Binary Bonsai

In laying down this new design — Kalamari — I decided to try and go with a fluid-width layout for once. Traditionally I haven’t held it in particularly high regard; but I experiemented with it for a few hours, and ended up somehow finding it a natural fit alongside the ‘book-like’ typography.

What’s interesting about fluid-width designs, is that for me, they actually only make sense under OS X. After all, under OS X, no window can be maximized and locked to the screen. Quite the contrary in fact. Not only are windows rarely sized to fit the full size of the screen¹, but all windows are movable at any time. And the ace in the hole, is that you cannot move the upper edge of a window above the lower edge of the menu bar, and you cannot resize a window to be bigger than the size of your screen.

Combined, these factors are very significant, as they directly influence the way you work your windows.

Contrary, on Windows, un-maximized windows most often differ in size and vertical position from window to window. And without the menu bar blocking vertical movement and the screen-size dictating the size of windows, it isn’t quite that easy to quickly move and resize a window, while retaining a tidy workspace; and so I most often simply maximize all windows.

Hang on, I’m approaching the point.

Because of this, I work much better with OS X’s windows paradigm. Much better. My work environment simply remains more fluid than when I’m working on Windows, and I often find myself resizing windows to fit whatever content they contain.

In turn, because I do that², Kalamari felt more natural on OS X, since I find myself resizing the width of the window to where it feels ‘right’. But at work, on Windows, the window was maximized, and… well, it looked almost grotesque actually, because of the vast wasteland of whitespace on either side of the column in a maximized window.

So I have to come up with some way of countering that I suppose.

Yay.

1. The lack of a maximize button in OS X has been known to drive some people to the brink of madness. ↩


2. Well, and because Baskerville looks amazing in Safari on OS X, and Georgia looks like shit in Firefox on Windows ↩

Alright, listen up. Binary Bonsai has been powered by WordPress literally since its very first release. And as a consequence, I’ve been pretty involved with the WordPress community over time, especially these last few years with K2 (which is still in production I might add). But, while it has served me well for all of that time, to kick the carcase of the dead horse that is the girlfriend metaphor; we’ve grown apart. And today, I’m moving out of the apartment. So it’s goodbye WordPress and…

Hello Habari.

Mmm. Sweet, sensual, built Habari. Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t a pitch for you to do the same (though, please, take it for a spin; you never know). It’s simply me celebrating that I’ve finally gotten on with my online life, and getting even more involved with a project that has so far been both incredibly rewarding and ditto challenging.

And it wasn’t that WordPress and I were in a painful relationship; at least not in last year or so. It was more one of those courteous ones where we had both made peace with the fact that we weren’t meant for each other. That over time, we had grown apart. And… Alright, alright; enough of this blasted girlfriend metaphor; it’s creeping me out!

Seriously though, I’m really happy to finally move in with Habari. I’ve long had a keen interest in interface design and blogging tools, and my involvement with Habari has allowed me to follow up on both of those, and hopefully in the process creating a blogging tool that others will find exciting as well.

As a writer, if anyone would stoop so low as to call me that (thank you), what happens behind the scenes doesn’t really interest me. I do most of my writing in Textmate and then copy/paste it anyway. And after I’ve turned off comments, I don’t even see the whole admin section that often. But just because you only use the car to go down to the supermarket, why shouldn’t you be driving a black Countach?

I thought so too.

But please, have some patience with the design (which is new, and very much in progress), the archives and the feed (new permanent address, I’ll try and do some clever rewriting to get the old links to work). I’m working on getting all my ducks in a neat little row, and hopefully everything will settle down within a few days.

Well, except for the design.

I’m calling it Kalamari.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

T. S. Eliot

Please, fellow interface designers, look into your hearts and face the fact that pagination navigation has newer stuff on the right and older stuff on the left. Not the other way around.

Consider a blog like a diary. You start writing on the first page and then go towards the right. And since the first page of a blog is the latest entry, to go to the older entries, you have to press the arrow that points to the left.

Left = Old.

Except if you read right-to-left, in which case:

Please, fellow rtl interface designers, look into your hearts and face the fact that pagination navigation has newer stuff on the left and older stuff on the right. Not the other way around.

Consider a blog like a diary. You start writing on the first page and then go towards the left. And since the first page of a blog is the latest entry, to go to the older entries, you have to press the arrow that points to the right.

Right = Old.

Thank you.

So, I’m kind of into soundtracks. And I’m kinda, sorta, maybe, a little… a little anal about my music library and album artwork and those sorts of things. So when I came across a collection of iTunes Library-grade resolution soundtrack covers that I hadn’t even seen before, I think I peed my pants a little. A little.

I think most of the ‘non-normal’ ones are fan-made; but contrary to most fan-made things on the internet, these are actually in pretty good taste. And if nothing else, they’re great as alternates for the real albums, when you have unofficial extended cuts, promos or other cover-less albums in need of some nice coverflow-friendly graphics.

Check out this one for Fight Club which matches the limited edition DVD, or this Pan’s Labyrinth by Mike Mignola, a whole slew of very cool Zodiac ones and some Life Aquatic and Lord of the Rings ones under L. A neat Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within one, which matches the artbook (good ol’ Goldenthal doesn’t let us down). And this There Will Be Blood cover certainly kicks the crap out of the one that came with my purchase.

But reigning high above all the others, is Kill Bill (I always loved the Japanese ‘Kill is Love’ series of posters) and Star Wars.