Haven’t wrote any­thing for a while, but here’s some food for ran­dom thoughts. With all the newest and great­est hit­ting web namely CSS3 and HTML5, how about giv­ing some love and thoughts to Multi-touch as the next big thing on the web, and prob­a­bly will be Web 3.0? Now you would say some­thing like, “Well, you know Mac­books have that awe­some fea­ture and peo­ple ARE using it on web­sites.” Well, can YOUR web­sites sup­port flip­ping objects around with 2 fin­gers? An inter­face to crop and edit pho­tos using your 2 fingers/hands on your web­site / web app? iPhone / Android phones can, but on web­sites? Nope.

First of all, I am one of those peo­ple who refused to support/buy any­thing with an “i” in front of it, it’s not that one day I wake up and decided to dis­like Macs. I owned an iPod before and I found myself almost throw­ing it against the wall. I have used Macs, and I can’t find myself lik­ing it as much as a PC. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate it, but I just pre­fer PC’s… that being said, the best thing Apple “invented” and poured so much thoughts into my brain is the lat­est and great­est the Multi-touch technology.

Where did I get the idea Multi-touch will be Web 3.0? Well, Javascript libraries such as jQuery, Mootools, Pro­to­type etc… changed the way peo­ple inter­act with web, and how it deliv­ered inter­ac­tiv­ity and infor­ma­tion to the users. Designers/developers don’t need to depend on Flash/Silverlight to have ani­ma­tions / effects, things load faster in the back­ground or don’t even have to reload a page thanks to AJAX. No longer the user has to open a new win­dow to see a pic­ture, instead, they can see them using a Light­box or sim­i­lar tool. I per­son­ally feel those are the most impor­tant ele­ments that dif­fer­en­ti­ate the good old web from Web 2.0. Some might argue Web 2.0 is all about the shiny graph­ics, but I beg to be dif­fered. Not only that, Multi-touch is already in smart phones and Apple already started it with their Mac­books / Magic Mouse, and Win­dows 7 with their own multi-touch inter­face. It’s only a mat­ter of time when all the web­sites don’t require a mouse to browse and adding more inter­ac­tiv­i­ties, because I don’t have to use a mouse to browse when I use my G1, why should a desk­top com­puter? The tools are already existed to get us there, the ques­tion is how soon. My guess? I’d say in a year.

To prove it, some cra­zies already made one of the world’s first Multi-touch web­site tak­ing advan­tage of Win­dows 7 multi-touch sup­port – of course it still works if you don’t have a fancy multi-touch screen or a Wac­com Bam­boo Touch (cost only $69 and works on both Macs and PCs – yes, even Win XP SP2).  Or a fancy Mac­book / Magic Mouse.

Although, I don’t think I’ll trade my CSS/HTML skills for multi-touch mak­ing web­sites in Sil­verlight. That being said, I think I was look­ing at the future of the web and prob­a­bly some­thing that will “encour­age” CSS3.x / and HTML4.x to sup­port multi-touch sooner, max­i­mize and push the web even fur­ther? Can I already say Multi-Touch Web 3.0, anyone?

A slight prob­lem of course Multi-touch is quite new, not many peo­ple have the tools to inter­act, or the neces­sity for it for the web at least. Never mind that, not a lot of peo­ple get the use of it. Multi-touch took me a few sec­onds to fig­ure out how to use it, now that I know, “wowser” is the word I’m using to describe it. To me, the web is all about two words: infor­ma­tion and expe­ri­ence. As designers/developers are con­stantly find­ing bet­ter and cooler way to cre­ate web­sites and deliver infor­ma­tion, Mutli-touch is def­i­nitely the next big thing on the web.

I don’t know about you, but I’m jump­ing on the band­wagon to look for a way to “fake” a Web 2.5 for now and make Web 2.0 sounds so 2008 while peo­ple still dig­ging the glossy/shiny but­tons, and debate the best way to clear floats.

This was one of the old posts that got cor­rupted when I did a rein­stall of WP 2.8.1.  Since this script is pretty handy, so I’m re-posting it.

This scripts worked in Acro­bat 8 & 9 Pro. Instead of of man­u­ally extract­ing all the pages, and then man­u­ally opti­mize them, this script can ease the process. To access the Batch Pro­cess­ing menu: Advanced -> Doc­u­ment Pro­cess­ing -> Batch Pro­cess­ing. The screen shot below shows where and how to add the script:

Then add the fol­low­ing script into the “Javascript Editor”:

var filename = this.documentFileName.replace(".pdf","");
try{ for(var i = 0; i<this.numPages; i++)
    var num = i+1;
    this.extractPages({ nStart: i; });
    cPath: filename+"_"+num+".pdf"});
}cath (e){ console.println {"Aborted: " + e) }

Saves a lot of time if you have a lot of files to extract and need to opti­mized the files using cus­tom settings.

…and con­trols to pause and play the time line.

I’ve been using this script quite a bit, and I think it’s time to jog it down some­where. A few things to keep in mind when using this script: (more…)

Inspi­ra­tions come in all places, some of mine seems to come from dreams…

A few days ago, I told myself that I need to reject the idea that I can’t draw.  So I started to look at tuto­ri­als how to draw and learn how to “think”.  One of the meth­ods is to think each objects in line and shapes how that object is made up instead of let the brain telling me what that object is.  Using that method, I tried vec­tor­iz­ing an image.  I feel that helps me to learn how to put the shapes together as much as draw­ing – and the prod­uct was my USB icons.   The result was quite good, and that was a very good exer­cise appar­ently… (more…)

I ran into an inter­est­ing error this morn­ing when I tried to open an Illus­tra­tor file from home to work.  When I opened it up, I got this error:

If that hap­pens, use Task Man­ager to “End Task” for Illus­tra­tor – then hit the “Can­cel” but­ton on the error popup.  Did 2 min­utes of google, this arti­cle came up.  Even though it was for Flex, it seems to apply here.  (more…)

I got this idea of this arti­cle after me and Java­Junky talk­ing and given a tuto­r­ial of how Twit­ter works to a cou­ple of our friends at my birth­day party.  When they went home, 3 peo­ple were on Twit­ter.  I guess me and Java­Junky did a good job on the sales pitch. (more…)

Well, all of my old posts are now offi­cially gone *cries a river*  oh well… here’s my first post… again… the tweets don’t count :P

My boss has a thing about revamp­ing the site once a year… his logic is that the cus­tomers need to relearn the nav­i­ga­tion so that they might dis­cover new things… I guess he really doesn’t like the idea of “Don’t make me think”.  Any­ways, that made me pon­der how long should a home­page be revamped?  Once a year seems a bit exces­sive to me, and I have noticed that sites like Intel / AMD had not updated their web­site for at least 2–3 years.  Now, there are many rea­sons why a web­site stays the way it is for a few year, I think these are the factors:

1. Con­fu­sions – new look dri­ves lots of habit based cur­rent readers/customers/clients absolutely nuts.  Every year after the revamp­ing, we got lots of emails and calls regard­ing the web­site that the cus­tomers claimed that they can’t find their things any­more.  Actu­ally, the cus­tomers mostly freaked out at the home­page, but the rest of the page, the nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem is pretty much the same with minor changes.  Yet, “he” per­sisted that we change every year, actu­ally, the new look only hit the 6 months mark… luck­ily, I ‘m not the one who answer those emails and calls
2. Resources - it takes time to come up with a good design and resources to build it.  Did I men­tion I’m a one per­son graphic / web depart­ment?  I don’t know how big is Intel & AMD’s web team, but pretty sure more than 1 per­son.  I am imag­in­ing that they study back and forth of all the nav­i­ga­tion and lay­out make sure that they don’t freak their cus­tomers out when they whip out the new look.  That, I am judg­ing by their nav­i­ga­tion and lay­out.  Intel has the most sig­nif­i­cant change on the home­page since last year, but after the home­page Intel keeps the nav­i­ga­tion pretty much the same.  AMD also keeps the same nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem and every­thing pretty much the same but with an updated look.

I mean, my boss has a point fresh­en­ing the nav­i­ga­tion, although, with the “Don’t make me think” prin­ci­ple… Well, let me know what you think?

Some 2009 updated cor­po­rate web­sites, I do a lot of cor­po­rate designs, so here’s a ref­er­ence for myself and any­one else find use­ful.  Some­one posted 35 2008 pro­fes­sional cor­po­rate web­sites, I’m updat­ing the list, added and sub­tract a few and keep on col­lect­ing: Orig­i­nal article

AMD 2009

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Pic­ture 1 of 13

AMD just recently revamped their web­site for the bet­ter. Very sim­ple and clean while keep using their green effectively.