Tim Davies sans vowels

alanvanroemburg: What a bunch of clowns at Samsung, who do you...

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 05:11:28 -0400

What a bunch of clowns at Samsung, who do you think you’re fooling? Clearly you have done a marvelous job copying Apple iPhone / iPad UI.

UX/UI: Heuristic Evaluation on Deadball Specialist HD

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 07:44:16 -0400

UX/UI: Heuristic Evaluation on Deadball Specialist HD:

thomasdavies:

Recently I conducted a very short heuristic evaluation on Full Fat Games‘ Deadball Specialist HD (iTunes Link) for iPad.

View the results document on Scribd.

View the methodology and results document on Scribd.

Sneak: Fixing the background 'bleed'

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 09:45:56 -0400

Sneak: Fixing the background 'bleed':

I recently came up against an issue in Safari where the background colour of an element seemed to ‘bleed’ through the edge of the corners when applying both borders and a border-radius (see the image above). After seeing David Cole tweet about the same issue I resolved to find a solution,…

"CSS3" and its place in today's world

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 19:08:00 -0400

I’m sure by now we are all very much aware of “CSS3” and what it means. However it seems the definition of its place in todays world has become a muddy puddle.

I myself use certain CSS3 additions in my work to help further an elements visual appearance or behaviour, this being of course a common use for style sheets in general. But it seems many people, mainly those who don’t work in a professional web design environment are, in my opinion, relying on CSS3 far too heavily to the point accessibility is being compromised for the sake of pretty animations in one specific browser. I believe it was Tim Van Damme who also came to the conclusion that to use CSS transitions you must still provide an identical page for other users minus the gimmicks. His example was perfect. Say you have a count down timer similar in style to a traditional tran station ticker board. If you want to try using CSS transitions to animate this ticker count down timer thing then by all means do, however you should take into account the fact that not all users will be able to see these animations and if they can’t will this count down still be accessible even if static?

I know there are many advocates for these “If my site doesn’t work then you should use my choice of browser” ideals. I myself find these sorts of messages insult peoples intelligence and freedom to use the internet as they choose.

You may now be thinking “I’m the designer, it’s my site I’ll make it how I want tough shit”. If so I shall leave you with this. If I were that dream big shot client. And I happen to open your folio in firefox and it doesn’t work? You’re not off to a good start. If you are a “designer” and do feels that way, then you need to look up the definition of what it is to “design”. Good design retains accessibility to all with or without sacrifice of “animated widgetry”.

By all means go crazy with the flipping and the flopping, the sliding and poping of your DOM elements but do spare a thought for those less fortunate than yourself and make sure the bloody thing works.

Flic.kr Short URL Safari Extension

Sat, 07 Aug 2010 09:26:00 -0400

Many of you will know, a while back I wrote a small webpage that shortened flickr.com urls. [http://tmdvs.me/flic.kr/]

I’ve finally had the chance to turn this into a Safari 5 native extension! Simply visit a photo on flickr and hit the tool bar button! It couldn’t be any simpler! The button will only be active if you’re viewing a photo on flickr.com.

This extension is currently only a beta release and there is no version updating currently built into it. I will add this on the next update. You can follow this blog or follow me on twitter to be notified as to when I release it. UPDATES NOW WORK UPDATE TO VERSION IN THIS POST

You can download the extension here. Or watch a video of it in action!

Tim.

I created my first Safari 5 Extension. It creates short URLS...

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 17:14:25 -0400

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

I created my first Safari 5 Extension. It creates short URLS with the tmdvs.me domain using AJAX calls.

Ads begone!

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 14:13:01 -0400

A quick note to say I have pulled ads from the site. A larger company joined the ad network I was with and now profits are less than $4 a month.

When an ad company starts up sporting the values of design and development themed ads hosted on design and development themed sites it would be silly not to expect them to sell out at some point. It just all went down hill rather quickly.

Sh*t My Dad Says, a humble book review...

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 17:14:00 -0400

At first glance Im sure many people will assume this book is just a collection of all the tweets the author originally tweeted. I wont be the first to admit I assumed the exact same thing.

However. This book is much more than a few funny one liners from an a sharp witty old man. No. This book also contains the story of growing up in an average home, except you’re living with a high class comedian for a father, a comedian who doesn’t even know it yet.

This book is full of family stories, truly hilarious and emotionally deep anecdotes that make it fantastic read. Every time the author recalls an upsetting memory he instantly brings a smile to your face, with the quick wit of his hilarious father.

I read this book in less than a few days. Not because its length, theres plenty here to read. It was more the fact I couldn’t put the damned thing down.

A fantastic insight into our own family lives through the somewhat more dramatic and caricature like life of another.

Web Development Environments

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 11:57:00 -0400

I recently scoured the internet in the search of the “perfect framework for me”. I work in web design and development so spend a lot of my time either designing or building web applications and decided it was time to look into the different ways I could approach doing so.

I started by researching what big web apps where written in, and the results where as I expected. The big three where; Rails (a web environment written in Ruby), Django (a python web environment) and the most obvious PHP. Although I know PHP thoroughly I decided to take a chance and see if I could learn the other two. The results where. Well, unfortunate.

I began with Rails. I’d looked into Ruby before, and quite liked the idea of Rails so dove right in. At first I was quite amused with being able to have Rails scaffold my controllers, In English that means produce a basic Model, View and Controller from a database table etc. Scaffolding was great for the first 5 minutes, and then you begin to realise that, sure Rails is being clever and trying to guess what I want but 90% of the time it’s guessing wrong. Rails had become to frustrating to spend any more time on. On with the show!

Next on the agenda was Django. I had heard good things about Django especially its built in web app admin controller. Then once again you realise its a lot of generating scripts. Another major let down was the lack of hosting support for DJango. I spent all of 10 minutes with Django, and unfortunately it was 10 minutes wasted. I should have spent more time looking into Django however as we already know I was on a mission to find myself a web development environment! Time was of the essence.

After another 5 minute flurry with Rails I went sulking back to PHP. PHP is a great language to be writing web apps in, after all its what it was made for. But PHP on its own lacks the MVC architectures and module based power that came with Rails and Django. What I needed was PHP with a framework!

Working in web development means when sitting in the office at work I get to over hear the names of all sorts of frameworks and libraries being thrown around the office between the developers. The name that came straight to mind was Kohana.

Kohana is the base framework being a lot of the magic done in our office. I went ahead and checked out a copy from their Git repository and stuck it on my server. There it was already configured. The language heavily documented. A framework for someone like me. A framework that didn’t do things for you but allowed you to do anything with its powerful ORM and great auth, database and core modules. It even has an HMVC architecture. Kohana is the high class whore of the web environment world. Letting you do whatever you wish with it without complaint or disconcerting error throwing. Within ten minutes I had built a blog app with admin controls. I felt empowered without the feeling of being babied that Rails gave me.

In short this post is more about my oppinions and lack of effort spent learning new things. However I’m sure there are many more web developers digging around for a great applications environment and if you ask me, I’d suggest Kohana PHP.

The development of Twiba

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 11:47:08 -0400

For those who don’t know Twiba (pronounced Twee ber) is an iPhone twitter client with a sexy UI and extra goodness from software magicians YummyCocoa LTD. I recently decided we’d hold off on release and focus heavily on developing the application to be compatible with the new iPhone 4, and iOS 4.

What I’d really like is user input. It seems many iPhone apps on the market seem to lack several features, and many users continue to keep switching from one to the other. After all twitter is a user experience and I’d like Twiba to be your app of choice. How do I plan to achieve that? By asking for your user input! Simply comment below, email me or speak to me on AIM and give me some features you REALLY want in a twitter client on the iPhone! Literally any idea is welcome! (however we shan’t be altering the UI sorry!)

I also plan on releasing an Alpha of twiba in the coming weeks without UI implemented so I can squish any current bugs! Again if you’d like in comment bellow or email me!

Thats is for this state of the union address. I’ve been Tim Davies and thank you for reading!

How the iPad changed my reading habits

Sat, 19 Jun 2010 11:40:00 -0400

A few weeks ago I purchased an iPad along with many other thousands of people. It’s everything i expected and more. Its always in my hands. What I didn’t expect the iPad to do was change my reading habits.

I was never a big reader. Parents would buy me books when I was younger. I would then just watch the films and pretend I had read these books. When I studied English literature I obviously had to read books, but I didn’t enjoy reading them. Now when i bought my iPad one of the first things I did was check out what this iBooks was all about. Ever since doing so I’ve not stopped reading. I no longer have the hastle of having to carry a book around with me. I don’t have to find a book mark to remember my page or worry about breaking my books spine. I never have to spend hours reading books in a hot crowded book store. iBooks does it all for me.

I’m now forever reading and actually enjoying myself. More people are enjoying books. Yet another success story for Apple’s iPad.

Objective-C apps running in Safari. Who needs flash on...

Sun, 23 May 2010 17:08:00 -0400

Objective-C apps running in Safari. Who needs flash on iPhone?

Developer Steven Troughton-Smith has managed to run his well known iPhone game LightsOff as a Mobile Safari Plugin. This demonstrates the ability to run objective-c (native) iPhone applications in browser. He did this with a plugin he wrote for iPad’s Safari.app.

For more information head over to read the post on Steven’s blog

Digest, a new way to microblog In recent years services like...

Fri, 14 May 2010 12:44:00 -0400

Digest, a new way to microblog

In recent years services like tumblr have become extremely popular due to their ease of use and management, something I take for granted with my busy schedules. However. As a designer Tumblr is seen as either a technical challenge or rather limiting. Enter Digest.

Digest is a new platform I’m working on in my spare time. It takes the micro blogging greatness of tumblr, adds a dollop of a wordpress-like theme engine and a sprinkle of optimisation to create a micro blogging service on aesthetic enhancing roids!

I will be publishing more information and teasers here over the next few weeks. Digest will be self hosted by its users and 100% free.

Volkswagen Vintage car cruise through Suffolk on the 9th of...

Sun, 09 May 2010 17:31:00 -0400

Volkswagen Vintage car cruise through Suffolk on the 9th of May 2010

GitKey: a small OS X Utility

Fri, 30 Apr 2010 17:28:00 -0400

After we had a discussion about the possibilities of slowly transitioning to Git for revision control at work, it became apparent that due to people having different grasps on Terminal/UNIX commands that setting up SSH key sets for use with remote repositories in git could be quite tedious and frustrating for the less experienced user. To solve this I wrote a small utility to aid those users and make the process of generating SSH keys a one step process. I named this app GitKey

Over the next few days I hope to tidy the utility up and release it to help other users who struggle with the tedious generation of SSH/RSA keys.

Creating Custom iPhone User Interfaces

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:33:00 -0400

I recently decided to create and iphone user interface in photoshop that demonstrated a different approach to iPhone UI. I then decided to prove the concept by putting it together in XCODE.

I have now published the project on gitHub for other developers to learn from and see how I put this UI together in IB and in objc.

The Project Repository on GitHub

This is the UI concept I produced all coded up and running under...

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 16:40:09 -0400

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

This is the UI concept I produced all coded up and running under iPhone OS 4.0. That really is a UINavigationBar. All the UI elements are extensions of the official APIs no cut corners here folks!

"Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow..."

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 09:24:29 -0400

“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know, none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaking suspicion… love actually is all around.”

- Love Actually (Hugh Grant)

Apple, wake up and smell the cocoa…

Wed, 14 Apr 2010 09:11:00 -0400

It would seem Apple has lost its grasp on the world of Consumer Electronics. This is a market place where electronics manufacturers compete to provide the consumer with the best possible device for the task at hand. Apple used to do this with great result. Just look at the iPod for example. With the iPod Apple rocked the portable music player market. Why? Because with each new iteration of the device it shipped world wide and lived up to its hype.

Today Apple failed it’s international market claiming it would delay international shipping of it’s iPad device due to high US demand. Bollocks. If Apple truly had Consumers in mind they would follow in the foot steps of previous giants such as Sony and bottle neck US supplies and push out limited stocks to international customers.

Announcing delays via a small press release on the the PR site of Apple.com is also a major let down by the Silicon Valley giant. If they did care for internationals would it not be more responsible to make the announcement in a main RSS feed or on the front page of Apple.com?

With another six weeks wait ahead of us UK customers will this “magical” device have been worth the ridiculous wait and foul treatment?

Twitter for iPhone

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 05:03:00 -0400

Twitter for iPhone:

Twitter buys Tweetie.