Everything in the world has a hidden meaning…
Men, animals, trees, stars, they are all hieroglyphics.
When you see them you do not understand them.
You think they are really men, animals, trees, stars.
It is only years later that you understand.Nikos Kazantzakis, 1883-1957
Greek Author, Poet and Playwright
Month: August 2007 Page 1 of 2
For those of us dealing with Information Technology daily, the web is an indispensable source of information. However, apart from Gmail, many people may be unaware the availability of many Web 2.0 applications – some free, others using a subscription model – which basically will allow us to work from anywhere as long as we have access to a web browser. Well, here is a good list of Office 2.0 setup.
Of the ones listed, I regularly use
- del.icio.us for managing bookmarks
- Gmail and RoundCube webmail clients
- Google Docs and Spreadsheet
- weblogs like WordPress and Joomla
- and trying out SugarCRM
During my previous brief foray into GTD, I had in fact started reading David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” and tried out quite a few applications, both on- and off-line, to try to find a wonder tool that can help to get my life back into tip-top shape. Sadly, the book currently remains unfinished and I have also stopped using the one application – ThinkingRock – which I settled on at the end of my search.
However, for one reason or other, I decided to give it another try today. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of quality of free applications out there that have sprung up in the mean time.
During my recent sojourn into the world of designing (specifically for the web) – not so much in the graphics design department but more of the structural approaches -I happened upon some articles highlighting the benefits of an approach known as grid-based design. In a way, I suppose it is quite natural for a pen-and-paper or print layout technique to be eventually transferred to the web domain?!
However, the caveat is that grid-based designs are probably (my interpretation) more suited to conventional websites that need to follow the normal visual design standards and may not necessarily apply to artistic web sites where the goal is to be “different”. The theory is that the human eye sees a web page in a certain way, roughly from the top left to the bottom right, and the eyes can be guided to see elements in a pleasing and distinctive way when grids are used for the placement and alignment of all visual objects on the web page.
In fact, I bought the idea so much that I converted my Tango blog to one of the grid-based templates. Here are two links providing many hours of fun reading if ever you are interested in the theory and application of grid-based layout!
For the past few months, work has been pretty busy. Well, being tired and stressed is a combination that is certain to kill off any creative juices… 😉
Anyway, as a result of needing to rapidly put together a simple web portal and web application, I have had to scour the internet for inspirations. The fortuitous by-product of this process is that I have managed to find many websites which carry (and good quality) free templates (for WordPress or otherwise). To cut a long story short, after sticking with fUnique theme on this blog for the past few, dormant months, I have switched to something simple and elegant – Moo-Point. This is based on Sandbox, which according to its author, is
… a theme for themers. It has the ability to be easily skinned… More experienced designers will drool at the rich semantic markup and profusion of classes, dynamically generated by a few functions.