I’m Here
by Khaled on August 22nd, 2007
Hey guys! This is just to let you know I’m still here… I’ve just came back from summer vacations in Sicily! and that I’m really busy doing a lot of stuff here and there… I hope I’ll start blogging here some time soon… Stay tuned and BTW thanks for everyone who contacted me to ask about my absence…I really appreciated that…
Promotion to Design Team Advisor at SitePoint
by Khaled on March 24th, 2007
After being a Design team Mentor at SitePoint for the last 9 months I was promoted yesterday to the position of Design Team Advisor.
And of course I have a new shiny badge:
The anouncement thread can be read here.
This is a huge honor for me to be an Advisor in the biggest Web designers and developers community on the net! if you don’t know about SitePoint yet then you’re missing a huge thing! SitePoint has more than 166,790 members from all over the world! If you want to know more about SitePoint then look here.
Principles of Beautiful Web Design
by Khaled on March 9th, 2007
Yes! yet another contest by SitePoint, after the Photo manipulation one, here’s a CSS contest. I will be a judge in this one too!
Josh Catone (the Community team leader @ SPF) posted :
The Challenge:
Announcing the SitePoint “Principles of Beautiful Web Design” CSS Competition. If you would like to win a copy of SitePoint’s acclaimed new book “The Principles of Beautiful Web design” then all you have to do is to take this html and turn it into a beautiful web page that is an advert for the book.
You are not allowed to change the html and can only use css and background images to create your masterpiece. Unlike the “Zen Garden” examples the html has very few extra “hooks” in the code and you will need to be very creative to turn this into a viable web page.
Advanced css’ers will therefore be able to use advanced selectors to create styling opportunities while those of medium skill levels can concentrate on the graphic side of things.
You must also use the SitePoint logo and the book cover image which can be downloaded from those links and the html for the images is already in place.
General Rules:
- The html must remain untouched.
- All html content must be used and not replaced with image replacement techniques.
- Background images can of course be attached to any available element.
- Valid CSS at whatever level you wish so advanced selectors can be used to good effect in browsers that support them.
- Browsers to support are: IE6, IE7, Firefox 1.5+, Opera 9+. The design must display well in all the browsers listed with ie6 as the minimum requirement. However you may get more points if you can utilise advanced css to make the display even better in Ie7 firefox and opera.
- No CSS hacks to be used.
- No Javascript or any other kind of scripting.
The competition will be judged by:
Sarah
Josh
Jelena
Sara
Paul
DT
Dave
(and possibly other SitePoint Forums staff members)Entries will be judged on technical merit, creativity, aesthetics, and compliance with the rules.
All entries must be received by 1 month from today: 6th April, 2007 at 11:59 (23:59) GMT. The winner notified shortly thereafter.
You are allowed to enter as many entries as you like but the judges decision will be final and will be based on not only the look of the page but also how clever and effective the use of css has been. (Also, you can only win once.)
You can download the html and images from Paul’s basic example but we are expecting much better from you. Remember the CSS is to be completely supplied by you but we have left Paul’s demo there so you can get some ideas on how the page can be manipulated.
When you have completed your design you can post in the competition entry thread and add a link to the layout or attach a screenshot and zip file which we can upload for viewing.
If you have any questions then post below in this thread as the entry thread will be just for entries only.
Good Luck!
So join SitePoint right now and have a chance to win this competition held by the biggest Web designers and developers community on the entire web!!
No future for AJAX?
by Khaled on March 9th, 2007
Many predictions here and there all over the web are stating that we’re going towards a web that will be mostly based on RIAs. So of course the platforms technology for these RIAs is very important! Now we are talking a lot about AJAX… But I guess you all know it is not that easy to make it cross-platform… You will most probably develop it on one platform then go through a tweaking nightmare to make it behave the same way on all the platforms you’re targeting and all the browsers etc…Looking at what has always happened on the net I believe that the pressure on the major companies to improve their services and productivity will probably lead them to replace AJAX techniques to build richer Internet Applications faster and with nicer, better and easier development process than what is available now with the XMLHttpRequest stuff…
Flash/Flex would be a nice alternative, this makes sense in my opinion especially if you’ve heard about the new online version for Photoshop,seeing how this will look/behave will certainly give us a nice example to follow… as it always takes one big company to develop a valuable technique to make others adopt it (Youtube you say?). The only problem with flash/flex, In my opinion, in comparison with AJAX is that Flash/flex is designed, controlled and sourced by one single company… But then Java is widely used in programming despite the fact that it is proprietary and controlled by a single party…
On the other hand we have the open source OpenLaszlo platform that is written in XML and JavaScript and then compiled to Flash and DHTML, so it is a kind of advanced AJAX application platform and it looks promising as it offers a lot of possibilities…
The replacement for AJAX should be more responsive and more interactive, with a bigger penetration and ubiquity, with a better and nicer development experiences and processes, offers a java-like cross-platform development and with reasonable cost…
I am thinking this is happening quite soon!and as I’ve said before the release of the photoshop online version by Adobe (which was my starting point for all these thoughts) will give us a better idea about the future of RIAs…
May be you’re thinking it is too soon to discuss this… but who knows…
Photoshop “Reflection” tutorial
by Khaled on January 17th, 2007
So this is the second simple Photoshop tutorial I am posting in the new Photoshop tutorials series. As I’ve stated before, this is to show to achieve the reflection effect that was created at the end of the Photoshop “Glass Text” Tutorial. And yes! many of you were requesting it.
This tutorial was done using Adobe Photoshop CS2 but, of course, it can be achieved using older Photoshop versions. So we are going to start where we ended in the previous Photoshop “Glass Text” Tutorial. You are curious aren’t you ? Dig for it to find out
Can I always use a 100% AJAX Solution?
by Khaled on January 12th, 2007
Lately I have been discussing this matter with different people on some forums or in real life. The discussion was about whether it is wise to totally rely on AJAX to design a web site or a web application without introducing any alternative way of usage. Some guys were claiming that it is safe to do so as most of the internet users now have Javascript-capable browsers. I believe that the best practice for the moment is to build your accessible application then add AJAX to make it better.
In my Opinion it is totally wrong to consider that JavaScript is always available, as this not the case at all for the moment at least.
Some visitors are not using Javascript-capable browsers (yes, they might be a minority, but remember your site should be accessible to potentially everyone), sometimes they are behind a script blocking firewall so even if their browsers are JavaScript capable the script won’t work for them!
I’ve read some nice articles by Ian Lloyd on this matter and I believe they are really interesting:
- Using a sledgehammer to crack a nut: Ma.gnolia’s case.
- Blogger: Can I get in please?
- Bloglines is broken! (at least for me)
Those are articles exhibiting some accessibility errors made by some very known “guys” just because they are totally relying on JavaScript!
and they forgot that for some reason or another their Javascripts are not executed…
Roger Johansson sums up the whole issue in a very nice way!
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
