It’s author, Patrick Wied, used an algorithm based on a research paper from De La Salle University.

The script uses canvas, so IE is out of the equation, although with some hacking it can be used along with excanvas on IE8, but I didn’t tested on this browser. Undoubtedly the fastest results was in Chrome.

I also threw together a little demonstration using random photos from Flickr, you can test it here: http://playground.primalskill.com/nude-js/index.php (If you feel offended by nude photos, please do not open the link).

My initial results are that the script indeed gives positive results almost 60% of the time, this also depends on the quality of the image and more importantly on the color of the photo. For almost every black and white image the script returned false results.

Anyway, it’s nice to see ‘out of the box’ usage for Javascript once in a while. This proves once again that Javascript and HTML5 are powerful technologies.

If you want to experiment with the code you can download it here: https://github.com/pa7/nude.js and the research paper here (PDF): http://www.math.admu.edu.ph/~raf/pcsc05/proceedings/AI4.pdf

Basically we will review your site for free, offering constructive critique on anything you’d like, ranging from graphics, layout to usability and everything in between.

We will choose on submitted site to review every week and post it on our Blog, Facebook page and Twitter along with our review. Everyone else is welcome to join the reviewing once it’s posted.

Please send your submission to office@primalskill.com along with a screenshot and the areas you would like us to review. Be sure to include in the subject “Website review”

Looking forward to your submissions and here’s hoping together we can make the Web more beautiful.

This news is especially important for non-English speaking people, but who are using an english keyboard. Today, Google Search just became easier to use for these people (including myself).

I for ex. use an english keyboard, but sometimes I search Google using search terms on my native language. I particularly found difficult to type accent characters without changing the language in the operating system.

Another good news that anybody can enable Virtual Keyboard on their site just by using the API hosted on Google Code.

This will be my first post but hopefully first of many to come.

For this first post i decided to talk a little about a topic that is important for startups, expanding organizations and our own life here at Primal Skill and that is whether to go about managing your business alone or with the aid of a partner.

Flying solo

Partnership sounds great and it is if you can manage it…problem is partnerships are just like marriages and we all know what happens with most couples.

Fact is around 70% of small businesses are sole proprietors. Why, you ask ? Easy, because having a close partner brings a lot of responsabilities,  social and personal issues into play, although if done right this comes with the “cost” of increasing your company’s potential, clientele, workload, income etc.

Control is the most important thing in the mind of an individual when deciding to start a business, this is even more accentuated if the respectable is coming from employment. Having a partner means giving up this control or at least the sense that you are. If you are the kind of guy who has always done things alone whit out consulting anybody, who always went his own way and never listened to others, even if that proved to be a bad route sometimes, than perhaps a partner is not for you.

Advantages and……of partnerships

I admit, i am biased here because i have great belief in partnerships, i believe that having the right partner can elevate any business to levels which are most of the time unreachable for a sole proprietor.

So let’s see what we get with a partner. We get :

a partner…don’t look at me strange please.  Entrepreneurship is often a long and lonely road stacked with countless problems, decisions, setbacks and having someone to share these with and who you know is working toward the same goals as you can be a huge comfort.

The most important advantage though is the working relationship, the synergy. Having a partner that you trust and who you can work together with in harmony can lead to results that could not have been achieved by either party individually.

How to choose a partner and partnerships that work

How to choose a partner? This right here is the question that will make or break a business based on a partnership. Associating yourself with somebody who complements you and your skills and with who you have good understanding is crucial.

In my experience and view there are only two kind of partnerships that work in the long term:

1. Silent partner – this is pretty straight forward, the silent partner only provides capital for the company but does not actively participate in it’s management, this way there is no opportunity for conflicts to arise.
2. Complementary partners – meaning that the partner has different skills, procedures and qualities to it’s counterpart. This can be a very successful model to follow because it means allowing both individuals to concentrate on what they do best so they can become even more proficient in those areas. The whole is far greater then the sum of it’s parts and in this case two individuals working on different areas can produce an overall much more increased output while two people with the same skill sets will eventually step on each others toes and slow down the workflow.

Consider the following and you should have no problems working in a partnership:

• communication – you are not alone anymore, remember this, discuss every expectation, goal and decision.
• define clear business roles
• never partner just because you can’t afford to hire
• be tolerant and work out any arising issues

Following in the footsteps of giants

It is only fitting to finish this post with taking  a look at a few little partnerships that worked and learning from them :

Sergey Brin and Larry Page – Co-Founders of Google

Amnon Amir, Sefi Vigiser, Arik Vardi, Yair Goldfinger, and Yossi Vardi – Founders of Mirabillis developer of ICQ instant messenger

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak – Co-founders of Apple

Bill Gates and Paul Allen – Co-founders of Microsoft

Chad Hurley and Steve Chen – Co-founders of YouTube

And everybody else who i did not have time nor patience to find pictures of, like : Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake (Co-founders, Flickr), Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström (Co-founders, Skype), Richard and Maurice McDonald (McDonalds), Bill Hewlett and David Packard (Hewlett – Packard , HP), Sam, Jack, Albert, and Harry Warner (Warner Bros.)

Let us take inspiration in these great businessmen and women.

The first iterations were horrible. I tried many variations of forms and font styles. I had a basic idea in my mind, I wanted a futuristic, modern logo that would stand out from the crowd. So I’ve read many articles on the subject of branding, logo design and related. I learned about brand philosophy, company mission statements, short and long term plans, etc.

These were the first steps that I had to accomplish. A motto and a philosophy, and create the whole design package according to those. After this I started to visualize better what I wanted to see in the logo. I definitely wanted an abstract, but meaningful emblem with a modern font, spelling Primal Skill.

My motto was ‘Dream. Design. Code.’ (this year it was slightly changed to cover other services we offer, now it is Dream. Design. Execute.) and the emblem is based around this motto.

This is how it looked like in 2007:

I used green as the base color (back then the whole website had a base color of green), because I’ve learned color theory and the meaning of colors. Green is a calming color, a color of nature. It suggests freshness, harmony, growth and peace.

The three circles equals the three words in the motto and facing inwards suggests unification. Design and Code (now Execution) are unseparable from each other and Dream equals ideas that a customer may have. This philosophy still stands today, our clients don’t have to know design / code nor how to execute it, they just have to ‘dream’ and come with ideas. We’ll do the rest.

One more thing to note, the circles are different in size. The biggest is the Dream part, the middle is the Design and the smallest is the Code. The sizing is loosely based on the golden proportion principle. The proportions are equal, it’s just not 1.618 (the golden ratio).

The next iteration was just a facelift for the logo. I just repositioned the emblem and the font to make it more professional looking and removed the motto.

Once we hit 2010 and the site was horrible, I didn’t like the whole design nor the blog’s design. I know that many designers have the same frustrations too. So I decided once again to change the website design including the logo.

In fact the logo didn’t change much, only the base color of green was replaced with blue. Green suggested freshness, blue suggests more maturity and stability. It also symbolizes trust, confidence, intelligence and understanding. Studies show that blue is mostly a masculine color and it’s just right for us, because the majority of our customers are males.

This is the story behind the Primal Skill logo, please tell your thoughts in the comment section below.

Well, I was overwhelmed with work and other personal issues and I didn’t had time to write nor to update my company’s website until now.

Here’s what happened:

First, I’d like to welcome Daniel as a new business developer and also partner in Primal Skill Ltd. With his help we will become one of the top web agencies in Romania.

Second, it was time that our company get a new design for 2010. Go have a look at www.primalskill.com/en/ and maybe post a comment with your thoughts. The website integrates Kohana as the PHP framework and of course WordPress for the blog engine.

Third, we tried to expand our company’s exposure on the Internet and use the potential of popular social networks. You can find us on:

• LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/companies/888699/Primal+Skill?trk=pp_icon
• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/edit/?id=325138168028#!/pages/PrimalSkillcom-Web-Design-and-Development/325138168028
• Twitter: http://twitter.com/primalskill

We will post regularly on these pages, so you’re welcome to join and follow us.

Finally, I moved and deleted lot’s of (now) irrelevant articles on this blog. In the future you’ll only find design and business related articles here. Also, the server-side articles will be moved on Server-Side Magazine. If you’re a developer make sure you subscribe to that blog too.

Thank you all who subscribed and followed us in the past and will follow us in the future.

Users can logically deduct certain steps, processes when interacting with the web application.

For example when I design administration interfaces I always skip the log out message, because the scenario is the following:

• The administrator clicks on the log out button
• The application logs him out, and returns to the home page

At this point the administrator knows that the log out was successful, there’s no need to implement an extra message saying: You are logged out.

On the other hand, if the log out failed, then the application won’t redirect the user to the home page, instead keeps him on the administration page.

The typical scenario of buying a product could be:

• Identifying a product category which satisfies a typical need.
• Identifying the actual product.
• Considering the alternatives based on different factors such as price, quality, etc.
• Buying the selected product or one of it’s alternatives.

The problem relies in searching and selecting the product’s alternatives. You see, the thing is that people (consumers) hate choices, because it involves an extra process, extra brain power.

It would be much easier if there were just a handful of products for every need, or better, just one product that is perfect from every perspective, but unfortunately no such product exists.

How a marketer should handle this situation, when he/she knows exactly the competitors. In my opinion the most effective strategy is a straight to the face marketing, not targeting the whole segment, just a little part of it, just a niche.

And the message should be clear, The X product satisfies Y need.

1. The ones who make products available to the masses, they make it fast, they cut down costs as much as they can. The creators-of-websites-from-a-template type of companies. Now, I believe that these companies are doomed from the beginning.

2. Most of the companies making a difference are found in this category. The companies who create quality products and services. They put quality before quantity or even price. This could be a win – win situation for everyone.

3. Finally, I realized that there’s a third category that just began to be adopted by companies. Companies who offer 100% authentic, fully customizable, personalized services and products. These companies not just put quality before everything else, but also satisfy each individual client differently. They create products that best suits the needs of a particular person / company, not just a particular niche or group. I think that eventually every company will adopt this philosophy, this will be the future.

If you want success for your company, you have to look at other, successful companies and learn from them, although this is not a guarantee to your own success.

First, original work start from the core of the company who’s making it. Above all, a company cannot create original products if the company itself is not original, the developers working in the company are not original, not honest, not believing in the philosophy of the company and do not want to achieve the same goal, which is offering authentic, quality products.

Second, the company must reflect the same philosophy, the same message to their clients and those people need to realize that the company is what it says it is.

“The past limits the future”. I read this quote somewhere and realized just how true it is. The past limits what you can do in the future, because if you done shit works then don’t expect future prospects to believe that you will deliver a quality product or service for them.

The value of ‘richness’ is perceived by people differently. One interesting study, that has nothing to do with money could answer the question: Why do rich people want even more money. This study was conducted by Abraham Maslow, he wrote a paper on human motivation in which he defined the hierarchy of needs, also called Maslow’s Hiererchy of Needs.

He conceptualized a hierarchy illustrated on the image below.

There are 5 levels of needs. Every people start from the bottom, working their way up to the top of the pyramid, but this doesn’t mean that if someone achieved a certain level he can’t slip down on this pyramid.

Usually in modern societies, unfortunately, homeless people are at the bottom of this hierarchy. The first level aggregates the most basic human needs such as to sleep, to eat or to breathe.

The second level adds protection and security to the first level. People on this level usually have some sort of shelter, stability and they can call their environment safe. The 3rd and 4th levels adds love, affection, work relationship, etc.

The interesting part is on the 5th level which is personal fulfiment, meaning that a person achieved he’s best in life, he satisfied all of his psychological needs.

This hierarchy maybe work in theory, but not in practice, because there is no such thing called perfect. In reality every need, such as financial status, could be improved on some level.

In theory this hierarchy could work, a person can reach to the top of the pyramid, but in practice we can’t reach the 5th level, because there is a paradox in this hierarchy. Our perception of value, of needs, etc. changes when we are on a certain level.

This could be a logical answer to the question. People will always want more no matter what it is. What matters is the perception of how we look at things and our needs. If a person has $10.000 in his bank account, the need for another $1000 is just as strong that of a person who has $1.000.000 and wants $100.000.

• Write the code
• Debug the code
• Modify the code

If the developer doesn’t think and set a solid design beforehand then the debugging process would take 90% of the total development time followed by frustration and boredom.

To make the development exciting, think of a good code design beforehand, what type of 3rd party code you will be using, client-side and server-side frameworks, what is the most optimal code to use in the current situation, how you will handle eventual problems that may arise, etc.

Coding without a solid design is like driving a car without an engine.

The website was started about a month ago. At this time me and another guy writing the articles, but we wanted to open this site for everyone who wishes to get a little coverage for his website/blog by writing cool, but strictly server side programming language related articles.

The site got and still getting pretty good visits every day, Google and other major search engines indexed the pages already, but the main problem was that we were steadily lacking articles to put up on the site, so we thought we give a little incentive for the community who visits the site and read the articles.

So we organized a contest, we wanted to gave out $200 Amazon Gift Card for the user who submits an article and gets good comments, diggs, bookmarks, etc. all in all brings traffic to the website. More on the rules you can found here.

We thought this would bring at least 10 articles, because we got plenty of visits for that post, but we didn’t got a single article just a lot of prospects who were interested in writing.

After the failure of the contest I started to think what could possibly went wrong? The price was to small? Or, because we wanted to give a gift card and not cash?

The real problem was that when we started the contest, the website was just 3 weeks old. It is a very early stage to organize such events. Everybody was interested to write an article, but the website didn’t had the authority yet. People thought “Why should I write an article for an unknown site just to get $200? Maybe I won’t even receive it, I don’t trust in this site yet…

In my opinion, this is perfectly fine. Lessons learned, I hope with steady and quality content the website will gain authority in it’s niche and hopefully it will be an information hub. And maybe when this happens then we start a new contest, because I myself believe that in order to get something you have to give back too.

Apple simply used these technologies and created a beautiful product, targeted for a specific consumer market.

Being the first has many advantages, as I wrote above, you get the opportunity to set the rules and if you do a good job, you will be one step ahead of your competition.

Doing something entirely new could easily drift you to unknown territory, where even the best marketer can’t be entirely sure what to do and how to handle problems. Planning ahead is a good thing, setting simple goals and philosophies about a service or product is also great. For example, Apple set that the iPod will be a quality product no matter what, the first generation iPod price was $500, which is a heavy price for an MP3 player, but even so the sales went to the roof, because the network effect kicked in around one simple rule which was quality.

Later, I was reading different news posts on iPod fakes, and how everybody wanted to copy the design of the iPod. Sure the design played an important role in the iPod sales, but it wasn’t the most important feature. Original iPod 1, fakes 0.

Another lesson we can learn from the iPod is to treat every customer as an individual and not as a group. A good example to this is the white iPod earphones.

My advice is to think 2 days on creating something original, than trying to copy a good idea in 1 day. The original idea always wins.

Managing time is a complex task, but let me show you how to actually finish your set tasks in a reasonably small time frame.

It’s all about optimization and refactoring, you as a web developer should know best how to optimize and refactor source code, why not do it with your time too?

This is how I do it. I list all the tasks that I want to get it done right now. I just list a bunch of items that I consider I can finish in a day or two, but most importantly I collaborate with other developers and/or clients to know exactly what the work is all about.

I set myself a ridiculously small time frame when I will work on a single task and NOTHING else such as talking on the phone, skype, chatting, googling around, watching Youtube, etc.

I just simply cut out all the distractions. I found that you can do a lot and I mean a lot of things when you don’t get distracted.

I must emphasize that if you want to do things this way, you need to have a solid plan beforehand (a task list, etc).

Merlin Mann at 43 Folders has a really good post on how to minimize distractions when you work. What software you should use, etc. Worth reading that post too.

What’s interesting is that when you add text to a textarea using innerHTML the code actually works, under Firebug I can see the text added between the <textarea></textarea> tags, but it won’t refresh it on the actual page.

Strangely it works if you’re using the value attribute of the textarea, but that’s just wrong. What is even more interesting that this approach works the same in IE 6 and IE 7.

In IE7 the innerHTML method works correctly.

I couldn’t find any documentation or post on this issue… is it that maybe that I’m missing something?