12 posts tagged “web”

I found a nice old web application I created a little less than a year ago during my Spanish class. The objective was simple, create a "wiki-esque" site that allows you to enter verbs, words and definitions and associate those with a picture. The idea was focused on being able to compose it as I was learning Spanish. At any rate:

The one feature I especially like about this site is the ability to add accents as you type in any text box.

Simply type the character of interest: a, then type the character ` (the backquote/tilda key on the top-left of the keyboard). This will immediately make any of the characters, accented. ?` = ¿, a` = á, n` = ñ... etc. Pretty neat eh?

http://theadvents.com/linguist/wiki

I know I can come up with something and it shall be launched! In the meantime, check out this new design I made. At some point I should actually put some content into the design, but I enjoy this. This one is called Plenatude.

It's not nearly as complete as the others, but I like the colored rays. I think I'll build on this one and get back to you. Here's another view without the navigation links, you can see the rays better.

I also made a "People's Software Manifesto". This should count as content.

Well, I launched Curbside Design, made a milllion bucks and now I'm on my next adventure (what? it can happen). Here's another sweet creative consulting company I'm working on. This one is called Cre8tive Software. I thought to put in some neat fractal effects into the background.

I even made a business card, check it out.

So far so good, if I can just work up to creating something that brings in the doeh - then I'll be set :D

Indeed, the news travels fast. I made another website recently (though I haven't actually registered anything or committed to ensuring its success), nevertheless I did make one. Gotta get critiqued somehow, here's the mockup:

What do you think? Oh, and I also made alternative banners which are chosen randomly on load. Here's one,
and here's another,
and another,
and one more for good measure.

Just a few more, I promise :)

UPDATE: Here's the other ones I forgot to add :P

Hello everyone, I'm back. I missed vox, did you miss me? Here's some things that you might of missed:

Prototyping through Mockups
A way to create really awesome and even usable prototypes using Microsoft Expression Blend.

 

Post Galaxy, your first callbacks
A simple, effective implementation of a chat client using WCF callbacks. Here's what you can expect:

Post Galaxy in Silverlight
A really detailed look at creating a web chat solution in Silverlight (with WCF Callbacks, JQuery and JSON).

There are more, but I felt that these best suited the audience. Enjoy :D

    I was recently thinking about the way Silverlight was designed and deployed to the world. Contrary to most Microsoft products, Silverlight is fully supported among the mainstream operating systems like Windows, Mac and even Linux. Silverlight is also just under 2 megabytes to download and install fairly quickly. Once you have Silverlight installed you can now go to any site that uses Silverlight as apart of their web platform. But the interesting part about Silverlight is in its architecture, more specifically it's client-side architecture.

    Silverlight includes an embed CLR that is roughly 2mb in size. When an application is developed using Silverlight it is packaged into a .xap with a manifest, markup and code files. The package is downloaded and the main visual is loaded from the app.xaml page in the Silverlight app. Any code that was included in the package is executed on the client-side. What this means is that any logic performed against the interaction, web service calls..etc are executed right there on the client without having to perform constant post-backs. This leaves the server available to do it's primary role - serve.

    On the development side, Silverlight supports all .NET languages as well as a few dynamic languages like Python and Ruby. Whenever you do happen to use any one of these languages you get the full benefits of Visual Studio, Intellisense and a wonderful interactive designer like Expression. But what I have myself concerned with at the moment is on how Silverlight applications are being accessed versus how they could be accessed and viewed.

The Desktop
    A desktop application, in a traditional sense, is a anything that must follow the following steps to be used:

• Download program installer
• Run installer (or create a build file and run that)
• Choose where it should be installed to
• Find the program on your system
• Run the program
  

The Web
    A web application, in the traditional sense as well, is anything that must follow the following steps to be used:

• Search for content (or enter bookmark)
  
• Use web application

Now, what advantages do we have with the desktop that we may have over the web environment? Well there are:

• Isolated storage for application content
• Stateful and consistent interaction (although not always  : P )

I propose that we remove some of the walls that we have created between the desktop and web world. It's time that we combine the two into an environment that allows us to search for content or tools, and load them. No more installers, no more unsupported environments. A desktop built to run on the modern web standards we use regularly today.

    Recently, I picked up an incredibly awesome tool called Enso from Humanized. Enso is all about bringing the ease of creating, navigating and manipulating content through commands. In the old days we used commands to get tasks done. As the GUI undoubtedly made things much easier to work with, it has also made things undoubtedly difficult to work with as everyone has their own opinions and natural bias towards one method of interaction over another - as well as color schemes..etc. But the one aspect that has us seemingly removed in this cumbersome Web 2.0  world is distraction. Some call it multi-tasking, I would disagree and say that we have created a monster for distraction.

    Not to say that some distractions aren't bad, but the thought is on how applications are increasing the gaps between the tasks we want to accomplish and the content that we are dealing with. Take for instance the fact that the market is now flooded with a dozen different social networks; there are hundreds of paint tools, editors and more. The market has a way with filtering these products out with emergence - or the difference in what is the best possible yet practical solution for the major audience.

    Nevertheless, it brings an motivating perspective towards the very definition of what operating systems are supposed to do for us. When I/O operations became a habitual necessity for computing technology it was added as a standard protocol to which all operating environments follow. However, today we are at a point where the desktop's monolithic structure has created an environment where dozens of applications are added due to what the user has asked for.

    The idea of adding feature after feature is fairly common among applications as well. In addition to this, there is integration - where one product's feature must integrate or serve another product in some form. For instance, Vox uses the Flickr API to allow users to add pictures to to posts. But what happens if you don't have a Flickr account, you just want to put pictures you got from your camera. Well, not only does Vox have to integrate with Flickr, they need to handle their own picture uploading service as well. When in reality, the only service that Vox is interested in it giving users the ability to write content to their blogs.

    In search technology, we have the ability to look up any website, blog, video and picture that exists on the web. We type a query and off it goes. The web provides a very nice tool for search. But how much have we provided in the web for commands? Telling the web to do something for you isn't as easy, but it definitely could be thought along the same lines. We have had the ability to aggregate content to serve information to users; what we need now is a way to aggregate services to serve tools to users. In that manner, we can begin to bring the level in which developers are typically mounted on up to the user's perspective.

    While this video is substantially old, it is certainly a good one to watch. Tim Sneath talks about a lot of the different aspects of Silverlight, it's capabilities, performance aspects, bits and pieces about the lightweight embed CLR. Not only that, he makes a few great points on web experience and providing a platform that takes advantage of client processing power, with multi-threaded multi-core computing, in shifts with fundamental changes in software platforms.

I've been working on a release for a reading and writing system called liquidi. It's web-based, of course, and it's main purpose is to facilitate accelerating reading with the accessibility of up to date resources from around the web.

I've centered the content to currently aggregate common RSS feeds from news, books, and websites with learning material.

 

There is currently no plan on embeding videos into the system since the focus is about reading and writing on the web. The interface is incredibly simple and incredibly fast. Here's a brief look at the application from the homepage view.

The basic motive is to create a reading and writing social utility that puts both the focus and intentions of the user at the forefront. Every rating, comment, review and simple view applys an interest variance in the application. In layman terms, the more you read, the more you'll find that the application remembers that and thus looks for similar reading material. Right now we're at the stages of incremental analysis to enable our users to mark reading material with either special distaste or special interest. We plan on adding the ability to mark items to help relevancy in content.

More details to come in our expected release date!