Dio5: latest posts

[Full Post] Presonus Audiobox USB

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

People who know me might remember that I used to play the guitar. I say 'used to' because the last few years my Fender Tonemaster and Kustom amplifiers are rotting away somewhere upstairs, basically because they're too loud to get a decent sound at low volume, and because of lack of time.

So I decided to invest in a little soundcard, allowing me to play electric through my computer, using Reaper other software.

Somehow my eyes fell on the Presonus Audiobox USB, which seemed great if you look at the features:

full metal case, no plastic crap
2 Neutrik combo inputs (2 XLR and 2 jack/instrument inputs)
USB Powered
Midi IN & OUT
Balanced outputs
Phones out
48V Phantom power
Separate dials per channel/phones/main

All in all nice features for the incredibly low price of 149 euros. I started looking forward to playing again without disturbing my neigbours, being able to record or even jam along with an e-drum.

However, this device seem to have one big flaw, making it almost useless: even though the diagram clearly shows you can plug in a guitar, the box is designed in such a way that it applies gain even with gain levels at minimum.

This results in almost constant clipping when you strum hard or slap a bass. This is clipping on the box, not software clipping, so no matter how much you lower your volume in your software, your signal will most likely be distorted.

Searching the presonus fora learned me that I'm not alone.

People from the Presonus Support department suggest using a DI and using the XLR's instead as a workaround, but I think this is ridiculous: it really makes the two jack inputs useless.

Fortunately, Music Store has a great money back service, so I'm going for a full refund.

So be aware when you consider buying this. Even though it looks great, I think Presonus made a design (usability) mistake with this one.

So what did I learn? Once again, before you buy, never forget to do your own due diligence.

[Flickr] Usability Failure

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Happen to come across usability failures in real life or online and have a flickr account? (Or don't mind creating one...) Take a picture and add it to the Flickr Usability Failure group.

Don't make me think.

[Full Post] And the future remains

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

For convenience, this post will be in Dutch. It basically explains that I got sacked at my part-time job due to the economic recession and that there are a few different routes I could take from now on.

De crisis, ze bestaat.

Zoals sommigen misschien weten, werk ik halftijds in kunstencentrum Vooruit als podiumtechnicus. Dit geeft me een vorm van zekerheid en gecombineerd met mijn zelfstandig bijberoep enorm veel vrijheid zowel naar loon, verlof, als naar werken toe.

Maar die zekerheid, zo blijkt, is dus relatief. Zo kreeg ik twee weken geleden te horen dat ik eind december kan vertrekken. Nu ja, niet met zulke woorden maar daar komt het wel op neer. Reden? Minder subsidies en minder werk naar volgend jaar toe, dus moet er bespaard worden. Maar ze willen wel nog graag dat ik als freelancer kom werken, 'als ze werk hebben'. Ze vergeten wel dat hier wat meer bij komt kijken voor mij.

Al zo'n twee jaar nu probeer ik mijn bijberoep als zelfstandig webontwikkelaar (of iets dergelijk) te combineren met dit compleet ander 'halftijds' beroep in dienstverband. De afwisseling, gekoppeld aan de vrijheid en de enorm flexibele uren was de motivatie om dit te blijven doen. Zeg nu zelf: de hele zomer 'vrij' hebben ter compensatie van overuren en zelf je verlof mogen kiezen. Geen nine-to-five maar in het mate van het mogelijke werken wanneer je wil, daar zeg je toch niet nee tegen.

Toegegeven, het is niet altijd even evident: dikwijls klop ik uren tot laat in de avond, in een rokerige omgeving met veel lawaai. Dikwijls laat ik de pinten staan terwijl anderen zich stevig vol drinken. Niet dat ik daar zo'n fan van ben, maar zeg maar eens constant nee. En dan sta ik 's morgens vroeg weer op omdat ik geconcentreerd moet (lees: wil) kunnen verder werken in mijn bijberoep. Het spreekt voor zich dat het soms redelijk vermoeiende weken zijn. Daarnaast zijn het soms ook lange dagen daar, met veel wachten en prutsen, terwijl ik thuis nog een berg werk heb liggen: frustrerend dus.

Mijn bijberoep is op die twee jaar ook sterk gegroeid en voorziet me van een groot deel van mijn inkomen. Daar ben ik dan GPMD dankbaar voor, aangezien ze een groot deel van hun opdrachten aan mij doorspelen, zelfs in die mate dat ik nog amper tijd over heb voor andere dingen. Niet alle opdrachten halen mijn portfolio helaas, soms sta ik niet zo achter het ontwerp dat dan door andere designers wordt aangeleverd. But it pays the bills en is nogal eens een uitdaging om te doen. Zo mocht ik onlangs grotendeels het ontwerp doen voor hun nieuwe site.

Maar wat nu gedaan? Officieel zal ik dus vanaf 1 januari 2010 werkloos zijn, maar wat dan met mijn bijberoep? Bij mijn weten zijn er drie mogelijkheden.

Optie één is om volledig zelfstandig te gaan. Zo lang ik genoeg opdrachten binnen krijg via GPMD lijkt me dit wel haalbaar, maar hier ga ik toch niet op rekenen. Het zou me ook de kans en de tijd geven om meer nadruk te leggen op mijn eigen zaak en meer eigen projecten proberen binnen te halen. Anderzijds vind ik dit wel een grote gok: er zijn genoeg bedrijven van topklasse hier in de buurt en in België—volgens mij is de concurrentie moordend—ook al kan ik dan een mooi alternatief bieden.

Optie twee dan: een vervanging zoeken van mijn huidige halftijdse. Een job die me ergens een houvast geeft, maar toch ook voldoende tijd en ruimte om te blijven doen wat ik nu doe. Ik ken weliswaar geen enkel bedrijf waar er zo'n flexibel systeem van toepassing is als in Vooruit, dus dit lijkt me op het eerste zicht niet realistisch.

De laatste optie is om een voltijdse job te zoeken die in het verlengde ligt van mijn bijberoep: iets met html/css/php—en misschien zelfs Silverstripe—dus. Hiertegenover staat dan wel dat ik mijn huidige relaties zal moeten afbreken en veel minder tijd aan dit zal kunnen spenderen als freelancer. Volgens mij dus minder vrijheid, en minder geld, maar misschien wel meer mensen om dingen mee te delen, grotere projecten en meer bevrediging?

Op dit moment laat ik de deur nog open voor alle mogelijkheden. Als het aan mij had gelegen, zou er niet onmiddellijk iets veranderen. Misschien dat ik in de toekomst mijn halftijdse wel zou opzeggen als ik er echt van overtuigd was dat ik zonder kon, of indien ik ergens een zeer interessante aanbieding zou krijgen.

Eerlijk gezegd had ik niet verwacht dat ik de crisis uit die hoek zou voelen. Het leek me meer voor de hand te liggen dat ik minder opdrachten zou krijgen vanuit London. Niet dus.

Er blijven me nu nog drie maanden om de kat uit de boom te kijken. Hoe dan ook, every change is a challenge, en aangezien we niet in Afrika leven zal ik wel niet omkomen van de honger zeker?

[Full Post] Summer's gone

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Summer's almost over and I thought I'd let you all know that I'm not dead.

Summer's always a great excuse for travelling, so apart from a few heavy weeks of working on some re-designs for a few websites, I got in my van and went out.

This year's destination was middle Norway. Have a look at my picture-set on flickr. Some of the highlights were the climbing of Storronden in Rondane, the climbing of Galdhopiggen (the highest mountain in northern Europe) in Jotunheimen, a three day hiking trip through Jotunheimen (Leirvassbu-Olavsbu-Gjendebu-Leirvassbu), and the spotting of wild reindeer and musk oxes in Dovrefjell.

It's always a pleasure to be in the outdoors, certainly in a country like Norway which feels just like a giant National Park. This year weather wasn't really on our side with mostly rain and cold. But of course there is no such thing as bad weather, there's only bad clothing!

If that wasn't enough we also took a short week off in August to go hiking in the Saastal in Switzerland: alpine meadows, glaciers and lots of fresh air. When I was a kid my parents took me to Saas Fee and Saas Grund a few times in the summer for walking, so I figured I had to go back once to see if there would be anything to remember from my childhood.

If you ever go there, you should take the Felskinn lift in Saas Fee for sunrise. Once a week the lift goes up at about five in the morning so you can see the sun rise at 3500m on Mittel Allalin, near the Allalinhorn. Bring good clothes though, big chance you'll freeze your ass off!

Next time I'll hopefully climb Allalinhorn - didn't feel like paying for a guide this time, it's expensive!

Let autumn begin...

[Books] New Books!

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Long time since I've had anything to say which probably hasn't been said somewhere else, but look, I've ordered new books!

Flexible Web Design

Creating liquid and elastic layouts with CSS, when, why and how to.

Building Findable Websites

By Aaron Walter. Web Standards, SEO and beyond. Had this one in my Amazon Wishlist for a while but never got to order it. Found it initially on Jonathan Snook's place.

Web Standards Solutions

Second edition of the popular Markup and Style handbook by Dan Cederholm. Never read the original one but it's never too late to...

Quantum: A Guide For The Perplexed

Not really anything to do with any of the previous but sometimes a man needs to relax. A book that explains quantum physics for simple creatures like me.

Enough to keep me company on the long Norwegian nights.

[Full Post] jQuery Magnifier

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

I needed a magnifier effect for images, preferably using the jQuery javascript framework and couldn't find one that did what I wanted: having the zoom over the image and rely on 2 seperate images, falling back as a link.

So here you go, a jquery magnifier plugin v0.1.

[Full Post] Five tips for designers

Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

For about a year now I have been building websites professionally - that is when I'm not doing my halftime job in Vooruit and when I'm actually getting work in.

In eighty percent of the cases my role was slicer or developer, meaning that I was given the designs by external 'design companies' and that I converted them to html and 'injected' this in the CMS (Silverstripe).

To be honest I am quite surprised in what I have experienced this past year, I always thought these things only happened in the books I read, but not in real life.

Hence this, five simple tips for designers or design companies, whether they're beginning or have existed for ten years. If you don't follow these simple rules it is really time to shape up or get another job.

Deliver in a real format

In many cases designs are given to me in PDF. While PDF is a great format for documents or to get a first impression of a design, it doesn't really get me far in terms of slicing.

A few issues I experienced in the past year:

Color problems: when imported in Adobe Photoshop the color doesn't always seem to be the same as the designer expects.
Pixel dimensions: when imported in Adobe Photoshop I usually have to guess at what resolution the original PDF was created. Without an explaining document I cannot guess if the layout is 800, 960, 1000 or whatever size wide. Setting the PDF at 100% usually doesn't correspond with the sizes the designer had in mind either.
Images: please provide high quality images, gradients etc. We don't want to use the poor stuff from the PDF to start on.

As you can see, these are just a few problems which can cause a lot of frustration to begin with.

Preferred document format is a layered PSD, where your design is clearly positioned in a wide background, so we can see if it should be centered, right or left aligned, if the background should flow along with the page width, if some margins need to scale, ...

If you use Illustrator, then you can easily export to PSD. If you really can't provide PSD's, please provide 100% PNG's along with your PDF's and possibly a document explaining every catch there may be.

Show some link love

The internet is all about linking to each other, still in a lot of the received designs links were almost completely ignored. Sometimes there wasn't a visual difference at all, not even mentioning the complete neglection of the hover state.

To be good a designer you should provide at least two different designs for a link: the normal state and the hover state. A great designer won't forget the visited state either. Links should clearly stand out from the content so visitors notice them at a glance.

A great article about the usability of links can be found on Wolf's Little Store. (Dutch alert!)

Design with headings

A good html document uses heading tags, going from h1 to h6. In most cases you won't need h4 to h6, but this doesn't mean h1 to h3 can be ignored.

Provide designs with clear headings. Headings should look different from normal body copy. Most of the time you'll want a h2 to look bigger or at least different from a h3 as well.

Roger Johanssen wrote an article about headings and heading hierarchy with some great discussions.

Design for the largest content

In a few occassions I got designs where content was sparse and limited to fit in a certain amount of space. This works well when you're a designer and choose your own amount of words or image sizes. Problems arise as soon as the client starts filling content and it won't fit the box. Make sure you get this cleared out from the beginning. Make a design that scales or make sure that the client understands very well the allowed number of words is limited in certain areas.

Also, do not fear the scrollbar. Pages are meant to scroll, not everyone has the same screen resolution, nor does everyone surf the web with maximized windows. This does not mean we want to see scrollbars anywhere else. We do not.

Avoid splash pages

Real designers will probably wonder why the hell I'm adding this tip, but unfortunately I'm still seeing too many splash pages.

Please avoid these were possible, they're annoying and almost everybody will use the skip animation button if there is one. If it's a javascript splash page I will set a cookie anyway so a visitor will only be bothered the first time he visits the site.

Conclusion

By no means I pretend to be a perfect designer, slicer or developer, but just a few looks around and reading a few books made me understand that these are really just simple steps a designer can take to improve his or her work.

I try to open my eyes and I expect from everybody else the same.

Yes, I know these are very basic things. But apparently it is still necessary to mention them.

PS: yes I know this site currently doesn't validate even though that doesn't mean shit and yes I know it's using @import and has tons of possible improvements which I haven't come to yet.

[Twitter] Tweet End

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Just for your information, I have abandoned the integration of my Twitter-account on this website. It was fun for a while - but really clutters the whole thing.

Anyone still interested in following my momentary thoughts or neurotic mumblings can still do this by following http://twitter.com/dio5.

Cheerz.

[Twitter] Just a thought

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

@wolfr waar dan wel niet? Ik vind het enkel in de dropdown Layer > Align, geen los panel?

http://twitter.com/dio5/statuses/1148723433

[Twitter] Just a thought

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Hoeveel daklozen en vluchtelingen zou je in het Vaticaan krijgen?

http://twitter.com/dio5/statuses/1149917537