Category Archives: design

Thanks to VOD webdesign learning team

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To all the people from the VOD human resources and reporting departments — thank you so much for your efforts and patience — you were the greatest students i have ever had. I hope, that in the passed weeks you have learned something useful, that will improve your webdesign skills and will bring some speed enhancements into your work efforts.
I am grateful to you, that i had the opportunity to spread the word about the web standards beyond the Dreamweaver means, and that i feel that i didn’t waste my or your time.
Thank you once again.

Project in progress

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Besides launching today a page for a friend of mine, who gives explications of geography, i am working on a big project, which will be hopefully launched in March. It is a quite a big site for environmental community, written completely in Drupal with a big number of modules.

At the moment we are close to start beta testing and there are just several functionalities that are not quite optimized, that i am refining. Besides normal modules, there are some areas where online payment is going to be used, so it will be probably one of the biggest project based on Drupal that i have done untill now, so i am very excited about finishing this one. =O)

Tarh Lda v2

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I have designed a new version of a website for TARH lda, which was finally launched a couple days ago. The site at the moment is completely static xhtml (php version is already in plans for the end of the 2008). Besides reworking graphic concept the new version includes a home page with news and archive, and a special page for the firm CEO José Martins Carvalho, also the work is being finished to add Spanish and English versions for the international visitors.

TARH Lda is a portuguese geological company in the area of ground water development. They are one of the most respected portuguese specialists in the project and supervision of ground water research as well as working with mineral water for spa and bottling and geothermal purposes. They have a very vast curriculum of doing works on 3 different continents and with no doubt are one of the finest portuguese firms.

At the moment it contains only a portuguese version, while english and spanish are still under revision, but they should arrive in the next weeks (english is almost ready, just a couple of small things are being reviewed and refined). The PT letters which stand for portuguese bellow the main menu are basically the start of the international menu.

The site of TARH was created using XHTML 1.0 strict and CSS 2.1 with a fluid design which is viewed best with 800×600+ resolutions.

Some words of dis appreciation go to the infamous Arsys hosting: no .htaccess access – guys, in which century are you living ? Anyway – enjoy the rest of the prepaid year – because it is the last one when TARH is still hosted on your servers. 2GB of traffic per month seems to be like a bad joke to me, especially in the year 2008 when most providers offer you no limits on the web traffic.

Dino Consult

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A couple of days ago i have put online a new site for “Dino Consult“, that was developed on Drupal. The design is very simplistic, to accompany the visit card that the owner of Dino Consult has. It was also based on the schematic design that was created by the client. Dino Consult is by their description a “consultancy firm for the export of innovative technologies, process comparisons and project management”.

Besides creating a xhtml/css template I have used the following modules: Views, Google Sitemaps, Update Status, TinyMCE (i still argue that it or any other editor should make into the core of the Drupal), PathAuto, Meta Tags, i18n and IMCE.
Basically the Views were used to place together. I still cannot imagine more or less complicated site or even a normal one (like Dino Consult) without Views module, it simply can do so many things for you.

The new GIMP

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The brand new version of the GIMP is already available on www.gimp.org. It seems that i was a kind of sleeping for the last month or so, since i completely missed this so much awaited and needed release. The 2.4 Version has been released on the 24th of October bringing all the changes that were made during the last couple of years by the GIMP developers. The most important of them for me are:

  • Scalable brushes – one can finally scale brushes while editing the photos, it has been a pain doing it without this feature
  • Selection resizing – you will wonder how have you lived all this years without it
  • Foreground select tool – yes yes yes !! no more suffering watching Photoshop users doing it on a instant basis
  • New crop tool – no more “keyboarding” for a simple operations

One thing i am very excited to see if the GIMP developers has managed to improve the color handling – in a lot of situations it was quite disastrous in the previous versions (2.2), but hey i am so grateful for having the Gimp that i am not whining, really =O)

The only missing thing at this moment is the absence of the MAC OS X port of the GIMP 2.4 version. The latest release available is still the 3rd release candidate. If you are an open source user and you are doing some visual stuff from time to time then you do not wish to miss this release.

Apple’s Leopard

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A couple of days ago Apple has launched a new version of their Operating System OS X 10.5 codename Leopard.

Apple has presented more 300 of new features in Leopard. I would highlight some of the features, which i consider relevant:
- Bootcamp (allows Windows to be installed in parallel with OS X on Intel-based Macs)
- Time Machine (deleted files restoring, multiple version system)
- Finder (iTunes-like preview of different file types)
- Spaces (Unix-like virtual desktops)
- Safari (new version)
- Parental controls (the name speaks for itself, doesn’t it ?)
- Desktop enhancements (stacks of files on your dock)

One of the more important changes in Leopard is finally dropped support of the old Mac OS code. Apple has officially “burried” OS 9 about 6 years ago, in an official ceremony, but only with this release the support has been finally removed. I think it is a good thing, because evolution requires old stuff to be renewed or be removed. This is one of the problems that Windows has faced – some of the elder code of Windows 3.11 still could be found in XP, though Microsoft claims that Vista is finally fee of it.

Being an OS X user since a couple of months, i do not see a lot of reasons doing upgrade to Leopard right now. Do not get me wrong, i will move to Leopard in the coming months, and i do think that the new version of OS X was worth developing and it brings a lot of good features (some of them like Time Machine almost revolutionary), but at the moment i see this upgrade as unnecessary.

My first argument is “rush” – no doubt that Leopard was rushed, in order to be launched at the promised date – (Ocotober), some features like a wireless net backup with a Time Machine were surprisingly removed at the last moment, Sun’s ZFS is still not being enabled by default and resolution independent feature still appears to be in development. There is an old good saying that one should never buy a 1.0 system, cause it is always a beta version of what is to come. I am used to follow this idea and so far it has been always true.

The second argument against doing an immediate upgrade is the fact, the some of the features are available for the Tiger (especially the Bootcamp) and some other are just of no use for me personally ( No additional hard drive for Time Machine on my MacBook Pro =O) ). =O) Other feature is Safari 3 which is available for download (a beta version at this moment). Though i have to admit that i have some second thoughts – will new Bootcamp versions be available for TIger and will the final release of Safari ever come to it as well for example.

Everything else is just as it is needed. I love the idea of the “ITunes”-like changes to the Finder, the automatic preview feature is something that i was hoping that someone would implement. I find it ignorant, that i have to open all possible types of programs in order to preview the content of different files. I attribute success of such programs like ACDSee to the fact, that their just previewed almost any type of the graphical file.

Leopard is an amazing operating system, with a lot of the features, that the well-known Redmond software company is going to copy and represent in a couple of years in their next operating system. It is quite a step into the future, but it is more evolutionary update, then a revolutionary upgrade.

Goumi Lda

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A new website for Goumi Lda went online a couple of minutes ago. Goumi Lda aka Kromos Urbanos is a firm, which creates completely customized furniture. Basically they will turn your inspiration into a piece of furniture that you wish – should it be a lamp or a bed or anything else. But its better to see (visit) one time then to read or hear ten thousand times.

Goumi is actually a rare tropical fruit, which can be found in places almost all around the world. Just by watching the results of Goumi’s work, you will understand that. I hope that they are really going to fill their portfolio with the images of their work, because i expect them to have a great future. No, it is not a promotion, but as for me – i know where i am going to get some furniture for my future house =O)

The site of Goumi was created using XHTML 1.0 strict and CSS 2.1. Also there is a “small” flash animation on the, which was quite easier to do in flash then in XHTML. I did my best to make this site working in 800×600 since viewing the statistics of this resolution usage in Portugal made me thing on this subject, but i am still considering that some of the things are not the way they should be, but when you have some big images, there are not many ways of making site 100% fluid while not breaking one thing or another in HTML.

There are two other projects, which are on their way to be published in the next weeks, i hope.