The Verge has a pretty good list of things to know about cameras before buying one. Even if you do already consider yourself a pretty good shutterbug, its a nice list to refresh your memory.
Jan 6, 2012Road Inc is a must have app if you own an iPad. Its an app thats sort of like an interactive coffee table book that showcases classic cars. You download tours of individual cars which includes a 360 degree view and a brief history about the car. A definite must have for any car enthusiast with an iPad.
“Like all forms of design, visual design is about problem solving, not about personal preference or unsupported opinion.”
I’ve recently made the drastic change of using cloud services for my music. I started by deleting all my music off my computer and resorted to using Rdio and SoundCloud to listen to my music. Rdio makes listening to music unbelievably easy with its massive library and easy to use interface. I pay a flat monthly fee to access their entire music collection. Rdio also has an awesome mobile app that lets me create playlists and listen to them when offline or stream directly from the Rdio service. Rdio even has some excellent social features thats lets me know what my friends are listening to and it also lets us collaborate on playlists and share music we like.
SoundCloud is another service I find myself using more frequently as more music artists use this service to share and crowdsource their music. Mainstream artists like Madonna, Beyoncé and Rihanna are also using Soundcloud to share popular tracks and showcase new exclusive tracks to their fans before releasing it. SoundCloud also has a very unique player that lets you add comments to any part of the track.
Its a bit scary too think we’re becoming so dependent on cloud services, in this case, to listen to music. But the convenience it adds is completely worth it especially when you have apps like Rdio and SoundCloud. With apps like Netflix and Hulu, I don’t think it will be too far along before watching movies and tv shows exclusively online will be a standard.
Path, a mobile journal app that lets you share your moments with your friends, has updated to version 2 and it is one of the most beautiful mobile apps I’ve laid eyes on. One great example of clever design in this app is the small button in the bottom left corner you tap to share a photo or your current location. Or the way they display the time a post was made as you scroll down the page. Heres to hoping other apps find inspiration in this one.
Dec 2, 2011This is getting a lot of publicity right now. Spotify is an online service which lets you pay about $10/month to listen to all the music you want on your desktop or mobile device. They recently changed their sign-up policy so that you now need a Facebook account to sign up for a spotify account, and a lot of people are upset.
http://getsatisfaction.com/spotify/topics/can_you_sign_up_for_spotify_without_facebook
And more comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3038815
It will be interesting to see if they revert this update since Mr. Zuckerberg seems to endorse Spotify.
Sep 27, 2011A really nice toolkit from the folks at Twitter which has a lot of elements that you’d commonly use on a site. I especially like the popovers and the alerts.
Sep 21, 2011Have you seen the new target.com? If you haven’t, I would recommend you visit the site and look around, they’ve done some marvelous work. This article points out some interesting things about the checkout form that comes with the new design. Not surprised to see this from a company that pays good attention to design.
Sep 16, 2011I’ve been using this for a few sites including this one. It walks you through different steps and helps you picking fonts that compliment each other for different elements of the site. Also generates the CSS for you to paste into your own CSS file.
Sep 15, 2011Frank Chimero has an excellent write-up that answers the age-old question of whether designers should learn how to code.
Sep 1, 2011Good design and good markup provide structure to content. Good markup is a fundamental part of good design: beautiful on the inside, beautiful on the outside.
I recently discovered Techcrunch Cribs, where Jason Kincaid takes you on a tour of tech startup offices. Some of these include Dropbox, Posterous and Tumblr.
Jul 30, 2011“Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else.”
Decide.com lets you know if it is the right time to buy that gadget you’ve had your eye on. You can also setup alerts so that you can be notified if there is a product update. While I’ve used the MacRumors Buyer’s Guide in the past, I can definitely see myself using this when its time to upgrade my MacBook or any other major electronic appliance.
Jun 20, 2011You know that feeling of having just bought & setup a new machine and everything still runs very fast? Well, a SSD will make every single day feel just like that, except much faster.
I switched over last year, after using a regular HDD on my Mac for a year. And now, a year later it still feels like I own a brand new machine. Its fun to watch the icon in the dock bounce only once before the app loads.
Apr 20, 2011About time someone came up with this. lorempixum is a placeholder image generator much like how “lorem ipsum” is a placeholder for text. Lots of customization avaiable too. So to show a random sports image with dimensions of 400×200, you would use this in your HTML:
<img src=”http://lorempixum.com/400/200/sports/” />
UPDATE: Tutsplus.com has a few more listed here: The Top 8 Placeholder Services for Web Designers
Apr 12, 2011Just started using Minimalist for Gmail and I have to say that they’ve done an impressive job. Lets you customize pretty much everything you see on Gmail including the ads, and the gigantic footer. Even lets you add in a toggle to hide the Gmail logo and search bar.
Apr 12, 2011Feb 18, 2011That’s three generations of PlayBook tablets announced in five months and we still haven’t seen a single product make it to market. The media seems enamored with the PlayBook and don’t ask the obvious question — where are the products?
“Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”
Simple concept: Influential and creative people offer advice and opinions over iChat.
Feb 16, 2011
Excellent album. Röyksopp has had a lot of success with their past albums and their music has been featured in quote a few TV commercials. Some of the songs are more electronic while some of them are more pop. Overall, a good blend and definetly worth a listen.
Feb 2, 2011
One of my favorite applications that I use all the time is Adobe Lightroom. After trying out almost every popular photo-managment software including iPhoto, Picasa and Aperture, it was pretty obvious that Lightroom was the robust choice to handle my 60GB+ worth of photos. One of the coolest features I like about Lightroom is that you can buy and download Lightroom presets. These presets can be programmed to do anything from converting a photo to black-and-white, removing grain and dust or just enhancing and sharpening dull or darkened photos, all with a single click. You can find a few presets on The Bell Sisters website.
The one preset that I love the most and probably use on almost all my photos is “Punch”. Its a default preset that comes with Lightroom and can be found towards the bottom of the Lightroom presets list. Punch basically takes any photo you give it, and bumps the “Clarity” level on the photo by 50 points and the “Vibrance” level by 25 points. This removes some of the dullness or gray-ness of the photo that you might have inherited especially if you have shots taken in a cloudy environment and makes it, in my opinion, the easiest way to cleanup a photo.
With all this delicious.com fiasco going on, I decided to move all my bookmarks from delicious to another wordpress blog that I can manage and control. Looks like its working pretty well right now.
Jan 21, 2011In the span of about a year, I’ve been lucky enough to travel to India a couple of times. Over these trips I’ve managed to take over two thousand pictures, out of which, several made it into this blog and a few others made it to my Flickr page. Not only did these trips provide an excellent opportunity for me to experiment with my camera and different lenses, it also gave me a chance to look at my home in a different light. While experimenting with all the ways you can take a single shot, it made me realize that there are a lot of things I’ve seen countless times as a child that I’ve always taken for granted. This time though, I was prepared to preserve these memories. Continue reading…
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