Elaptics

design principles cheatsheet

I’ve always enjoyed art and design and wasn’t too bad at it—though never quite as good as I wanted to be. For quite a while through high school I was interested in becoming an Architect hopeful that it would satisfy my desire to mix science/engineering with art/design. My interest in computers won through and until the last couple of years, whilst I still dabbled in the design side of things, my focus had been much more on the logical, engineering side. Now though, I’m enjoying getting involved in design tasks again and it’s also informing my programming in many ways. (This is something I’m hoping to cover more in future posts.)

One thing has always passed me by though, and that’s typography. I’ve never really paid much attention to it, but since watching a documentary by Stephen Fry on Gutenberg a few months ago I’ve become fascinated with it. With credit card in hand I made my way to Waterstones and visited the design section. I picked up “Type & Typography” (Phil Baines and Andrew Haslam) as well as “The Non-Designer’s Design and Type Books, Deluxe Edition” (Robin Williams). A slight detour via the science fiction section, a few moleskines and a lighter bank balance and I’m on my way home.

I thought I’d start with Robin Williams (not the comedian) book to brush up on my design skills and get a gentler introduction to type. Overall, I was very impressed with the book. It was an easy read and it really got the information over well, I highly recommend you buy a copy. Eager to put my new-found skills and inspired by Amy Hoy’s cheatsheets I thought I would put together my own on design principles.

I know I’ve broken a few design rules in putting it together but my aim was to illustrate some of the Don’ts as well as the Do’s. That said, I would really appreciate any feedback or criticism you may have on the overall design and the typefaces I chose along with any tips you might have for improvement. Any recommendations for books or other resources are also most welcome.

Backpack Journal Dashboard Widget

At work we use quite a few 37signals products to manage our internal processes and client projects, one of which is Backpack. 37signals recently introduced a new feature, Journal, for tracking what you’ve done and what you’re currently doing which we’re trying out to see if it’s a good fit for us. On their product blog there was a recent post about a Dashboard widget for updating your status and journal entries.

That’s pretty cool, I thought, but kinda redundant because Safari on Leopard has an awesome, but probably somewhat underused, webclip button which allows you to grab part of a webpage and have it turned into a widget. And as all programmers know, the best code to write is no code. So I have grabbed the updating part of the page as per the widget described and also the team’s recent updates. As a double bonus, it updates the clips when you invoke Dashboard so you get the latest team updates straight away rather than what you’d normally be having to do is refresh your browser’s page yourself.

Ok, I’m blind, where’s this button?

Right here….

And this is what mine looks like on my Dashboard. The webclip widgets also allow you to put different frames around the clip, just flip it over and pick from the options. This season my two widgets are sporting the latest in Torn Edge and Glass themes fashion.

Technorati Tags: backpack, dashboard, leopard, mac

Blast from the past

In an attempt to ensure that I keep this blogging lark up, I thought I would resurrect an old post I made a couple of years ago to a now defunct blog to serve as a starting point and thus I’ll revisit where I am now in a future post.

A brief history of computing… (well, according to me)

I’ve had an interest in computers ever since I wrote my first Basic program,when I was eleven, on our Tandy 1000 and began poking around it’s memory with Norton Utilities trying to crack the high score tables of some of the games we had. (I even managed to succeed with a couple!)

Fast forwarding several years of Amiga programming I ended up building my own PC which has been upgraded many times to the current incarnation that’s sitting under my desk here. It stopped being upgraded when I discovered Apple Macs and (maybe more importantly) Mac OS X. And it’s through Macs that I came to discover Ruby on Rails. In my search for the ultimate text editor, which I found in TextMate, I saw a video of TextMate being used with this web framework thingy. What piqued my interest was not only the fact that it seemed so quick to put together a basic application but the guy who was demonstrating it was clearly so passionate about it.

The gem in all of this…

I started looking into it and the philosophies behind it, and I think that a combination of them and where my head is at now is the reason that it all seems to gel together nicely. The key piece of the jigsaw, that seems to be often overlooked in all the hype, is Ruby. It really is a joy to use and like many Ruby fans have said it “just fits your brain”.

The majority of my past programming experience has been in procedural programming and although many of the languages I have used have some elements of Object Oriented programming I’ve never really been able to fully wrap my head around the principles of Object Orientation until now. At university we used Smalltalk but I never got it, it just didn’t feel right and it didn’t excite me. Somehow, and I really can’t explain how, Ruby just feels right. I can write code the way my brain thinks and though I don’t know Ruby very well yet I write what I think it ought to be and very often it turns out it is and the code works.

But the proof is in the pudding; I’m still learning the ropes but even with that in mind I have built a proof of concept app for an internal company project from start to finish in 5 hours with Ruby on Rails; that’s from inception to a working prototype — oh, and I had to find out how to do some stuff in Rails too, so I reckon that time can be cut down somewhat too.

So where does that leave us? Well it convinced me that it is viable for us to use it to build web apps in our spare time in a reasonable length of time - and have fun doing it! By letting us be more productive it should also allow us to spend more time on the little things that matter…the things that make a good app into a great app.

Having said that, I’d certainly like to hear your stories of how you got into Ruby and/or Rails, and also if you didn’t.

New Design, New Beginnings?

Finally gotten around to updating my site to consolidate everything into one place.  I spent a bit of time deciding what to do –should I just go “old school” and hand code everything, or should I write my own little blogging tool? In the end, as much as I quite fancied writing my own blogging tool I have too little time on my hands to do that and plenty of other projects that I’d rather be working on, so I plumped for WordPress, as it’s one I’ve used before and the newest version is pretty nice to use. And it’s easy to get set up.

So, here’s to new beginnings and a hope that I will keep this site much more up to date with my thoughts and perhaps even a few articles…

A dubious first!

Well apparently I can claim a first - for being spammed through ma.gnolia! Yes, apparently nowhere is safe from spam now.

Today I received a message within ma.gnolia (the really nice bookmarking website, for those of you who don’t know) from member donco. I’ve posted a screenshot of the message for posterity.

An a related note, I’m in the closing stages of putting together a widget for Mac OS X Tiger to quickly search just your own ma.gnolia bookmarks. When it’s done I’ll put it on my website for download and maybe see if I can get it listed on ma.gnolia itself. Speaking of websites, I’m also just getting my actual site up (www.elaptics.co.uk) if you want to see it in it’s current part-finished state. And that’s my rubbish excuse for not keeping this blog up to date!

.ds_store no more (on network shares at least!)

Nothing exciting (for most people) but I’ve just finally found an easy way to stop creating the useless .ds_store files on non-mac network shares so I’m putting the info here for my posterity.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301711

1. Open the Terminal.
2. Type:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

3. Press Return.
4. Restart the computer.

As found on www.textsnippets.com (which also may come in handy in the future)

[composed and posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: mac, terminal

Easier editing of TypoScript

I’ve recently discovered TextMate from www.macromates.com - a superb text editor, previously I’ve been using TextWrangler but I’m slowly using TextMate more and more, one of it’s really great features is it’s expandability through the use of bundles.

In getting to grips with the bundle editor I decided to put together a bundle for editing TypoScript so that it has syntax highlighting plus I’ve added some of the more common TypoScript objects as snippets to make it much quicker to put your typoscript together. I’ve put a link to the TSRef doc online as well as ensuring the comment toggle puts the right comment symbol in.

Not sure how it measures up as a first attempt but drop me a line if you find it useful or would like to see some other things added to it, likewise if you add any more features why not send them to me so I can include them here. If enough people are finding it useful then we can also consider getting the bundle added to the main repository at macromates.

I’ve added the following scope selectors to the language grammars which you’ll almost certainly want to add to your theme to have the syntax highlighted. (Whether these are the best scopes to use I don’t know but feel free to suggest others).

entity.other.tsobject
entity.other.tsconstant
entity.other.tsvalue
entity.other.tscopy

Technorati Tags: textmate, typo3

UPDATE:

The bundle is much updated and now available from the macromates subversion repository.  Thanks to Sudara there is also a theme and a much better language grammar. You can find it under the Review directory. (Maybe one of these days I’ll iron out all the kinks and get it into the main section)

PC World ahead of the curve?

Well looks like PC World have managed to pull off a bit of a coup - but they’re keeping it a bit quiet. Whilst some have managed to get Windows XP running on the new Intel based Mac’s, PC World have managed to get Mac OS X running on non Apple based kit - at least if their new advert in the UK is anything to go by! The advert I saw on E4 last night shows the PC World website running on the Compaq notebook PC. Their web browser of choice? Apple’s Safari browser! :) Well at least now they’re admitting OS X is a better operating system to run!! :)

[composed and posted with ecto]

Technorati Tags: mac

Is this me?

Ok, I just read this article TidBITS: From iPod to MacBook Pro: A Switcher’s Tale and it pretty much sounds like me and my view on the whole switching to Apple thing.

I’m not a total mac zealot but I do think that if you’ve thought about switching (and even if you haven’t), get yourself down to an Apple store or a reseller for Apple and have a go on one. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. One tip though; forget about Windows and how you have to do things, on the mac if you’re not sure how to do something try the really obvious thing and it usually works exactly like you’d expect.

Technorati Tags: mac

Secret GMail account

Wow, another week has flown by, nothing great to report other than I’ve found another rss news reader which I’m trying out. (Endo for anyone who’s interested) plus I’m also trying out Wordpress to see the differences between that and Blogger.

Ok, the real reason for this post is just to note that I found out today that anyone who has a googlemail.com account with Google can still claim they have a gmail.com address and use it. I’m sure this isn’t secret at all (all I did was notice the headers of some mails sent to me through googlemail) but it’s good to know, googlemail just doesn’t have the same ring to it as gmail. Maybe, at some point we’ll lose the ability (if Google loses it’s legal battle) but for now it works.

Technorati Tags: endo, googlemail