January 7th, 2009
With the ubiquitous cry “Hmm, blow-offs” Cath Hyslop plies her wears around Worthing. Which gave me an idea for a new blog design element, namely a kangaroo doing, well, blow-offs.
See what I did there? Kangaroo, and blow-offs from it’s bottom? Put ‘em together and what do you get? That’s right! An idea for a rather tenuous illustrative pun. And here she is, in all here vectory glory…
October 19th, 2008
After reading Paul Walsh’s post about why he loves Tweetdeck (play nice kiddies, he’s paying for my freelance lifestyle at the moment) I started thinking about the new UI that was recently added in version 0.19b. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great App - and Adobe should give this guy some credit for choosing Air on which to build the best Twitter desktop App I’ve ever used.
But it’s this bloody new UI added in the new version. Apparently, it’s “Overall new cleaner” - well, yeah, I guess. Trouble is it’s at the cost of usability. Fair enough use icons to denote functions in an App, but not when the icons used have no accepted meanings. Checkout a screenshot I lifted from the offical site of an early build - the main functions can be accessed by text buttons. No fuss, no mess. Want to Tweet? No worries, the button is right there…
But these have been replaced with fussy icons that don’t really tell me what they do at all.
Ok, I can see why this has been done, as using text buttons for all the new functionality that’s in the most recent version probably wouldn’t fit in the current configuration. But I say give us the choice, I don’t really know what these icons mean, so it’s a learning curve. Maybe I’m lazy, but the new “cleaner” Interface has made this awesome app (for me at least) harder to use.
Alright, rant over, I’m feeling like enough of t***t now. Bottom line - This is still a great app, and if you’re a Twitter user you’ll wonder how you ever coped without it.
March 6th, 2008
I was recently asked by a friend to take a look at their website contact form. Viewing the source of the HTML that Quark Xpress had generated, my eyes started to bleed. So as an act of mercy, I put the old html out of it’s misery and re-created the whole thing from scratch.
It still astounds me how a program as big as Quark can produce such poor html. Surly a LOT of designers now wish to publish stuff to web, and while perhaps Quark wouldn’t be the tool of choice for most dedicated web developers, it’s still the no.1 layout tool for print.
Ok, so the html it outputs may not be as accessible and compact as any a human could do, but they certainly could be a lot lot better.
I always find it useful to spend the odd bit of time working on other things than Glubble, as it gives me a chance to learn new tricks and experiment with things I wouldn’t usually.
Be sure to checkout Zero One - They do some quality print stuff.
December 3rd, 2007
I know, I know, I know! The updates have been getting less again - but I do have an excuse - Work has been mega busy, look out for some exciting stuff coming from them sometime soon….
But the lack of updates aren’t the only problem with this site, one is the un-robustness of the design in our old friend Internet Explorer.
I’m really inclined to say ’screw IE’, but then again it’s still a main-stay of web surfers the world over, it shouldn’t be - but that’s an argument for another time. Recently, my good friend Mr.Cotton told me that one of his classes had to review a website for an assignment, so being the good egg that he is they we’re pointed in the direction of roobottom. Now, I like to think this was because Paul knows good design when he sees it, but its more likely that he just wanted to take the p**s out of my name.
Knowing what our country’s fine educational institutions are like at providing the latest equipment for their fine young minds, I doubt if they’ve got much choice than to use IE, but you never know some cleaver boffin may have sneaked in a copy of Firefox in his Transformers lunch box. So now I’m torn between really wanting to serve the readers who have little choice in their web software, and sticking it (in some small way) to the man. The man being, erm.. Well, I’m sure you know what I mean.
Incidentally, Paul getting his class to review me did raise another issue that I will be sorting out - Comments. He said he didn’t think most of the guys in his class even knew you could comment. Whoops! Is this true? Do it need to make it easier to and more obvious that you can comment?
Anyway, all this blogging has made me hungry, and lunchtime is nearly over. TTFN.
October 17th, 2007
Whist in Italy I took the opportunity to capture several images of the same thing - the bay at Salo, the Tower at Sirmione and the Arena in Verona.
Now by themselves, they look pretty rubbish, but stick them in a crazy-go-nutts program called Calico and out the other end you get beautiful panoramic shots.
I’m so impressed with this software. I didn’t use a tripod for these shots, I simply ensured there was plenty of overlap and then exported them full-res from iPhoto. Once in Calico I simply loaded the photos in, and clicked Align.
You can of course rotate each photo or change their order, but Calico takes care of the rest. Alignment, colour balance, the lot! Crop off the black edges and you can’t tell the photos were ever separate.
Pretty sweet! Sorry for those of you with a PC - perhaps someone could suggest something similar for other platforms?
September 25th, 2007
Paul Lloyd and I went to school together. We laughed and cried together. We shared chips from the same paper bag. But alas, he is not keen on the new design. I don’t know if we can weather this rift in our friendship. As an attempt to repair broken prides and clear the air I would like to publicly discuss the issues my friend Mr. Lloyd has with my design.
But first, a brief history.
As already mentioned, myself and Paul went to the same fine secondary education establishment. After a teary goodbye, we both left for our respective Universities - Paul choosing a course in Graphic Design and myself a stint in Multimedia Design. After completing our eduction (both with an Atilla) we moved into jobs, greasing our way up the ranks to reach the lofty heights of Lead Design at Ning and Interaction Designer at Glaxstar.
It should be mentioned at this point that whereas I have always had slightly more technical skill than Paul, he far outstrips me on the design front. That said, lets now move onto what he thought of the new design.
F*****G Stars!
Were the first words out of Paul’s mouth. Too many stars apparently. I gathered from this that Paul was less than impressed with the new design.
He then sent me an email, a design critique if you will, kindly enclosing a re-hashed version of the design that ‘he did on the train’. This gave me a basic overview of each area of my sins:
Ok, time to get serious. I must admit to having my pride a little battered by Paul’s redesign, but he’s an awesome designer and a great friend. I just thought this would be funny - And a chance to put both designs out there. I’ve uploaded Paul’s Homepage and About Page to Flickr. Please feel free to take a look and rip either or both versions. Again, it’s over to you!
September 24th, 2007
Not since January 4th 2006 has there been any update, new look or (if you will) face lift to my own little corner of the web. So it was about bloody time I put mouse to slightly grubby desktop and upgraded things a little.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been spending quiet moments with Fireworks and then Dreamweaver slaving away to bring you a pimped-up roobottom. I’ve chopped out the things that were rubbish or no-body used (most notably the subscribe via email thing) and added in some cool new ways to navigate around.
The Archives have received a complete re-code and now offer (I think) a great alternative to the standard Wordpress list by date feature. In-fact all of the code is sleeker, faster and more importantly ALL stored in it’s theme directory - where as before it was scattered all over the place.
I will endeavor to post some more technical details of what’s going on behind the scenes in the near future - and I may even release some of the Archive code as a plug in (if I get enough spare time).
Oh, and the flickr photo streams now work! Thanks to the brilliant work of Eightface.
August 9th, 2007
After dropping my beloved K800i down a flight of steps, ripping off the back and damaging the camera in the process, I finally have a shiny new K810i from the insurance company.
But I couldn’t stand the crappy theme that came with it. But, wait a punk-ass minute - I thought, Aren’t I supposed to be some kind of interface designer? Some sort yeah, but never the less I still managed to come up with my own little roobottom theme when I had a spare hour last night.
So, I’m sharing it with you (un)lucky people, it works well on my K810, and I imagine also on the K800 too! It’ll do me until I get my grubby mits on an iPhone anyway! Enjoy!
March 23rd, 2007
I stared designing some shiny new icons for a website yesterday, and thought I’d like to share them with you lucky lucky people. But I need ideas! What could / should / should not go in these icons?
They’re pretty much a miss-match of objects at the moment, but if someone can suggest a winning theme then I’ll put together a new set based on your ideas. I realise this is coping out, but you wanted more posts, so this is the type of crap you get. It’s not all about me me me you know.
Anyway, ideas for icons gratefully accepted. Thanks. Now bog off.
July 28th, 2006
At last! I’m ready to release the public beta-1 version of greeneStripe, a new theme for Wordpress!
It’s still very much in the testing phase, but if you can cope with a few bugs then please feel free to download a copy and install it on your wordpress. It even includes support for Automattic’s Wordpress Widgets, which work very nicely once installed.
Please post any bug reports / design ideas / slag-offs here rather than on the theme blog! Thank you!
The last 10 posts. See The Archive for more
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Designed & Written by Jon Roobottom. This work is licensed.
