Tag Archive for 'web design'

Ronin

Apr 14, '10  ·  10 Comments Tags: , , , .

Yes, people of the planet Earth and outlying satellites, I am as a matter of fact a ‘free agent’, even if this blog seems as inactive as ever, which would be because I spend my days basking in the sun, reading long-overdue books and experimenting with various outlandish fruit combinations for smoothies that’ll blow your socks right off and send tears of joy rolling down your cheeks.

Alright, so I’ve started reading some books, the other stuff I’ve only dipped by toes into. But I’m working on it.

But a I am a free agent, having had the opportune fortune of ending my 6+ year stint at Io Interactive by being escorted out the door along with some 30 other people who for various reasons found themselves down and out in Copenhagen on the single most beautiful spring day in a decade or more.

No, I’m not entirely sure what happened. I don’t think any of us are, including friends and colleagues left behind, but considering that I’m the least experienced of the developers let go — most of them having 10 years or more behind them — I’m left to wonder on my own what the overriding idea was…

But, as is always the case, the bad memories fade and the good persist, and much as I’ll miss the excitement of working on large-scale games like the Kane & Lynch series — where I spent most of my time — I’ll miss my friends there infinitely more. The banter, the heated TF2 matches, the coffee trains and the overarching eagerness to prove our meddle and just create great games.

So hurray for Facebook, Twitter, blogs, mail and Skype. These things truly shine when you suddenly find yourself going it alone.

Lucky for me, I’ve had it in mind to quit for quite some time, having made several preparations for doing so, and this quite literally couldn’t have happened at a more opportune time. Add to that the timing of having spring making its way into Denmark and me getting to soar my oates on some of those vanity projects I’ve been wanting to do for years, while Io continues to pay me for a few months more…

Things could be a lot worse.

Beyond that, my plan is to hook up with friends of mine for a pretty cool project we’re all very excited about. After that I’ll go the way of the modern-day ronin: The Freelance Web Designer.

Hopefully, this also means I’ll be able to find the time to blog some more, not to mention bringing out the next version of K2 within a foreseeable future.

Oh yeah, and then Red Dead Redemption is coming up in May, so…

I’ll expound on my plans in the near future; for now I just need to get them more organized as well as learn this new routine of not having an office to go to for a little while, which is probably the hardest part about not being employed. It’s surprising how fast time flies when you’re just milling about the house.

Goodbye Io, and thanks for all the fishcake.

Where Were We?

Jan 2, '10  ·  5 Comments Tags: , , , .

Even though I intended to blog some more over the holidays, I instead spent most of the time glued to the computer working in various capacities on K2.

I feel I squandered the trust of the community, by having been too casual about K2 in the past. K2 has been first with a whole bunch of features and functionality, we had a rather large and very active community and a solid codebase, yet mostly due to me having other priorities it’s atrophied somewhat.

The good news is that we put out our 1.0 and subsequently our 1.0.2 over the holidays.

And the great news is we’re already up to having nine languages1 in our new localization repository which puts us well on our way towards the 1.1 release which is of course geared towards localization. We’ve got some pretty cool ideas in the pipeline for the roadmap after that, but more on that later.

Meanwhile, it’s been a while since I did any web design of significance, and I think I’d forgotten a little bit how fun it is (as long as Internet Explorer isn’t invited to the party that is). This has also meant getting reacquainted with the tools of the trade, old and new, and where I used to use TextMate for pretty much everything, I tried switching to Coda (I had a license, even though I’d hardly ever used it), and I’m now a full convert. Those Panic guys know a thing or two about software.

Cinch is another little app that’s been making my life a lot easier, especially since Chrome for OS X still doesn’t have the same functionality that the Windows version has had for a year or more, and since Apple refuses to acknowledge the need for a maximize button.

Now if only I could find a great app for resizing windows in a sane manner.

  1. Danish, german, spanish, latvian, norwegian, dutch, polish, swedish and turkish, with a russian translation on the way. We’re still looking for more, so if you’re interested, read this and give me a shout. [↩]

The OS & Fluid Designs

Aug 13, '08  ·  Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

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.

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Habari Design

Dec 1, '07  ·  3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Early this year, I spent some time with a bunch of other people setting up a direction for Habari’s administration interface. It was mostly blue-skying, but loving interface design as I do, it felt like time well-spent.

In fact, it felt good.

It was a little early to start implementing stuff like that, when the platform itself hardly even existed at the time. So I went off and spent most of my time on K2 instead. But now that K2 is nearly done, I’ve started working on Habari designs again, and just submitted my first major patch (with no assurance it will be accepted of course).

Habari is like the promised land in terms of the kind of interaction design I’ve wanted to see in WordPress for years. It’s like a digital catharsis to finally apply these thoughts and frustrations.

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Semantics 101

Jan 23, '07  ·  20 Comments Tags: , , , .

Now I don’t personally use the visual editor in WordPress. I like me some Textile and control. But it is in there, and I think non-tech users are better off overall because of it.

And now with WordPress 2.1, you can even switch between WYSIWYG and code views. Great!

Yeah, well it is great, but what in the hell is going on with those buttons?!

WordPress in Safari

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Prototype 1.5 Released

Jan 19, '07  ·  1 Comment Tags: , , , , .

Yeah, so I’m still at home, eating oat meal and yoghurt very slowly. Very carefully. Which by the way, for those of you keeping track, means I missed out on the burgers at work today. Which sucks, because they are legendary burgers. And free.

Anyway, it does give me an opportunity to mindlessly check my feeds when I’m not feeding myself with painkillers. And as luck would have it, Prototype 1.5 was released today, complete with a new site and brand-spanking new documentation! Shiny!

I’ve already updated our K2 SVN repository, which by the way is as near as I can tell ready for the imminent release of WordPress 2.1.

Invader60 Commands Obedience

Nov 6, '05  ·  61 Comments Tags: , , .

Dear reader, meet Invader60; Invader60 meet one of the people who will be using you. Great, now that we have that out of the way, allow me to explain to you what exactly is going on.

Invader60 is the 60% mark of Invader. You will no doubt have noticed that it is considerably slimmer than earlier versions of Invader, or indeed any layout previously seen on Binary Bonsai, which is actually quite contrary to what I had originally planned (which was a layout which would be considerably wider than anything before it).

The implementation is filled to the brim with bugs at the moment, but I’ll be hammering most of them out today; I just wanted to make sure I actually managed to publish this today instead of letting it slide.

There are quite a few ideas behind the way this new layout is structured, some are evident some aren’t quite as evident yet. Most importantly is the use of AJAX and fancy schmancy effects, all of which I’ll also want to talk more about as soon as it’s all working as it’s supposed to.

Order of business: Fix the currently slightly broken functionality, then order the content properly, then fix the styling.

Now if you’ll excuse me.

PS: Oh yeah, in the midst of all of this, I forgot to tell you that this is another Bachelor Weekend! :)

Before The Bonsai

Jan 2, '05  ·  12 Comments Tags: , , .

Karma's Carnage Logo

As chronicled in the 5-part ‘nostalgia’ series (which I might add is way overdue for a hardcore editing procedure), I got my first modem quite early – possibly around 1994 or so – on loan from my grandad (a 1200 baud beauty). Back then, everything was gopher and Telnet. Pretty boring if you’re a teenager with a vivid imagination and Neuromancer on the nightstand…

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Segregation and iPod

Dec 2, '04  ·  13 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Well, as promised when I launched Freya, I have finally gotten down to segregating comments from ping– and trackbacks. Something I might add, that I believe WordPress should do by default. The Livesearch Entry is a good example of how a list of pings will look like. Either way, I’ll probably post some code soon for those of you interested in something like that. I’m about to send off the latest version of the Latest Comments plugin that Brian wrote, after doing some 1.3 compatibilitization (so a word!) to it, and once Brian gets the time, he’ll put it up on his site for everyone to download.

In other news, I sent in my iPod for repairs today. I’ve also got the box for my Powerbook down at the office, just need to backup the harddrive and it’ll go in too. I hope the wait won’t be too long.

Either way, I think I have most of the things I need to run the world without it, but in case I disappear from the surface of the Earth; well now you know who to lynch.

Meet Freya

Nov 21, '04  ·  52 Comments Tags: , , .

Everyone, please welcome Freya, previously designated 4, the new glazing on top of the bittersweet pudding that is, Binary Bonsai. There are many things to say, many things to apologize for. Feel free to leave some comments while I run her through the necessary trials to see if she is ready for the world. Though keep in mind that I will come back, hopefully later tonight, to write a full super-size entry on all the thoughts I’ve had or not had and why things are in new places and in many cases in their old habitual place.

Needless to say, the minor incident this morning set me back a trifle; while I quickly covered the major rewrites, minor changes are still lingering in the recesses beyond the frontpage.

Though for what it’s worth, I’m quite happy with how it turned out, though I regret not having had the time to flesh out some of the details that I have planned. But I could feel that I had to activate it today or slowly get bogged down in the repetitious routines of adjustments ad nausea.

Now I will leave you to it, while I head off to clean up the code a little and patch whatever holes I might find.

Update: Freya Upgrade Continued

Livesearch

Sep 25, '04  ·  62 Comments Tags: , , .

Using ancient formulas, the scales of a dragon, spit of a toad and a single hair from the head of Margaret Thatcher – yeah, not really –  I have succeeded in concocting a search-as-you-type. For all you Mac-whores out there, it’s sort of like Quicksilver / Spotlight ‘lite’.

Try it out. Type for instance ‘kubrick’ into the search form, and wait a second. There, a list should roll down and show you the last 20 entries with the word Kubrick in them. Now use arrow up and down to navigate and enter to select an entry.

Ehm… Now press the back button… Hello?… Come back!

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Stomped on Kubrick

Jul 26, '04  ·  16 Comments Tags: , , , .

Kubrick for WordPress

As I said a few days ago, the Kubrick Theme is alive and well. In fact, I have in a sense been working on it throughout the weekend. So I do hope that you will forgive me the longer-than-anticipated wait, but I want to make sure that this thing is right from the get-go (I hate ‘patches’, they never propagate as far as the original.)

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