Results tagged “design” from SweetFriday

Update: I found a copy of the essay here but it appears to be a reprint with a different title, “Time To Liberate The Web”. Same content though, so it doesn't matter.

I found an essay by Ted Nelson titled “Way Out Of The Box”, and it's about limitations imposed by technical-minded people on everyone else. It's about the assumptions made when programs and computers are designed.

Here is a particularly good passage that tells us what we sacrifice when we force users to become distinct from programmers,

Suppose they gave you MTV, and in return took away your right to vote? Would you care? Some of us would. That's how I think of today's computer world, beginning with the Macintosh. The Macintosh gave us Fonts, pretty fonts to play with, and graphic arts tools that previously were out of reach, except in the most high-budget realms of advertising and coffeetable book production. Those fonts and graphic arts tools were a great gift.

But nobody seems to have noticed what the Macintosh took away.

It took away THE RIGHT TO PROGRAM.

If you bought an Apple II, you could begin programming it right out of the box. I have friends who bought the Apple II without knowing what programming was, and became professional programmers almost overnight. The system was clean and simple and allowed you to do graphics.

But the Macintosh (and now the Windows PC) are another story. And the story is simple: PROGRAMMING IS ONLY FOR OFFICIAL REGISTERED “DEVELOPERS”.

(Emphasis mine)

So I was studying my marketing textbook and I realized that Free Software has an awful reputation because of bad marketing. The software is, for the most part, technically sound, however the image of it is awful. This then reminded me of EventCal, the Python HTML calendar generator that I wrote a few years ago. I still get emails about it once in a while, even though I'm not actively maintaining.

So instead of studying, I created a quick checklist on what a Free Software website should have in order to be considered helpful by users. I won't post that list here just yet, because I want to write up a few other checklists and notes on marketing.

I've become interested in infographics, those fancy diagrams and charts and illustrations/visualizations of data that make them stick in your mind more easily. Why settle for an ugly chart when you can just adjust the fonts and colours a bit and get something sweeter looking.

A week or so ago I decided to finally sit down and try out the Compass CSS framework. When I first looked at it, I was dismayed to find that it required Yet Another Language to learn, but then I quickly saw its advantages when I started using it.

For the past few days I have been fixing up a website that my cousin found. He was working on some biology/technology homework and was tired of writing out DNA sequences, manually converting them to RNA and then searching through a table to find the amino acids that each trio of letter corresponds to.

Using jQuery and JavaScript magic, I came up with this. It converts DNA to RNA and then finds the amino acids in the sequence. The conversion between RNA and DNA takes place while you type, but you have to click to get the amino acids.

The whole thing is a single HTML file with 3 JavaScript files and a stylesheet. The JavaScript is divided into three categories; data, logic, and views. The data.js file contains information on amino acids. The logic.js file has code that deals with the conversions, and the views.js file has code for displaying the results. The amazing thing is that all of this works in Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 3, Safari, etc. Note: there are other JavaScript files included but they are for the fancy effects in the views.js file, they aren't part of the core logic of tool. The advantage is that the whole package is self-contained and you can copy the folder over to a USB thumbdrive and use the tool on any computer that has a web browser installed. You don't even need a web serrver.

The code is available at GitHub and is licensed under the MIT License.

I overslept by a few hours but I decided to change the colour scheme. The stylesheet I uploaded last night was hideous, though good enough for testing. The new styles and page generation functions are up and I've switched the main page to PHP. The Friend of a Friend Creator is also partially up. I need to add more of the FOAF specification stuff of course, but there's a fancy new date picker (Thanks jQuery-UI!)

The design is very retro, very 70s I would say...at least in terms of the colours. The striped background reminds me of the swimshorts I bought that also have racing stripes. Obviously the design is solid because of this, heh.

Some details...

• The colour palette: Beach Bum
• The pattern: Beach Stripes
• Image editor used for the logo: The GIMP
• JavaScript magic framework: jQuery
• The calendar date-picker comes from: jQuery User Interface
• Version control: GIT
• Text editor: GNU Emacs
• Music listened to: Goldfrapp, Headlights, Seu Jorge, The Fratellis, Ladytron, Lightspeed Champion