Articles

Hicksdesign’s Design Process
CSS3 Design Contest Results – Amazing Work

Fun & Links

Inside look at BP meeting before and after oil spill.
The Smashing Cartoons are pretty funny.

Related posts:

1. Interesting Stuff From Last Week (and this week) II
2. Interesting Stuff From Last Week

Practice is the key

And of course, if you don’t practice a language, whether is computer related or not, you end up forgetting most of it, if not all. That’s exactly what happened to me. So, a couple of months ago I signed up for lynda.com to refresh my mind.

One Small Project

While watching the videos at lynda.com I started thinking about a small project I could do just for fun that will help me get my hands dirty and actually practice the language.

One Friday night I was studying my Bible and it occurred to me that I could speed up that process of studying if I could have several verses open at one time, something you can’t do with a regular Bible.

I know some of you might know several desktop and online applications that would do just that and much more, but this wasn’t about creating something better than the “competition” it was about practicing and creating something simple that would help me (and helpfully help others) study the Bible more efficiently.

Finding Bibles

While Building the application I encountered several road blocks, this is something one would expect when practicing a new language, but I never thought I would find myself spending a lot of hours looking and researching resources for Bibles.

My idea was to find a service (paid or free) that would have an API to get Bible versions, verses, etc. but I couldn’t find any. My next option was to build the database myself, so that’s what I did.

Now I know that most Bibles are copyrighted, which is kind of a surprise to me. I never thought you could copyright the Bible. I guess I need to learn more about copyrights. Anyway, I was able to find 4 versions of the Bible that I think are not copyrighted or part of the public domain. and that’s what I used on the application.

A Simple Application to Study the Bible

After months of hard work, I had the joy to launch a small application called Bible Study (I’m still working on a few bugs here and there, but it’s totally usable. And of course I’m planning to add more features later on).

Thanks to Ruby and Rails

After learning a lot of this awesome language my humble conclusion is that I like it and I like it a lot, specially the syntax. I like how its philosophy and the mind set blends almost perfectly with the way you code, you can actually see it and that’s something I haven’t experienced in another language. It inspired me to be a better programmer, a better web designer and the best of all, it made me want to learn more and more.

Thanks to Yukihiro “matz” Matsumoto, David Heinemeier Hansson and the rails community for this awesome language and framework.

Thank God for helping me build this small but awesome application.

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Articles:
30 Brilliant Typefaces For Corporate Design
8 Characteristics Of Successful User Interfaces
50 Stunning Examples of a great redesign: My Top Picks

Fun Stuff / Links
Tagline: “Failure is not an option (it comes bundled with Windows)”
How Microsoft’s retail stores plan to compete with Apple’s
5 Hot Tips for Microsoft and its Retail Stores
Amazing Bird Photos
New Apple Ads
The most expensive lens ever

Videos:
Bathtub IV – by Keith Loutit

Related posts:

1. Interesting Stuff From Last Week

I know sometimes (always) I tend to push myself beyond the limits, the boundaries of what I’m capable of creating, which it’s a good thing, but it can lead to undesirable consequences, and that’s why I think retouching is the key to keep us satisfied.

Another important aspect to consider is the fact that many times a redesign might improve the look & feel of the website but totally destroy the purpose of it, and I think both aspects need to go side by side. If you improve the design it must also improve the goals and vice versa.

Yesterday, when I finished version 1.1 of “Simple Talk”, I got this incredible feeling of relief, one that I’m sure is going to keep me satisfied for a long time.

As you can see, I updated the icons throughout the site and I made the bubble talk smaller, which I think gives a better perspective of what I’m trying to accomplish with the design.

Version 1.0

Version 1.1

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This is a list of links I posted on twitter during the past week. Hope you find them useful.

Articles:
Building Campaign Monitor Part 3 – Design Process.
AA Online Booking.

Fun Stuff / Links
44 Web Designers to Follow on Twitter.
ASCII art.

Videos:
A Short Love Story in Stop Motion.

Can we sue Microsoft for all the time spent debugging their bugs?
IE bug that killed me on friday the 13th.

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After contacting several B&M travel agencies, we decided to do it all ourselves.

Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz and Priceline were our websites of choice. All of them had similar prices but priceline was the cheapest, so we chose it. We needed to buy 6 tickets around $1,300 each, since our banks would not let us go over $5,000.00 on our daily purchases we had to split the order in two.

We both (Carolina my fiancé and I) had 3 tickets in our cart, same flight number, same price, same everything. We both submitted our orders at the same time, Carolina’s order went through but mine did not.

I got a message saying that I needed to redo my order because of some price change, so I did. But then I got the same message, so I did everything again, and again, and again. I tried at least 4 times, before we decided to change the number of passengers to 1. By this time, the price of a single ticket had gone up a hundred bucks ($1,400) but changing the number to 1 made all the difference and the order went through just fine. But I had 2 more tickets left to buy, I didn’t want to try priceline again so I went ahead and bought them from orbitz.

My frustration with priceline is that, if they have some sort of limitations on the amount of tickets they can sell per flight, just tell me so! Don’t make me go in an infinite loop trying to buy the tickets because you are telling me you still have tickets available. I can’t figure out the reason why they do this (if somebody know please let me know)

I called them the next morning to tell them what had happened, but they couldn’t answer any of my questions or help me in any way, so they lost a customer.

Next time you’re out shopping for an airfare ticket, remember this: “priceline sucks!”, seriously it does. Okay, I admit that was my frustration talking, but one thing I learned from this experience is that cheap doesn’t always mean better.

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It took me 7 months to finish this website, I started working on the new design on July 28th 2008. Of course I didn’t spend all that time on this project alone. Despite the fact that I could only spend a couple of hours a week to work on my freelance and personal stuff, there were many more reasons why this project was delayed.

But that’s behind now, the website is live and I learned my lesson: “If you set priorities, keep them, whether is a simple blog like mine or the biggest website ever built by humans, just keep them!” It might save you at least 6 months of production time or more, who knows.

Now, I can concentrate on my next project, a simple application using a new language I’ve been trying to learn for the last…7 months. I can’t tell you details about it right at this moment, but I’ll definitely post information, once I get started.

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