Vitamin: Subversion for Designers

What’s Nice
The new Ferrari GT is not yet ready to be released, but the kind folks at Ferrari created a site to get folks charged up. Before you can see the car you can hear the sounds of the GT in various phases of driving. The only annoying part of the site is the numbering of the main menus. It reminds me of the tedious flash sites of the late 90s that did not bother with real navigation and either put up squares or other shapes you had to click on or numbers.

What’s Nice
Search multiple sources from technorati to Google news to flickr and Youtube. Inhale the web in one shot for a subject. I searched for Giro D’Italia since the great Italian bike race is starting this week and got a great range of results from places to see live video to very comprehensive sites.

What’s Nice
Jamie Oliver gives a fresh grown at home feel to his new website. The large background pic with the paper background match the rich grungy look of his TV show on the Food Network. I’m getting hungry just looking at the site.

We All Hate Quickbooks is a promo for a web app called Less Accounting. They basically read from twitter anything that contains Quickbooks and post it to their site. Brilliant since it seems that lots of folks have ill will to that piece of software. Or perhaps that since it is so popular it is pretty easy to find a frustrated user group willing to vent on Twitter. Either way it is a great marketing move to call attention to their web application.

The 3-d Flames on resize are a great touch. This effect is called Parallax where transparent png images are placed over each other and offset to give a three-dimensional effect. The cartoon character devil and possibly an angel. The flames are reminiscent of the Silverback vines.

What’s Nice
The founding developer of Wordpress Matthew Mullenweg just redesigned his site for spring. The grungy florally design. Amazingly this is the first time he eats his own dog food…or pick your own favortite saying relating to using your own product.

This is the first iteration of this site that is powered entirely by WordPress. (I know, 5 years late. The cobbler’s children go shoeless!) Before it was a cobbled together set of PHP includes and software like Gallery. Now 100% WP.

What’s Nice
The action figure motif is hard to not love. The rest of this one pager is clean with the combo of a grungy wood background and transparent sections. I like the FAQ section which helps explain the design:

If this is a ‘wood’ style website, where is the piece of paper with coffee cup stains on it ?
I tried to go minimalist with this re-design and avoid clique ornamentation like notepads and wrinkled paper with coffee stains.

What’s Nice
The portfolio site of Bryan Katzel at first is not too different. What you notice is a long page, when you click on a link or scroll down the magic happens. The bleeding rainbow effect stays consistent ly on the background while going through several masking layers in front. Truly great work with transparency and the slide effect this time with Scriptaculous.

The author notes this too.

Author’s note: Please keep in mind that most of these don’t have real AJAX going on (mootables maybe, but there’s no server-side communication, just DOM manipulation), but simply effects that are associated with AJAX techniques. When I say AJAX effects, I refer to unobtrusive (in most cases) JavaScript that utilizes the DOM to add richness to a web page; effects that can be associated with the general look-and-feel of AJAX-rich applications. Thanks for the feedback, I failed to note this in my final copy!

The best features are the XXXBOX effects such as GreyBox/ ShadowBox, Lightbox, ThickBox, etc. They remove the need for pop-ups and provide modal functionality which is very useful when developing a web app.

Six Revisions: 10 AJAX Effects to Boost Your Website’s Fanciness Factor

Let me be perfectly clear on this matter: more is more. More usable desktop space reduces the amount of time you spend on window management excise. Instead of incessantly dragging, sizing, minimizing and maximizing windows, you can do actual productive work. With a larger desktop, you can spend less time mindlessly arranging information, and more time interacting with and acting on that information. How much that matters to you will depend on your job and working style. Personally, I’d be ecstatic if I never had to size, position, or arrange another damn window for the rest of my life.

I have to agree. At work I use two monitors and it helps me do things so much faster than with one. I can program in Aptana or Ecplise on the left and have the site on the right. Or Flash and Aptana or and other combo. This is much easier than with one monitor where you have to alt-tab through app windows or resize them side-by-side.

Coding Horror: Does More Than One Monitor Improve Productivity?