http://www.henrytapia.com Personal site of Henry Tapia - web and digital media designer Wed, 23 Apr 2008 10:48:33 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Here's some jQuery love for you front-end types. I have certainly been enjoying using jQuery a lot lately. So damn efficient and easy to use. An active community means there are lots of handy plug-in libraries out there to take care of your tabs, carousels and fadey bits... (If you're ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2008/04/22/load-only-the-jquery-plugins-you-need-when-you-need-them/ We were recently discussing some quotes from Apple man Steve Jobs around the office, where he talked about his philosophy when it comes to design: It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. BusinessWeek, May ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2008/04/16/designing-for-yourself/ Well, looks like Adobe has pulled another one out of the bag with Photoshop Express, a web-based Flash application that lets you colour adjust, retouch and add effects to your photographs without installing anything. The interface is really easy to use and it looks as though this is aimed at your ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2008/03/29/photoshop-express/ Update: Firefox 2.0.0.13 is now out and it would appear the bug has been fixed. Any web developers that spend any time using CSS would be familiar with the Firebug add-on for Firefox. (If you don't have it, get it. It is the best web development and diagnostics tool out there.) Having ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2008/03/25/firebug-problem-in-firefox-20012-workaround/ A List Apart's latest edition (#254) is all about design, and approaches the subject from two very different angles. Naz Hamid has written about perfecting your designs by paying attention to all the little details. I wasn't hugely impressed by this article. I echo some of the comments made in that ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2008/03/16/creativity/ So SXSW 2008 is on at the moment. It's hard to believe it's been a year already since I attended last years Interactive festival. How time flies and all that. So the web awards winners have been announced. The very talented mob at Preloaded took out the game category as well ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2008/03/15/web-award-winners-sxsw-2008/ I've always been a fan of clean design, and keeping things simple and to the point. I'm getting a lot of opportunities to put that into practice at Snow Valley over here in London. With this in mind I'm once again contemplating a redesign. Typical web designer behaviour no doubt, ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2008/03/11/redesign-thinkings/ This was going to be a happy 2008 post but half way through February makes it a bit late for that, and I'm not going to make it a Valentine's Day ("You'll Do" day) themed post. So anyway, what's news here then? The significant other and I are still living ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2008/02/16/recent-stuff/ Time sure has flown for me. For the most part, it's been a spectacular year... A short list of highlights (and the odd low point): Travelling through 11 countries spanning four continents (so far) Scuba diving in Thailand and Vietnam Like, pretty much all of Mexico Having my laptop stolen in Peru Still in Peru, kicking ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2007/11/21/1-year-abroad/ I've just been moving server over the past couple of days, all should be up on the new location, complete with a much more generous bandwidth limit as well as a more generous disk space and mailbox size, and hopefully slightly faster. During the name server change over, I've had to ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2007/11/20/back-on-the-air/ I've just come across SitePoint's design contests site. It is presumably intended to be a way for smaller businesses to be able to choose from a variety of creative solutions for a fixed "prize" amount. Sorry, but I'm just not a fan of this concept at all. This is not ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2007/09/30/sitepoint-builds-a-crowdsourcing-community/ We interrupt the travelogues to talk about some geeky stuff that's been going on around these parts. I've recently been using grids of thumbnails to link to Flickr photos as they relate to blog posts (e.g. my previous post). One thing I've wanted to do is find a way to show ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2007/08/28/javascript-overlay-gallery/ Having settled in here in London I must admit I miss Mexico. Quite a bit. What an awesome place to visit. Mexico was the culture shock and the push out of our comfort zone that we had been craving toward the end of our time in the States. It was ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2007/08/22/mexico-city-mexico/ Time goes by, we get a little older. We travel through 4 continents, we move to other countries and get new jobs. This blog sees another year... yes that's 3 years of half-arsed blogging. It's August again... (And I *did* get that redesign done!) http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2007/08/16/gradient-dropshadow-curve-turns-3/ Early March saw us say goodbye to my Mum at San Francisco airport and move on to Dallas and Austin, Texas. A visit to the Sixth Floor Museum and a little boozing with the very hospitable Jade and Carter lightened up the otherwise dull city of Dallas before we hit ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2007/08/14/dallas-austin-sxsw/ We spent a month staying with my Mum in the San Francisco Bay Area and travelling in and around California. We did trips to Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon and Los Angeles. We spent a bit of time in San Francisco getting a bit of a taste of one USA's ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2007/06/15/san-francisco-las-vegas/ Hong Kong was a busy and colourful city. I was surprised by how modern (and expensive) it was there. Two days is not a long time so I'll keep this post short (so the story goes...) Day 63 - 66, Hong Kong, China - a busy, modern metropolis On January 28, we ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2007/05/11/hong-kong-china/ Haven't written for a bit... having a laptop and plane tickets stolen and the ensuing bureaucratic nightmare will do that to ya... but back with the travel essays, will be trying to catch up over the next couple of weeks at every given opportunity... So, back to Vietnam: A couple of ... http://www.henrytapia.com/archives/2007/05/09/hoi-an-and-hanoi-vietnam/