Revolutions are hard to come by. Our minds cannot churn out something that makes people go “Wow!” everyday, hence maintaining the novelty of innovation. That doesn’t mean the new cannot surprise or please. Most of the time, evolutio …

There is a lot of chatter about @font-face and the future of web typography, font foundries and the font industry in general. There’s a good summary over at I Love Typography about the various solutions that have been proposed, and what the con …

I. PERSONAL FREEDOM When I was a freelancer, developing and creating things was pretty grand. I would get the required specifications from clients, sit down to work and complete that project knowing that it was something the client wanted and would …

One of the biggest learning experiences I’ve had this past year has been on what user interaction is and should be like. Being involved with Filttr, a couple of internal projects (that aren’t ready to see daylight just yet), and actually …

During the early phases of Filttr, when we were still deciding how to go about things and how much we would offer, a desktop application was very high on the priority list because of the amazing ecosystem of apps Twitter had allowed to grow. Sure, th …

I’ve been designing for five years now. Out of that, I’ve been a designer for three of them. I must establish the difference between the two before I continue, so that we’re on the same page. Designing, to me is a very vague term. I …

Javascript for the win: Modern day Web browsers are trying to improve by making speed improvements to their rendering engines, optimising memory usage and the latest trend — faster Javascript execution. Rich Internet Applications (RIA) have mad …

Coding up multiple projects in a span of 3-4 months, I’ve at times hit situations where there is a fork in the coding road. A point where the decision has to be made if I want to write out a program that just works by using any and every means …

A simple search for “Firefox 3 ugly” shows exactly how many people find the new “native”-ness of Firefox not so pleasing. The problem isn’t just about a non-uniform theme, but the fact that every control looks hacked tog …

In reply to a tweet about wanting PUSH-based construct for web applications, @prasnation pointed me to Comet, which Wikipedia defines as a “WWW architecture in which a web server sends data to a client program (normally a web browser) asynchron …

There’s something about being a designer or just a plain computer person that makes you want to tweak everything to the way you want it to look. I have tweaked the life out of Geekaholic, and am currently in the process of designing my landing …

The very first ‘Search-as-you-type’ control I saw was the in-page searches of browsers. The way words would start highlighting the moment you keyed in the n th letter of the word, was something I found very convenient, but didn’t th …

Simply defining, a conversion engine is tool that one uses to convert one form of text into another. Here, I am talking about converting plain text to formatted coding. If you want a better idea of what I am talking about, take a look at the excellen …

I like how Google service pages load up faster than others. Most of it can be attributed to their minimalistic design, but if you ever open up Firebug’s console, you’ll see the actual reason. The good thing about Javascript is that it& …

Lightbox Gone Wild was one of the first to implement this. A Javascript/CSS based modal window, which had to be serviced before access the page was returned. Sort of like a cool looking dialogue box. It was new for the time, and everybody joined on t …

When we get used to an operating system, and memorise the keyboard short-cuts, we see our productivity increase. Tasks that would normally take 3 mouse clicks (after the time taken to move your hand from the keys to the mouse), can be easily executed …

Now that Firefox 3.0 beta 3 has come out (and been blasted by me), I wanted to take time to see which direction the UI refresh was going for the next generation of the browser we’ve all come to love. I’m going to start by saying I donR …

I’ll be using a programming jargon in this post, so excuse me if you don’t understand things immediately. All explanations are at the bottom. One thing I love about PHP and sorely miss in C++ is the concept of variable variables. A ̵ …

About a week back I began work on a couple of UI Javascript effects. An auto-completer, and an accordion. I know libraries come with these plug-ins pre-defined, but they’re heavy. Plus, I wanted to take up the challenge of making one on my own, …

I remember when Mozilla first announced that they would be shifting main focus over to Firefox, and what their core aim with this new browser was: Firefox is simply smaller, faster, and better – especially better not because it has every co …

I read a lovely article over at Coding Horror about a week back, and I’ve been thinking about how we programmers deal with code. To start with, I think there are mainly two types of programmers today. 1) Programmers who don’t care about t …

GUI (Graphical User Interface) is such an integral part of our computing lives, I really doubt we stop and analyze the separate elements that make it what it is –– easy and intuitive to use. It has evolved over years, suggestions and load …

Unless you’ve been living under a frozen rock in Antarctica, you’d know about Adobe Apollo. Now, welcome Silverlight! Microsoft’s answer to Adobe, but in the other direction. Silverlight is to the Internet, was Apollo is to the desk …

I think every person who has wanted to get their hands dirty in code, should rethink their strategy and what they want to ultimately end up as. I have said before that ideas will ultimately mean more for hacks than the implementation and the code its …

Today I bumped into FrogJS. It’s another photo gallery ‘unobtrusive Javascript’ library, which can be used by people to make a Javascript driven animated photo gallery on their pages. My question is simple. Do we really need another …

I had a few other posts waiting to be posted, but this news just deserves priority! When I first heard of Apollo, I wasn’t so excited as a lot of people have been. I was more of the thought that since Adobe just likes to do things their way, …

The new Blogger brought a lot of new features. We (the bleet) were a little worried about the future of hacks, and how Blogger’s features would make a lot of past hacks useless, and make future hackery difficult. Now that I look back these past …

I got the idea for it when I saw the two fixed menus over at Quirksmode. Now, I’m not a great book publishing, tutorial blog writing coder. But I can write code, so with the new look, I wanted to add that little detail in. It becomes a nuisance …

Recently, working on my personal blog (I’ll be releasing soon enough :) ), I had a little itch to make a automatically updating ‘Now Playing’ widget, which would automatically take the data from my Winamp, and via some fancy scripti …

I have recently been experimenting with unicode characters on this blog. You would have noticed them next to links, at the end of the footnotes and very recently, the bullet icon for the label under the title. I use three glyphs at the moment, the ou …