Monthly Archives: April 2009

MCon Outdoor Advertising : Amalgamation of 3D & 2D in Web Designing.

Posted by on April 21, 2009 4 comments

Few days ago I was given the job to design the website of a Mumbai based Outdoor advertising which was to be made all in Flash. Now, Flash takes lots of time to load but also gives us some interactivity which isn’t possible in JavaScript.

I made the concept for MCons by looking at one of my old 3ds Max renders of Urban Colony. I went with a 3d Perspective & made real boards on which ads are shown outside our home.

This is how the modified design of MCons would look like.

Homepage b1

When the user clicks on the mailbox, it opens a slide out animation for this contact form.

contact form

We are also told to add cat & dog animation as they are the company’s trademark which will be added by Flash. My fellow ex-colleague at Infranix are working on it.

This is my last work in Infranix. Next work is going to be for SlideShare.

Destination Holiday

Posted by on April 20, 2009 1 comment

Destination Holiday is a Travel Agency in Lucknow. For there website, they wanted a design which was is something like a paper brochure. They wanted something which they can simply tell the user to print & it will still look good.

I started with a Paper Texture background which I later reduced a bit. At the homepage all you get is thumbnails of various place’s pictures where destination Holiday provides service & touring etc. When you mouse over any thumbnail a Tooltip opens which has some information about that place as shown in the screenshot. The tooltip is made using JavaScript

Homepage1

Once clicked, another page opens with information regarding the place using simple accordian. This Place content page is under revision right now which might change if the client gives further feedback.

Content Page - Keral

Finally, I am also on Twitter

Posted by on April 19, 2009 2 comments

 

Everyone is on Twitter & no matter how much I find it pointless, it is a good way to communicate to many people at one time, or announce something to all of them etc etc.

I joined twitter today & integrated it to my blog. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/gx_saurav

Here is the thing, don’t expect me to write everything I do in my life on Twitter, its for announcements, queries etc only. I even disabled Facebook Integration with Twitter as it looks pathetic when my Facebook page is filled with friend’s twits.

After using many Twitter clines, I am settled at Blu. It is a really good looking WPF based Desktop client. I also tried Witty which is equally good but Witty doesn’t support TinyURL while you are writing, while Blu will automatically convert your link. Now I wish I could get Witty’s notification system & minimize to tray feature in Blu.

SNAG-0001

I tried Twhirl, Spaz etc too but didn’t like them. Adobe AIR applications have very small font. Twhirl was somewhat good though as it had custom font support but the icons then were very small :D

On Mobile phone I am using Tweete recommended by Manan. Its good, I don’t need any mobile clients either. Its a browser based service which works beautifully with Opera Mini.

Roundtable with S.Somasegar, Microsoft

Posted by on April 17, 2009 6 comments

 

My M.V.P lead Mr. Abhishek Baxi called me few days ago all of a sudden to tell me about the urgent opportunity to meet Mr. Somasegar S, Senior Vice President of Microsoft, Developer Division. Whose going to miss such an opportunity, so I packed my bags, took the first bus available to Delhi as train tickets were not available on time & reached Delhi.

I had no place to stay so stayed with my brother in his college hostel & thanks to his contacts I was able to locate Oberoi Hotel. I reached there on time for the meet to start.

Its rare to get a chance to meet such influencing personality like Mr. Somasegar S from Microsoft who is the reason why we developers & designers are able to create such magnificent solutions for Windows. He creates the hammer, using which we chisel out the craft.

I wasn’t expecting many people but to my surprise there were many people all from there own field of expertise. It was an honor to meet Mr. Vijay Malhotra again who inspired me to start paying attention to Linguistic when we make a software at InfraniX. I was also able to meet Mr. Vinod Unny, regional Director Microsoft.

I hope I didn’t make the attendees angry by throwing maximum question at Mr. Somasegar. I asked question like integration between Photoshop & Expression Blend, Microsoft DreamSpark initiative etc. Despite of having just one hour with us, Somasegar Sir were able to answer many of our questions.

You can view all the pictures at the Flickr Photo stream of Abhishek Baxi. I am adding some to this post.

Group Photograph

Even Grace Agrees, I am still fat.

BumpTop : Managing your PC Desktop like a real Desktop

Posted by on April 10, 2009 2 comments

 

Few years ago I saw a video on YouTube which was demonstrating BumpTop UI of managing your Windows Desktop using physics based gestures & rules of real life like  dragging & dropping, piling together etc. At that time It was just a concept demo but it is possible today in form of BumpTop which will run with .net runtime 3.5 SP1 on Windows XP, Vista & Windows 7. BumpTop is using OpenGL though which makes it possible to create a cross platform application. This UI is so useful in real life, it would be a crime not to release it for Linux based touch screen devices.

The philosophy of BumpTop is to make you manage your Windows Desktop the same way you manage a real life Desktop or Table on which you work. What do you do there??? You pile things on top of each other, put sticky notes, pictures, frames etc. You get a similar experience with BumpTop just that it is inside a computer. Here is how BumpTop looks like on my PC. I wish Yahoo Widgets would go flat on the floor of BumpTop.

bumptop

A better picture of BumpTop found on Arstechnica

BumpTop from my point of view isn’t that useful when used on a PC with Mouse but is extremely useful when used on a Touchscreen Tablet PC. It just makes more sense there to use it.

Here is a Video of BumpTop running I found on YouTube. It really fluid & without any performance hits even on my PC.

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