Yearly Archives: 2009 - Page 3

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.

Trouble with twitter

Posted by on March 31, 2009 1 comment

 

Many of my friends are on twitter these days & twitter is said to be the next “Next big thing” in Web 2.0. Maybe it is good but I just don’t get Twitter’s Hype. I don’t want to tell everyone what I am doing at any given time. If I have a friend who I want to tell something, I will simply call him or her & say it.

Twitter is for Microblogging, ok..this I get but at least for me it has no use at all. I got real life friends who meet me in real life & I find real life with them better then virtual life.

I found this funny video of twitter troubles on Youtube.

You can follow me on Twitter though at http://twitter.com/gx_saurav

Real life is indeed better….

Polishing Chrome for shine

Posted by on March 30, 2009 1 comment

 

Google released there own browser few months ago which was the first product in ages to come out of the famous Beta tag of Google within 2 months of release so as to appeal to the OEMs. Despite of Google’s stupidity of saying “Windows 7 users should be asked to select there default browser on each startup”, Google Chrome still is making noise in the browser market & is touted as the next best thing after Sliced bread.

Google Chrome is based on Webkit Rendering engine which was created by Apple which Apple copied from KDE’s KHTML engine. Webkit has gained so much momentum that people forgot about KHTML & now use Webkit only for there browser development. Webkit is also powering the mobile browser of iPhone & Symbian S60 OS.

Google added there own faster Javscript Engine called V8 to it which sparked the era in all the browsers to provide faster Javascript performance as most of Web 2.0 is based on JavaScript. Even in the company where I work we have stopped using Flash in favor of Javascript & ASP.net. Even the banner ads we create are made using JS. Its just better & works everywhere, even on mobile phones as JS is better then Flash when it comes to resource usage.

Firefox is the regarded as the best browser out there due to its Open Source structure, Extensions & 3rd party Extensions support. Firefox has indeed managed to crack the market share of Internet Explorer but now we have Chrome in the block which is eating the market share of Firefox. Firefox looks kind of ugly on Windows & its not a native windows browser, instead it tries to shove XUL all over. The good part of Chrome is that it is made with Windows in mind & so far follows many Microsoft recommended ways of creating an application for Windows platform.

I used Google Chrome for 3 days as my primary browser & I am already missing many features. Although Google Chrome is really fast to execute & open pages, it still lacks features which I need.

So far this is my take of Google Chrome.

1. No Extensions support. Although it is being said that Google is planning to support extension support to Chrome.

2. No Ad blocking support. Google is a company which makes lots of money through AdSence so obviously they would want there browser to show all the Ads. I was however able to find a good ad blocker for Google Chrome called Ad sweep which is like Adblock for Firefox but will work with many browsers.

3. After some searching on Google I was also able to find some tutorials to use Google Chrome as Power users

4. My 3rd party plug-in don’t work, yet. What I miss the most is AI Roboform, Orbit Downloader, Microsoft File transfer manager, something like Configuration Mania for Firefox & something to block or unblock Adobe Flash. Rest all is already there & the UI of Google Chrome is already simple & minimal.

5. I like the Omni bar. One bar for address & search. However, in Firefox if I write something in the AwesomeBar & press enter, I am automatically redirected to the website which is most relevant. When I write gxsaurav in Firefox awesomebar I am redirected here but in Chrome it opens a Google Search Page. This I don’t like.

6. Google Chrome is the browser I have given to my Sister & dad to work on there user profile in my Shared PC. They like it as it is very easy to use.

7. Its wrong for Google to install Chome in the user folder instead of Program Files in Windows. On Windows Vista Chrome is installed in

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default

After installation just copy all the files from this folder to your program files Folder after creating a folder named Google Chrome. Copy all the files from the version # number folder to the root folder & then use Google Chrome.

Google Chrome has a long way to go. It does looks promising & the fact that Google is advertising Chrome like anything, it can indeed create a serious dent to even Firefox. Now, I am just hoping for 3rd party developers to release plug-in for chrome soon.

Update : You can run Google Chrome as a portable standalone application now, thanks to Devrexster.

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