Awesome Sixth Sense technology by Pranav Mistry

Thursday, January 07, 2010

Pranav Mistry is definitely a most talented young inventor to watch for. His 'Sixth Sense' gestural interface technology is amazing and the simplicity of user experience is awesome. Nearly turns any physical surface as interactive interface to interact with digital information and that to at very less cost. Watch his presentation at TED.

When clients take too much design control

Wednesday, January 06, 2010

Recently I stumbled upon a fantastic article about relations between Client & Design and speaks about the possible solutions. Interesting to read designer's tweeter responses having similar experiences.

“Looks great. Let’s just move the main content down and change the font to a brighter red and Papyrus…”

Have you ever dealt with a client who suddenly flipped on “design mode” mid-project? The expectation is that you are an expert, and you act as a filter between the client and a (successful) finished product. Web design is more than just coding a client’s vision.

Read more...

Bizarre world of client requests!

Thursday, November 26, 2009

• The funny and Bizarre World of Client requests!
• Clients from hell

The Swiss Way

What's wrong with Rediff' Design!

Wednesday, July 29, 2009

For all these years, Rediff has emerged as one of the leading website on Indian scene. Most of the regular internet users in India start day with Rediff, like me. But suddenly some days ago Rediff has shocked me with it's new design. I thought, may be some test going on, but now it's confirmed. Rediff has launched new minimilistic design, but more than a enhancement it is a pain. Why? Read below.

New Design: Minimalistic approach
It is good to see Rediff utilizing minimalistic approach. Focusing more now on contents, rather than 'All in a one page' funda. Rediff is emerged as main source of news on internet, so design aproach should be focused on all news sections (Headlines, news, movies etc.). News can be displayed in a single view, rather than tabs which are not accessible through keyboard.

Let's compare Rediff.com with CNN.com designs, both mainly news websites.




First thing we notice here that CNN has clean design, sections devided with clever gray background, focusing more on contents. Rediff lacks exactly here. If you see Rediff pages, you often confuse between main contents, navigation, related links and other contents. There is no clear differentiation.

New design would have utilized layout grid system. It is clean and effective technique to arrange contents. A balanced and consistently implemented design scheme will increase readers’ confidence in site.

As responsible publisher Rediff must use and support accessiblity standards for people with color-blinded or other disablities, Web accessibility also benefits people without disabilities.

Rediff's design can be improved in many ways and I hope they are listening us, we the readers.

Labels: Design Review, Rediff, Reviews

Interesting facts about India

Friday, January 30, 2009

I wasn't really aware about some of this facts. Do you know that:

• The 'Place Value System' and the 'Decimal System' were developed in India in 100 B.C.
• The game of Snakes & Ladders was created by the 13th century poet saint Gyandev. It was originally called 'Mokshapat'. The ladders in the game represented virtues and the snakes indicated vices. The game was played with cowrie shells and dices. In time, the game underwent several modifications, but its meaning remained the same, i.e. good deeds take people to heaven and evil to a cycle of re-births.
• India has the largest number of Post Offices in the world.
  
• India was one of the richest countries till the time of British rule in the early 17th Century. Christopher Columbus, attracted by India's wealth, had come looking for a sea route to India when he discovered America by mistake.
• Bhaskaracharya rightly calculated the time taken by the earth to orbit the Sun hundreds of years before the astronomer Smart. According to his calculation, the time taken by the Earth to orbit the Sun was 365.258756484 days.
• The value of "pi" was first calculated by the Indian Mathematician Budhayana, and he explained the concept of what is known as the Pythagorean Theorem. He discovered this in the 6th century, long before the European mathematicians.
• Until 1896, India was the only source of diamonds in the world (Source : Gemological Institute of America).

Want to know more? Click here.

Google Talk: Translation bots

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Did you hear about this.? Really a very good feature to interact with people from other parts of the world. I love the instant translation.

Send a message in one language and have it instantly translated into another. Just add a translation bot to your contacts using the following format: [from language]2[to language]@bot.talk.google.com. There are 24 bots available:

(ar = Arabic, de = German, el = Greek, en = English, es = Spanish, fr = French, it = Italian, ja = Japanese, ko = Korean, nl = Dutch, ru = Russian, zh = Chinese)

• ar2en
• de2en
• de2fr
• el2en
• en2ar
• en2de

• en2el
• en2es
• en2fr
• en2it
• en2ja
• en2ko

• en2nl
• en2ru
• en2zh
• es2en
• fr2de
• fr2en

• it2en
• ja2en
• ko2en
• nl2en
• ru2en
• zh2en

ProjectPier: A good small project management tool

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

I was facing problems in Project management since long time. During the period we tested some applications and found Basecamp better. We successfully used it in development process of a project but it has it's own limitations as it is not a open-source (means no free) product. Being a trial user I was not able to add more than one client and project with some more can-not-do's. So I was looking for a open-source alternative for Basecamp and recently found ProjectPier a good alternative for Basecamp and ActiveCollab.

ProjectPier is a Free, Open-Source, self-hosted PHP application for managing tasks, projects and teams through an intuitive web interface. ProjectPier will help your organization communicate, collaborate and get things done Its function is similar to commercial groupware/project management products, but allows the freedom and scalability of self-hosting. Even better, it will always be free."

What I liked most that ProjectPier team insures users that the product will remain free in future unlike ActiveCollab which was a opensource project in development phase.

About me -
Learning technologies, Web Developer, Graphics Designer, Photographer, Artist, Reader, Friend, Brother, Son, Indian and all around a good guy :)

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