We finally launched seyDesign 2008
Did you hear that? That was the sigh of relief heard around the world. Why? Because I just launched the biggest site porting I have ever done in my career with nothing more than a few typo’s to sully to good name of seyDoggy. In case you’ve missed the buzz, I am talking about the LONG awaited seyDesign 2008 relaunch, a rather large on-line store and resource that sells RapidWeaver themes.
On the surface it doesn’t look like such a big deal right? But underneath it all is a site that consists of more than 280 pages which include product write-ups, downloads, support areas, contact forms and store pages. Nearly all of this was rebuilt from the ground up; new copy, new graphics, new style, new typography… a ton of work! But the most challenging in any site relaunch is not have any broken or orphaned links, files or downloads. So far I have only managed one broken download link. Not bad out of 280+ pages.
Now that I have this monster behind me, it’s time to celebrate the Canada Day long weekend the best I know how… CAMPING! I will catch you all again on July 2. w00t!
SproutCore; open source meets Apple and web apps
When Apple assimilates… er… I mean hires developers, you often wonder what will come of it. Will a shinning star be snuffed out, buried, forgotten or stymied? Or will great things happen, pushing the envelope that contains the Apple-sphere, making the hardware giant showcase a new facet of the… erm… once narrow minded, acutely focussed business model.
One could wonder such things when Apple hired Charles Jolley, Sproutit founder and Mailroom developer, to re-architect their .Mac side of things. We have seen new things pop up in .Mac that were surely the influence of a Charles Jolley way of thinking; the photo gallery and what-not. And then comes MobileMe, a very rich internet application that defies all that we have known about web apps; they don’t have to suck. Surely this is the work of Charles Jolley. So what is to become of this seemingly fresh way of doing RIA’s?
That’s when Apple (and a few friends) drop SproutCore on us, an open standard platform for building web apps that look and feel like desktop apps… seriously… they do. But let me restate the cool part, open standard platform. That’s right, this is not Flash or SilverLight or even Java, this is open web standards such as HTML, CSS and Javascript with a bit of Cocoa inspiration.
Finally a javascript framework that I can get behind and one that I can sit down and take a crack at, knowing that a) it’s open and b) it has the support of a few heavy hitters behind it.
seyDesign 2008 is nearly complete
It has been months in the making and may be a week or two longer, but seyDesign 2008 is definitely nearing completion. All that’s left to do is tie up some of the loose ends, do some browser testing, write a press release or two…
So in working on seyDesign 2008, I have been able to take a retrospective look at seyDesign, seyDoggy and where things have gone with both branches in the past 3 years. One thing has really struck me; Kitchener-Waterloo is well known for it’s tech-sector (thanks in part to R.I.M and our incredible universities), Kitchener-Waterloo has a lot of web designers and web developers and Kitchener-Waterloo has a reasonably good Mac to PC ratio (enough to support both an independent reseller and a Best Buy Apple store)… So why is it then, that I remain the only RapidWeaver theme developer in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, and only one of three in all of Canada?
RapidWeaver is no flash in the pan; it’s here to stay. The same is true of Macs. I would welcome the some local camaraderie in this world of RapidWeaver theme development and maybe some day it will happen. If you are a web designer, a Mac user, have heard of RapidWeaver and hail from the Kitchener-Waterloo area, why not drop me a line. There is so much to talk about
Demonstrating the power of Scott Kelby’s techniques
A twitter peep of mine, and fellow Kitchener-Waterloo photographer was kind enough share her untouched photos with me. Lisa has quite the eye for composition (especially this one, WOW!). Anyhow, we got talking about photo retouching (which she had not yet had the opportunity to to this batch), and I had brought up Scott Kelby’s 7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3. So better than trying to explain it, I thought a nifty little demonstration would be cool. So I took one of Lisa’s pretty little roses (as seen untouched here) and performed a few of Scott’s steps just to make it pop a little and bring it to life. Now this is only from a screen shot of the image in her photostream so there weren’t as many dynamics to work with as there would have been with the original image but I think the point is well illustrated. This took me all of 5 minutes which shows just how powerful these techniques are. Fo more on Scott Kelby’s system, click here. Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch
I ought to do this more often
It’s one of those less-than-sexy jobs you often forget about; emptying the trash. Heck, some of us even use the trash as another place to sort and store things, like a, “I’m not quite done with you” bin. This morning was my time to do this, empty the trash, and it seems that it has been awhile. By the time I was done writing this post, OS X had been chugging away at deleting the 3000+ files for 13 minutes and was only a 1/4 of the way done. So maybe I ought to make this a daily task. Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch
moo cards round 2
So uhh… yeah. I liked the last batch but there were a few things on the text side I didn’t like and then I felt that the old ones didn’t pop enough. Seeing as I now knew the exact dimensions I had to work with I set out to make a new batch. Yeah, a little more traditional, I know, but it’s an awkward format to work with. The next batch will be unique, I promise. Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch
A delicious word cloud
I spied this one off of the admartinator’s flickr feed, “Wordle – Beautiful Word, a site that will take a bunch of words (or del.icio.us tags in my case) and turn them into a really cool word cloud. As you can see my del.icio.us tags are heavy on web design, RapidWeaver, mac and Apple. What else would you expect? Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch
kicking it in the shade
Here is my oldest child, back in town for the summer, enjoying summer vacation the only way a kid should; kicking it in the shade with a cool drink, doing nothing particularly important but being totally absorbed in it all the same. I must admit a bit of jealousy as I sit indoors doing the things that grow-ups do for all but a few short weeks in the summer; work. I raise a cheer to the boy doing his summer best to forget all that is wintery and for shaking every ounce of responsibility from his very being. I live vicariously through you.