Photoshop “Glass Text” Tutorial

by Khaled on December 25th, 2006

As I have announced it before, I am going to be posting Photoshop tutorials on this blog. Some tutorials are old others are new and will be posted for the first time. So stay tuned!
Today I am going to start off with quite a simple tutorial that will show you how to achieve a glassy text effect .

This tutorial was made using Photoshop CS2 but can be achieved using older Photoshop versions. You can now add a cool effect to your text easily. Of course, and as usual, your feedback is more than welcome.

First of all I’ve created a new blank document That is 400×150, Then I have selected the text tool, I’ve set the font to “Gill Sans Ultra Bold”, the size to 60pt and the color to #d41385 (yeah that’s pink!!). Then I’ve typed in my text. Read on More

The Switchy McLayout

by Khaled on December 21st, 2006

The Switchy McLayout is an adaptive layout technique that allows the designer to define a layout for wide display, one for medium-sized screens and one for hand held devices and PDAs.
And no this not like liquid design because when you design a liquid template that is optimized for a maximum width of 800 or 1024 px you will have a broken layout with gaps if the site is viewed on wider screens, moreover on the small screened hand held devices and PDAs the text and the graphics will be compressed together, so that’s quite a major issue in my opinion! The switchy Mclayout could be a nice solution to solve such issues it behaves as if your layout were a ‘vector’ graphic that scales up and down without loosing quality. Of course it is not as perfect as that but it is a nice and a very useful technique. As I said it defines a layout for each kind of screens.
After defining a range of layouts, the technique consists on detecting the user’s screen width in order to use the appropriate style for that size thanks to a style-switching technique that depends on the class of the body element. This is done thanks to a some nice unobtrusive JavaScript code…

All in all you will see that with the switchy McLayout technique helps designers take as much advantage as possible of the available screen space. This is really useful due to the unceasingly increasing number of the screen sizes for the devices used to browse the net. This technique can help you with such a big challenge.
Still Hungry for further details? find more here!

BreedSoftware: Beta launch

by Khaled on December 19th, 2006

Today we’re launching our new project called BreedSoftware. The company specializes in developing software and games for the Microsoft Windows platform (not only the desktop Windows platform but also the Windows Mobile platform for Pocket PCs). Currently, BreedSoftware markets various products ranging from website development utilities to intellectual games. BreedSoftware is committed to provide high-performance, and cost effective software products such as text editors, PHP editors as well as high-quality games for our customers.
Visit the website.

My FireFox Add-ons

by Khaled on December 7th, 2006

I was asked so many times about the add-ons fro Mozilla FireFox I am using. I’ve always given different variable answers due to the fact I was actually shifting from an add-on to another or dropping some they no longer work on the newer Firefox versions (like screengrab for instance). For now I think I have a nice collection of add-ons to use with my Firefox 2.0 installation. So here’s the full list:

I will update the list once I have some changes in it. See the pic on flickr! Enjoy these great FireFox plug-ins.

Pink’d!

by Khaled on December 6th, 2006

Well I’ve tweaked the look of the blog’s theme. It is obvious, I’ve added a touch of pink. Pink seems to be a color that’s widely used in the modern Web 2.0ish sites and web applications. So why not a touch of pink in ‘No relation’? Moreover Pink looks nice, trendy and slick with lime green… So I took the plunge and tweaked my CSS and my graphics.

Something else that’s new on ‘No relation’ is that I’ve added a “current project” box to the sidebar, this is powered by the lightbox JS V2. Nifty! Also this we’ll let see what I am working on right now, and for the moment it is BreedSoftware Project. BreedSoftware will hopefully be launched within few days.

I’ve also added a Flickr powered Photo gallery to the blog in which you will find some personal pics, some Photo Manipulations with Photoshop (old Dark Art for the 2003 and 2004 year) and some old Projects that I had the permission to post publicly unlike most of the others.

So that’s all! I hope you like the changes…

Oh! I look like some celebrities!

by Khaled on December 5th, 2006

Believe it or not I do look like some of most famous persons on earth! it seems that we have some common heritage! It seems like I am a mix of Che Guevara, Megan Ewing, Laureen Hill and Adriana Karembeu… You don’t believe me? you are a click away from the truth just click for

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Photoshop Tutorials Series

by Khaled on December 5th, 2006

Upon some demand from some friends and users I will start posting some of my old Adobe Photoshop tutorials here on this blog. I will also post new Photoshop tutorials soon. The Old tutorials were already published on Kyscorp, good-tutorials.com and SitePoint forums and many other Photoshop tutorials sites. I am gathering them again here. Most of them are for beginners. Stay tuned guys!