I’ve been a bit quiet lately both here and on Dribbble. I’m currently studying for my AS Exams that will be over in 2 to 3 weeks time, after which, I’ll be back to designing stuff straight away! I’ve got plans to continue work on Boxee and work on some tasty UI kits which I’ll make available here.
“Stay hungry, stay foolish.”
Just a quick post to thank Daniel and the guys over at GLOW Creative for my Dribbble invite! Check out my profile here.
I’ll be uploading more of my work there so look out for it!
Stay Cool.
When it comes to testing your application for a desktop operating system, you’ll want to have a record of what your user tries to do. There are some great applications out there such as Silverback ($69.95), a simple application which records your computer screen and webcam to provide a record of your users interaction with your application so you can look back later and see what the average user does.
The problem that many designers face is that no such application exists for mobile devices. People have jailborken their iDevice to add a VNC viewer or some other hacky rubbish but they didn’t think to use something built right into the Operating System. AirPlay.
If you’re using an iPhone 4S, iPad 2 or ‘The New iPad’, there’s a hidden gem called AirPlay mirroring and with Reflection ($14.99) for Mac you can stream your iDevice to your mac as if it were an Apple TV. Next, with some simple screen capture software such as QuickTime Player, you can capture the screen of the iDevice remotely. Below is a quick shot of what this setup looks like:
That’s all there is to it. It’s a simple trick but it’s bloody effective!
Over and out!
If you’re visiting this site during the day (GMT) you may notice a small now-playing box just below the Twitter feed. Yes, magic, I know. If you haven’t seen it, here is a preview:
This was created using the LastFM Api which is a friendly way to access your music library and it allows you to do some pretty nifty stuff. In this article, I’ll tell you a little about how I managed to twist the XML returned and make use of a little quirk to make life easier. This method is by no means the most efficient way of manipulating the returned XML but this is an early prototype.
You can follow along and learn how to do something cool for your site. Only a very basic PHP knowledge is required and some javascript if you want to make the call using Ajax.
Everyone fears that moment when somebody asks you:
“Could you fax it through instead?”
The answer is no. Want to know why?
Fax machines are the arse end of the networked world. They combine two of my least favourite things: Printers and Dial-up modems.
Printers are useless at the best of times. The drivers never work, the ink has mysteriously run out, and for some reason there are bloody cat pictures up all over the office when I don’t know how or where they came from. And for dial-up modems, they just dance around on your rotting sandwich from last wednesday whilst that one page document of a smiley face is still being downloaded from your balding uncle who still seems to think that the wheel is the peak of our technological capabilities.
I digress. Technology has moved on, I’m grateful for it. Without it, I wouldn’t have a job but I stand by the fact that there is a space reserved in hell for the inventor of the sodding fax machine.
Rant over. Talk soon lovelies!
It’s been slow progress, I’ve been pretty busy with other projects and studies but I finally have a semi-complete portfolio. There’s more to come but it should give you a taste of the sort of work that I do. Remember. It’s a start!
Check it out here: www.shadedpixel.co.uk/portfolio
Internet explorer needs a lot of work.
Over and out.