Posts from ‘World Wide Web’
Create your own Moodstream
The world’s largest stock imagery company, Getty Images, released a mashup (I just stumbled upon it) that leans on the company’s vast stock image and audio assets. It is a flash application called Moodstream that draws on Getty’s photo, video, and audio collections to create what the company calls a
Powerful brainstorming tool designed to take you in inspiring, unexpected directions.
Moodstream streams music and images along with video clips to create a sort of audio-visual mix. There are manny other applications for desktop or mobile that are trying to impose the same effect, like StereoMood or Sourcetone, I for example use on my iPod touch RjDj, but none of them have incorporated a visual element (yet).
Moodstream is able to adjusts its output based on settings users input via some sliders that should describe their state of mind. Happy to Sad, Humorous to Serious, etc. Also the type of transitions between image assets can be controlled by the user, the amount of color vs. black and white imagery, and the type of music.
Everybody wants to be an artist and for some there are special tools that are in the same time very easy to use and very powerful when creating some form of digital art. On of these tools is Flame.
Flame is a painting program, it belongs to my ‘I am Artist’ experimental project. I think with tools which inspires you, everybody can be an artist. You can try it here, change different brush settings and paint your own flame paintings. When you change background from black to white, palette changes from additive to substactive and the feeling of the painting is very different. It’s not easy to explain all brush parameters, so I leave this for your experimentation.
Flame Painter Main Screen
Build by Peter Blaškovič Flame is a Processing application that can make a simple mouse movement look like a 1000 brush strokes on a canvas. Basically your brush is transformed into a multiple particle elastic one that can fill your strokes like you would do it with lots of small brushes put together. The only and the most important difference here is that you can control the intensity, color, opacity and size of each of the brushes.
Moscow designer Anatoly Zenkov to brighten up the routine work made a really nice application called MousePath. It was a simple Java based tool that records your mouse movements and records all your paths drawing a line as it’s goes along running in the background.
Posting it at Flickr, the tool very quickly made some noise and everyone was trying to see what was too discover in the chaotic movements of their mouse. Some of us even called it ART 
Now the tool has evolved from the little Java application to
IOGraph — is an application that turns mouse movements into a modern art. The idea is that you just run it and do your usual day stuff at the computer. Go back to IOGraph after a while and grab a nice picture of what you’ve done!
The tool works quite easy: Open, Press Start, Do your thing, Save the image…
Ever wanted to add a bottom shadow effect to some elements, shapes or images in Photoshop in just a few easy steps? Well actually is quite easy to do something like this and you don’t have to be an expert.
The main design advantage that bottom shadow effects have is that it will give you the impression of deepness to your content and elements.
Here is the desired effect
Step 1 – Open your image / document
Open your document or image in Photoshop and create a new Layer right after your main Layer. In this layer we will add the bottom shadow effect and because the new layer is positioned right after our main one it will display in the back without overlapping the main layer…
Inspired by others ideas and code and also by the need to insert a Top Link like button on my own website I managed to write a script that not only works on all major browsers but it’s also neat and animated
The expected outcome
The general idea was to try and add a link on the right side of the page that will appear and stick there after a certain percentage of the page is scrolled down and when clicked will smoothly scroll the page back to the top. Also it’s mandatory that this should work on all major browsers (including IE).
Here is an example how this should look like (example working already on this page, just scroll down to see it)
The button and the placement problems
In order to add the button to the page we just need to add this code to our page just after the <body> tag:
<a href="#header-top"> <div id="back-top" style="display: block;"></div> </a>
The DIV tag will be used to show our top link using a background-image (but you can use a text just as well) and the anchor will be used to link us to the top of the page (in this case by the most outer div tag with the #header-top id) .
I tried (lately) to separate my blog articles from funny, cool, dev, tech bla bla (meme related) videos and images and post them all on my Tumblr Profile but this one is a must see. I just stumbled upon it and this video is about A coder girl … I really can’t describe how funny and cool this one is so I will let you all to watch it and see it for your selves.
UI Honeycombbig
Am observat in ultima vreme o greseala (amestecare, confuzie) pe care o fac multi oameni cand se refera la doua concepte cu asemanari semantice, dar total diferite in ceea ce priveste conceptul si aplicarea.
User Experience vs Usability
Aceste doua “industrii” au inceput sa creasca si sa fie din ce in ce mai cunoscute odata cu dezvoltarea rapida a RIA (Rich Internet Applications). Astfel ca odata cu popularitatea aplicatiilor web acesti doi termeni au atins cote inalte in agenda fiecarui dezvoltator, dar in acelasi timp sunt percepute sau intelese gresit.
Usability se refera la usurinta cu care un utilizator poate duce la bun sfarsit un task folosind orice tool. In general acest termen are la baza analizele factorilor umani si include ideei din multe domenii cum ar fi psihologia umana si statistica. In fundament termenul de Usability este calitativ, dar se bazeaza pe datele cantitative pentru analiza si identificarea slabiciunilor si generarea solutiilor de imbunatatire.
Studiul de usability se face in general prin teste foarte detaliate si amanuntite cu esantioane/grupuri mari de oameni pentru a determina cum interactioneaza utilizatorul cu interfata si zonele specifice unde el se pierde (cateodata se aplica metode care analizeaza miscarile ochilor pentru a determina zonele de interes majore).
“Highly usable interfaces” sunt intotdeauna acelea foarte intuitive, simple si extrem de usor de invatat.
IE6-Wanted
The War against IE 6 has a very log story behind it, but from my point of view is just boring and very unproductive to sit around and talk about it all day. In the same time I agree with the fact that you should develop your web-applications without worrying about compatibility inside a specific browser, so I personally just IGNORE this one and try to convince the user to switch to a more appropriate browser. You can find more about this issue all over the net and also here, here, here and here.
Now Google joins the armada announcing that they will drop support for IE 6, so I remembered some code snippets that will actually crash your browser if the page is opened in IE 6. In no particular order here are the crashers:
<style>*{position:relative}</style><table><input></table>
<script>for(x in document.write){document.write(x);}</script>
<html> <form> <input type crash> </form> </html>
In speranta ca marea majoritatea dintre voi petrec foarte mult timp in fata calculatorului si pentru ca multi nici nu stiu cum sa isi faca viata mai usoara din punct de vedere al sanatatii incercati in primul rand cand ajungeti la birou sau acasa in fata computer-ului din dotare sa va acordati cateva minute sa reflectati asupra conditiei voastre
Ma simt sau nu confortabil pe scaun in fata calculatorului?
Raspunsul trebuie sa fie simplu DA sau BA!
Aici intervine Ergonomia. Desi poate suna ciudat Ergonomia spatiului de munca este o stiinta care se ocupa cu design-ul jobului si echipamentului pentru a se potrivii cu muncitorul. Astfel ca de ce sa nu facem ceva in privinta acestui lucru reusind in acest sens sa ne imbunatatim viata si productivitatea in munca (cat de corporate suna, dar sa nu pierdem din vedere esenta).
Lista punctelor esentiale
Daca cautam putin pe net despre ergonomie si exemple gasim o gramada, unele mai detaliate altele mai simple, ce pierdem noi insa din vedere este faptul ca cele mai importante le putem face fara prea mult efort, astfel ca am agregat o lista cu cele mai importante si usor de facut aspecte in ceea ce priveste ergonomia noastra la locul de munca sau acasa…
Text Escaping Unescaping
For a project I worked a few months ago I needed to escape special characters used to pass some information from one point to another. Of course I used at that point the great application built by Marc called Unicode2HTML but I needed more than that. I wanted to convert also to other formats like \uXXXX or Punycode so after searching the net for a tool like that I found a very nice library built by Satorux called strutil.js.
The library actually does exactly what I wanted, it converts a character to a bunch of formats that I can use. The service Satorux has build, using this library, can be found at Text Escaping and Unescaping in JavaScript.
I decided to port this online version to an application so we can use it in offline also. This was a good project because it concluded to be my first Adobe AIR project (hope more will come).
I won’t make a tutorial on how to build an AIR app in this article because there is no point you can search the net for this kind of things and you will find dozens of great tutorials. But what I want to share with you is the application itself and the simplicity of the AUTO UPDATER Framework Adobe AIR has…
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