drudge.
Written on July 20, 2009 at 5:22 pm, by Brian Schwartz
Whew… Long title.
So I do some web development and there are instances where I need to test on multiple browsers (and multiple versions of browsers). It was pretty easy to install multiple instances of Firefox on my Mac (running OS X Leopard):
Voila. You’ll be able to test sites on different versions of Firefox. Have fun.
UPDATE: One more step I forgot about to make your life easier. Go here and learn how to create a profile for each of your accounts (like I did below) and then you won’t be prompted for updates each time you open that version of Firefox. I just saved mine into the version folder for each version.
