Bence

Tired

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 19:45:45 -0700

Anita

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 05:04:54 -0700

rim check

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 04:43:55 -0800

Faceplate Sans by Rodrigo Xavier Cavazos

Sat, 09 Jun 2007 07:07:19 -0700

I've learned from my last story with the FontShop newsletter, that it is worth to read indeed, or at least to browse trough, because there are true beauties to discover every month if you happen to be a typo-nerd... Exactly just like this time, and what's the best? The one I would have chosen to buy this month is free for grab for a limited time period. Fantaboulus. It's called Faceplate Sans and was designed by the talented San Franciscan, Rodrigo Xavier Cavazos back in 2001. Type is a powerful behavior modification tool – transparent to the consumer, transcendent to the designer who knows how to use it. Rodrigo Xavier Cavazos, PSY/OPS If you missed the May newsletter of FontShop – whatever the reason may be, I highly recommend to check it out immediately and download the light weight of Faceplate Sans. Just as a sidenote, I should mention that it could be possible – although not very ethical – that older free downloads, which are no more displayed on the Free Fonts page of FontShop, could be still reachable through direct link with the format, just like the latest one has: http://www.fontshop.com/freefonts/download/79. Who knows. Psst, you didn't heard that from me, though.

Finally received my US Visa

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 04:51:27 -0700

Making people stay in line twice(!) on the street, before even getting inside the building of the embassy isn't exactly the way I think you should handle people who want to spend their holiday and money in your country... Besides that, I'm excited to visit the States for the first time. I`m leaving on 21th June to Los Angeles for 3 weeks and plan to visit San Francisco for a couple of days to discuss some big mysterious future happenings, but unfortunately can not leak more on that now, but hopefully soon. Going on with the holiday part of my travel I plan to check out these weird dudes in San Diego, for making some extra chips I plan to drop by in Las Vegas, and for having a little rest and a fun scuba-dive session I'll be sailing to a tiny little island near Los Angeles – forgot the name, need sleep. Of course any "dude, you have to check out that awesome place" suggestions are appreciated! Boooya.

Specialize smart - Preselect your clients

Fri, 25 May 2007 09:47:04 -0700

Specializing your business profile helps you to find the right clients, which is important, because it again assures you the ability to work your way to the top in the masses of “all-in-one design shops” flooding the web nowadays. Hiring the right clients, as once very well explained by 37signal's Jason Fried is one of the most important business decisions what you can make. It can decide if you succeed or fail on the long run, if success is that you can't wait to get to work in the morning (we could ask of course our girlfriends and/or families, haha), and failure is to hate it because of all those weird client wishes we all have heard stories about, or worse, even experienced them personally. Preselecting your clients To eliminate or reduce these to the minimum, targeting the market you want to work with is essential. To achieve this nothing is better than having a clear vision of your part of the work and embody it in shape of a clear copy, addressed to the clients you desire. Here I would like to get back to Jesse's example, where he masters this task very well, describing his services along with his targeted market: Creative services for the design-challenged developer. Claim of Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain's 31Three.com You may not have the time or know-how needed to get the design of your site looking as clean as your code. That's OK. I take design as seriously as you take your markup. Copy of Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain's 31Three.com

Maquette by ARS Type

Mon, 14 May 2007 06:36:03 -0700

Fact is, I fail very bad in newsletter reading, I'm always months behind, so it's no surprise that I've just discovered the march newsletter from FontShop with this must-have beauty in it, called Maquette. Designed by Angus R. Shamal, Maquette is in 5 different weights and in 3 different formats available for a fair amount of $196,- for the whole family of course. Be sure to check out: The march edition of the FontShop Newsletter ARS Maquette on FontShop By the way could maybe somebody explain me how comes that if you change the locality settings from US to "Other European Country" the amount of 196,- stays the same, just the $ gets changed to EUR in the front. Isn't this interesting, since this fact? – this is more a FontShop related issue of course.

Voicemail - Apple?s new ace?

Wed, 09 May 2007 09:38:37 -0700

Short answer - Yes, I think so. Maybe we could be soon witnesses of the voicemail evolving to a real communication platform, enabling you to send and receive voice messages. First of all, what am I talking about? The last week announced iPhone has an application called Visual Voicemail which displays all the voice messages you have in a list, just like an e-mail inbox, so you no more have to call your voice mail, wait and listen through multiple messages to hear that specific one you want. All you need to do is choose from a list displaying the name of the caller and the date of recording. To make this happen Apple?s exclusive partner Cingular had to rework their voicemail servers to support this feature of pushing all messages to the phone and letting the user browse them. So is it a weird idea if I imagine a new communication platform evolving on sending and receiving voice messages instead of boring SMS with all the typing and wannabe character emotions? Well, let us think about it just for a second. What if this is really the beginning of a new way of messaging, and let it be said, a very pleasant and easy to use way it would be. Recording and sending short voice messages in situations, where you can?t or maybe don?t want to make a phone call. Ugly guys and snoring Sure as many of the voice features of any device, this one too would make you feel a bit scary talking to oneself in some situations, and it would have it?s evident limitations compared to text messaging - just like speaking on the phone, because seriously, who wants to record a voice message like ?Oh, you can not even imagine how this ugly guy snores next to me...? on a crowded plane? For that I think the SMS, just like the e-mail and other text messaging forms are here to stay for a very long time, but maybe iPhone?s Visual Voicemail could be the first sign of something new evolving.

Great Podcast Extravaganza

Wed, 09 May 2007 09:38:37 -0700

If you are lucky and your brain can handle visual and audio separate, so you can still focus on working while listening some blabbing, the time spent in front of computer could be just more entertaining listening to podcasts. Podcasts? OK, for those of you don't know what the heck I'm talking about, podcasts are kind of shows distributed on the internet, with the great advantage of the on-demand model. It's like TV or radio on your computer, magical isn't it? For more and more professional you must check out the wiki page I guess. Without further ado I share some of my favorites: TWiT - This Week in Tech - Leo Laporte and other former TechTV hosts audiotechnologyinsighttech celebsround table discussionfunny factor - ha One of the most known shows out there today. Join Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, John C. Dvorak, and other tech luminaries in a round table discussion of the latest trends in digital technology. Released - every Sunday at midnight Photoshop TV - Dave Cross, Matt Kloskowski, and Scott Kelby videotips & trickstech celebsbeginner - intermediatefunny factor - ha The Photoshop Guys are presenting 30-minute episodes packed full with interviews and tricks of Photoshop gurus, time saving shortcuts and step-by-step tutorials covering topics like smart objects, color replacement and photo editing. It's actually sometimes too basic for real Photoshop pros, but super instructive and useful for beginners and intermediate users. Released - every Monday skinnyCorp Podcastation - Charles Festa and other folks from skinnyCorp audiofunfan-mailsthreadless teesfunny factor - hahaha Charlie doing some silly monologue or inviting some colleagues from threadless/skinnyCorp and blabbing about some nice tee design or emails from customers. "I can not trust a guy, who has more the one shoe, and wears his girlfriend jeans..." Well, this says it all! Released - varying Diggnation - Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht drinking beer all the time videotechnologynewsgeekyalcoholfunny factor - hahaha As I mentioned earlier, I simply love Diggnation and it's concept. Watching Kevin and Alex covering the weekly top stories from Digg.com guarantees an entertaining hour every week, should give it a try. Released - every Saturday (the member version) and every Thursday (free) Ctrl+Alt+Chicken - Alex Albrecht and Heather Stewart in the kitchen videocookinghumornice cuts and editsfunny factor - haha Slow getting hungry after this great podcast extravaganza? Then check out a new form of cooking show, one in which the chefs don't know how to cook! Join Alex Albrecht and Heather Stewart as they attempt a new recipe each episode. Released - varying

Adding hCard to your site with microformats

Wed, 09 May 2007 09:38:36 -0700

Microformats are a new and simple to implement way to handle your existing data on your website, to enable its exchange with web apps like Google Maps or flickr or even with desktop apps like Mail or Outlook. Sweet. For getting started let's just take a small step with a really useful example - Making contact informations available for download directly to the visitors contact managing application like Outlook or Apple Mail in form of an hCard with the generous help of microformats. Step 1 of 2 - Formatting your existing data There are some specifications for formatting your existing contact informations, many examples are available over at the hCard wiki page, but for now let's have a look at my example:

Bence Michael Kucsan

Svenigson Studios

Interactive Designer & Developer

Felsolover 72

Sopron Gyor-Moson-Sopron 9400 Hungary

Cell +36 70 505 ...

Of course with CSS you are able to style this as usual, and for the case - just like me - you don't have, and do not want to have these kind of informations on any of your site, simple add style="display: none;" to the ones you don't want to be displayed or to the vcard itself. Step 2 of 2 - Adding a download link via Technorati Wondering how to get this linked? Well, via the generous help of Technorati. There is a beta application available, calledTechnorati Contacts Feed Service at http://technorati.com/contact where you can type in the address of the page which contains your vcard informations and it collects the informations and generates an hCard, ready for download. Nice. So you only need to add a link on your site like: Download vCard with replacing http://svenigson.com with the address of your page containing your vcard and you are done. From now on your visitors can easily download your contact informations and use them in their desktop applications just like this one: Example - Download vCard With My Contact Informations Firefox Extension and Mr.Cederholm's example of usage There is a super useful Firefox Extension - announced by Mozilla Labs - called Operator. Operator detects hCard, hCalendar, geo, hReview and rel-tag and allows you to combine those microformats with desktop applications and web services such as Google Maps and Yahoo! Calendar. After installing this extension visiting sites which already adopted microformats is becoming enhanced with the ability to easily reuse their data. For example try Dan Cederholm's SimpleBits and you'll be instantly able to add the events he mentions on his site directly to your Google Calendar. Isn't this great?

VIRB

Wed, 09 May 2007 09:38:36 -0700

The talented guys over at UMI know that social networking in it's current form, not quite satisfy everybody. But they did not stop at this point, they decided to do something, which will be much more fun, especially for CSS gurus. So long story short, VIRB

Apollo 13 and web typography

Wed, 09 May 2007 09:38:35 -0700

"Okay, Houston, we've had a problem here." ...were the words Jerry Woodfill, the Apollo 13's Mission Warning System Engineer heard in his headset that Monday evening, April 13th back in 1970. Without diving deeper, long story short, an oxygen tank explosion forced Apollo 13 to cancel its landing on the moon, but the fascinating problem solving of the crew and mission control turned the mission into a "successful failure." Making a square peg fit into a round hole I was 14 when I first saw the movie based on the story, and the scene the most fascinated me was where the mission control collected all the parts which were available for the crew up there, dropped them on a table and they started to figure out how to make a square peg fit into a round hole to fix their losing oxygen issue. ( Having too much free time? Redo the Apollo 13 Rescue ) I don't know why, but I get

Fresh features in double pack

Wed, 09 May 2007 09:38:35 -0700

Two weeks gone since my last post, but don't think I wasn't around. I was here, thinking about my needs and this site's abilities and if they could maybe get better together in some form of new entry types. Since this is my first blog ever, and I want to maintain this as good as i just can, I had to figure out new ways to feed my need of communication in matters which are not quite compatible with the format of a blog entry. Since this site has a not so common method for displaying entries and I don't want to play around with the style elements of entry pages, I had to figure out new entry types. It's not a big deal, anyway: I give You Selected Flickr Photos and Notes for all the small, sometimes absolutely useless stuff. The next item on my To-Do List - related to this - is of course to figure out a way to display the new entry types on the archives page somehow and adding RSS Feeds. Do You like them anyway?!

Introducing Work - Flickr slideshow gone wild

Wed, 09 May 2007 09:38:34 -0700

I was on the search for an easy, yet impressive way to show off my portfolio with the prior accent on fast and easy maintenance to keep it fresh. So with this on my mind I thought a kind of slideshow would be nice, and started to think about a flash-based solution, one like the super-talented Todd Dominey's SlideShowPro. The more deep I dived in the topic, the more I heard a quiet voice in my head (yes, I know that's the first step to get a straitjacket) asking wait a minute, don't you already have a place where you waste your limited amount of spare time uploading and describing diverse photos and screens about all kind of stuff?Heck yes, FlickrOK, I had the idea that maybe I could show off some pictures from my account, and than I got into it and thought, hey, why not going for the slideshow?! Yes Flickr offers slideshows, so after a couple hours of tweaking I was done with the realization of my portfolio concept.Check it out, if you haven't already:Moral of the story - UtilizeWith the rise of the web apps era there's a big chance that the problems you have, are already solved, just take a step back and think about the possible collaborations between platforms keeping track of the main goal: input once, display everywhere. And this is getting a lot more easier nowadays.

CSS Lesson No.1 - More classes to a tag

Wed, 09 May 2007 09:38:34 -0700

Well, it's quite simple, goes just like this:

So I wanted to start this new section with a very impressive technique, I just discovered a couple of days ago. Although it's very plausible, I've never used this before, but probably would have saved me a good amount lines of code. How does it work? It's very simple, you can add multiple classes to a tag separated with a space. In the example I highlighted above I would use it to define the model of a text box called "message" only once, like .message { width: 250px; background-color: #eeeeee; border: 1px solid #cccccc; } and let them mutate in cases where I need this box in form of an error message, where I only need for example the borders to be red. For this I would only need the easy one liner: .error { border: 1px solid red } And this would overwrite the border definition of the class message to the red one. Awesomeness.

Designing the experience for website hallways

Wed, 09 May 2007 09:38:33 -0700

Let's make an experimental analogy between a hotel suite and a website. The experience you get from your stay in the suite doesn't come from shiny pictures in catalogs, but more from walking through the rooms – using hallways. Accepting rooms in general and pages on a website having some similarities, we need to realize that websites have hallways too. Just like in hotel suites, they give their portion to the experience using them to navigate between the pages, so let's pay attention giving them that extra touch, which communicates the simple fact – along with the other tiny, but together very powerful details – you do care. Websites and their hallways OK, what do you mean with hallways regarding websites? - could you ask. Well, with hallways I mean the dynamic state between 2 static stages. For a more clear view, the way how the approximately 2-3 seconds looks and feels(!) like between jumping from a current page to another – or between the states in a process like registration or ordering. The loading phase of the page with all it's background images and media, your visitor actually gets to see and follows with attention. Going back to the hotel suite analogy, it's like there were an interior design team in front of you in a rush hanging pictures on the wall and laying carpet on the floor – equipping the hallway every time you go to the bathroom. It would definitely be a part of the experience, I'm sure about that. Making the hallway experience better on websites Let's make this idea even more clear with the simple scenario of having a big header image on your website (just like me up there), which takes maybe 2 seconds to load on an average broadband connection. Having a background with a different color and with the picture not showing up for that 2 seconds, your design could feel broke for that small period of time. Giving a background-color definition in your CSS to the area your picture is being loaded can work very well on eliminating that "2 seconds design broke" feeling. Just choose the right color, a mainly dominating one from the picture and you are on your way to achieve a better experience. Live demo Just scroll down on this page to the footer and hit the refresh button in your browser. After try the same scrolling up to the top with the header area. What a difference, isn't it? Now, this is only one way to improve the overall look and feel, there are tons more of them and it's definitely something your users won't talk about as the next killer feature what the web has to offer, but I'm sure it gives it's part to experiencing the site as consistent whole, with love and enthusiasm for all the small details, helping you generate feelings.

The success of Firefox

Wed, 09 May 2007 09:38:32 -0700

Firefox is one of the best examples that you don't have to be afraid of competition, not even if it's coming from a monstrosity called Microsoft, especially not in cases where you're confident about knowing people better. As in every business, the key for success in the software business is to know people – what they need and desire – to satisfy them the best way possible. To make people choose your product, trust plays a massive role, and to achieve this, making a non-profit organization (Mozilla Foundation) with the only goal to make things better for the people (Firefox, Thunderbird and more), works perfect. And there is that sense of trust, the most fundamental aspect I think of Firefox and partly it's because the product is great, partly it's because we are a public benefit organization and we are not trying to maximize our revenue and we're not trying to generate massive private wealth for a few people. The asset is owned by the public. Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation Speaking about money Conventional business processes say you absolutely diversify your revenue sources, which ideally would be nice to do but not at the cost of product. Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation Many of you may wonder where the money comes from, which allows the Mozilla Foundation not to make compromises. Well, Google. OK, not only from Google, but the most significant slice of the income pie comes from the inclusion of Google search functionality in the top corner, next the address bar and on the standard start page. And what amount are we talking about? Around $55 million in a year, it's based on the commissions Google pays after every search done on this two boxes. Well, yes that's a lot. Trust your competition I have been told by some large business users that when they look at IE7 they are re-contemplating a switch to Firefox because the move from IE6 to Firefox might be easier than the move from IE6 to IE7. Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation Thinking a step ahead Running web apps offline without an internet connection would be incredibly interesting because all of us has faced the situation of being disconnected while sitting on a plane for example. Apps with the ability to work offline for some period of time – it's one of those things that would move the web platform forward. We have actually done a fair amount of work already, so what's happened so far is that most or all of the basic code - the databases and storage work necessary to support offline web apps – is in the shipping versions of Firefox now. Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Foundation

Let's Get This Started

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 14:43:26 -0800