Free work

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Facebook + Fluid = Awesome

So if you've been following my Twitter feed, you'll know that I finally got a Macbook. To be more exact, my parents bought me a Macbook for a graduation present, and it's been incredible. I've been working on Macs at the ITRC exclusively for the last year, more to get accustomed to an unfamiliar operating system, but because of administrative restrictions, I wasn't able to go to town on it by adding Dashboard widgets and other little applications that made my PC the productivity powerhouse that it is.

I came across Fluid the other day, after experimenting with Mozilla's Prism on my PC, and decided to give it a shot. It functions pretty much the same as Prism, with (I'm sure) some greater flexibility that I just can't be bothered to toy around with. With the Mac, everything is just supposed to work, right? I don't want to have to do anything to get it to do what I want, it's supposed to read my mind and perform accordingly. The only problem with Fluid is that I couldn't find a practical use for it. I'm sure I'll be bombarded with comments about how I could use it for Gmail or whatever, but I don't want to, so deal with it!

While searching around for Dashboard widgets to add, I came across the Facebook widget that takes advantage of the iPhone website that Facebook put out. It's great, but it's not the most functional widget due to it refusing to stay logged in to the iPhone website. A light bulb went on (for once) and I plugged the iPhone Facebook website into Fluid and set it as a MenuSSB app that sits up in my toolbar. Now I can check Facebook whenever I want without having to launch Firefox in a easy to navigate and easy to use manner. Of course the iPhone Facebook website doesn't have all the functionality of the vanilla Facebook website, but it's no big deal. I only ever use it to check up on what my friends are doing (or creeping them, if you prefer to refer to such activity).

I love Macs.

But I still love my PC too.

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Staples Rips Off Elderly - $390 For Basic Computer Repair

This just gives me another reason to hate the big box chains.

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Hello World!

Even though the title of this post is rather cliched, I feel like it's really suiting given the relaunch of this site.

Anyway, I fiddled around with several designs for months on end, but nothing really seemed to fit. I was fixated on creating something that was dark, like the previous design, but I would always hit a wall sooner or later. Sometimes it was just stepping away from a design for a few days and then coming back to it that would lead me to realize that I really didn't like what I was doing. I realized that my failures had been the result of taking too much time to develop them.

The previous design I had put together in an afternoon, including coding and all the back end design and integration. Part of the reason why I liked it was because its strength was in its simplicity; from what I gather most viewers shared this sentiment. I felt like if I was going to put together a successful redesign, I would have to duplicate the process I had used before.

So essentially this design was put together this past weekend as I sat in London bored out of my mind (a great start to Reading Week-I needed to pick up my transcripts for my Carleton grad school application on Monday, and going home and then coming back makes little sense). I decided that I would break away from the dark and clean design style I had grown fond of by using some serifed fonts, grungy highlights, and a lot of white. I think it turned out pretty well.

If you spy any bugs, feel free to let me know, either by email or by posting a comment to this entry.

Cheers.

Post a comment

Hello World!

Even though the title of this post is rather cliched, I feel like it's really suiting given the relaunch of this site.

Anyway, I fiddled around with several designs for months on end, but nothing really seemed to fit. I was fixated on creating something that was dark, like the previous design, but I would always hit a wall sooner or later. Sometimes it was just stepping away from a design for a few days and then coming back to it that would lead me to realize that I really didn't like what I was doing. I realized that my failures had been the result of taking too much time to develop them.

The previous design I had put together in an afternoon, including coding and all the back end design and integration. Part of the reason why I liked it was because its strength was in its simplicity; from what I gather most viewers shared this sentiment. I felt like if I was going to put together a successful redesign, I would have to duplicate the process I had used before.

So essentially this design was put together this past weekend as I sat in London bored out of my mind (a great start to Reading Week-I needed to pick up my transcripts for my Carleton grad school application on Monday, and going home and then coming back makes little sense). I decided that I would break away from the dark and clean design style I had grown fond of by using some serifed fonts, grungy highlights, and a lot of white. I think it turned out pretty well.

If you spy any bugs, feel free to let me know, either by email or by posting a comment to this entry.

Cheers.

Post a comment