Category Archives: Design

It’s All Coming Back to Me

★ Posted on at 05:11 pm ★

20110918-0002

A close up of the leaves sprouting on my maple tree in the backyard. The blue background is of the pot for the lemon tree and that gives some nice contrast against the red and green leaves.

* * *

Been spending the last few days reading and coding stuff for a website. Heh, it’s sort of like riding a bicycle, you never quite forget how to do it. I’ve picked up some new practices along the way and have implemented them really quickly. Talk about standing on the shoulders of giants, it wouldn’t have been so easy to prototype a new site without all the frameworks that have been setup in the last few years for web design.

I just need to write a few lines of code and the magic happens, displaying consistently across all browsers. Maybe my mind has become a little more sophisticated, I don’t struggle that much with Javascript any more, and neither do I have to worry about CSS breaking that much. All those many hours spent long ago pulling my hair out trying to figure things out have helped to get me up to speed with the latest trends really quickly.

Just putting my efforts into learning new things and immediately putting them into practice. I’m enjoying the challenge at the moment.

Further Progress

★ Posted on at 08:49 am ★

leaves

Was trying to capture flare effects by shooting at the sun, but that only left me half blinded by the end of it. Heh, it’s one of the advantages of having a Canon I suppose, since Nikons are so technically well built, that they resist flare. It’s a joke we had at the photo workshop I was at earlier last month.

These are the leaves of the pussy willow outside my front door, and I like how the light from the setting sun just makes the leaves glow.

* * *

Reading up on stuff I know I need improvement on. It’s supposed to be common sense at times, but you have to think things through before taking further action, otherwise you aren’t really adding the required value to what you should be doing.

I have identified some areas in my skill sets for photography and web design that needs to be brushed up on, so I’m taking the time to read up on those things now. Mentioned previously on how I prefer physical books over reading on the iPad. I have become accustomed to reading some material on the iPad, and I was in a perfectly placed spot earlier this morning trying to read a PDF on it. I was just sitting at the dining table, great morning sun shining through the windows, with my feet up on one of the other chairs, and iPad sort of on my lap but propped up against the table. A single swipe brings you to the next page, and while I’m still not too familiar with how to get back to the table of contents, I manage to get my way around and I’ve been using the bookmarking function to keep tabs for easy reference on some ideas I may have read earlier.

* * *

In this modern day of multitasking, I’ve had to consciously tell myself not to flip between activities (since it’s so easy to switch from one application to another on computers) so that I get the most out of what I’m currently doing. Heh, hence also trying to get one blog post out in one sitting. It helps when you are focused, to just get things done. It’s been a while since I’ve forced myself to sit and drill the material I’m learning into my mind.

At least now I’m happy with the effort I’m putting in because I know exactly what I want to get out of it.

New Web Spec

★ Posted on at 07:46 pm ★

20110119-1-4

Not sure what they are called, even if they resemble roses a little. I have become quite familiar with what I can do with the GF1 and while manual focusing is still a challenge, it’s much easier now compared to using the D300 viewfinder to determine focus. You could use Live View to get the same effect but having no mirror flapping during the exposure is one of the key advantages of the GF1 when using manual lenses.

* * *

Spent the last couple of nights reading stuff regarding the relatively new HTML5 and CSS3 specifications. The last time I was so enthusiastic about any of this was in 2003, when I was still in uni and doing web applications. I was the one on the team that made our webpages look good. If you think the following paragraphs are going to be about geek talk, you are definitely correct and should tune your browser to another channel.

Heh, while my Photoshop and Illustrator skills have declined over the past few years from lack of use, my understanding of using markup to render webpages has stuck to me like how my other Chinese dialects have. I can read and understand it, even if I can’t write it properly but that’s what Google is for, and when you have a reference guide, you could probably hack something together relatively quickly.

Looking at the new spec for both toolsets above required to design web pages, I like that things have been simplified over the years, and I no longer have to worry too much about browser wars and supporting standards. Back then I switched from Internet Explorer 6 (which blew Netscape out of the water with its startup efficiency and more support for features) to the first renditions of Firefox. Firefox was the first to properly support the CSS2 spec and they advertised it as such, so designing web pages for it was a joy and one often had to hack around the code to get it to display the same with Internet Explorer.

As I stopped updating the design of my website (I just checked last night and the current format was last updated in August 2009), I stopped caring about which browsers I had installed to test web page renders. I currently use Chrome as my default browser only because it is the fastest of the lot and displays most pages these days properly. I have Firefox as a backup for some websites as Chrome does crash on occasion. Internet Explorer has been relegated to downloading an alternative browser when I have a fresh install of Windows.

Anyhow, back to the present, the new spec allows for a lot of extra layout and design options. I recall the early days when I tried dabbling with Flash and Actionscript for dynamic, animated websites. CSS and Javascript killed that for me as they did much of what I wanted, without a bulky Shockwave download to your website (that plus how Apple iOS devices don’t support Flash and even the current mobile handsets that do get a big performance hit from it and reduced battery life, which on its own is a discussion for another day). HTML5 and CSS3 offer a lot more and a lot of what I used to do with background images like text shadows and rounded borders can now be implemented as code using CSS3.

It’s been a long time since I’ve sat in front of the computer writing code, but I’m excited at the new tools available and this is probably what I will occupy my evenings with over the next few weeks. An overhaul of the website was one of the initial list of things to do for 2011 and no better time to start it than now.