Free books on lewro.com from Roman Leinwather on Vimeo.

hd version is available on vimeo site

The list of available books

• Designing with Web Standards 1st Ed.
• Bulletproof AJAX
• Bulletproof Web Design
• Designing with Web Standards 2nd Ed
• Pro Javascript Techniques
• Pro CSS Techniques
• Beginning CSS
• CSS Mastery
• Blog design solutions
• Microformats
• Web Standards Creativity
• DOM Scripting
• CSS Anthology
• The Javascript Anthology
• The principles of beautifull web design
• Beginning PHP 5 & MYSQL 5
• PHP 6 & MYSQL 5

Leave a comment with your selection

The problem is following

When user has open more then 20 windows at the same time it becomes very hard to manage those TABs.

My solution

I spent couple of minutes thinking about this problem and came with my solution. My solution would be to display only the FAVICONs and bring the URI and delete button once you hover over the TAB. This way there is only one click per action and you can still see more then 40 TABs at the same time.

Competition

It turned out that joining the competition is only possible if you create image, upload it to flickr and tag it the with right tag but also you need to provide video where you describe your solution.

Screencast

This is the screencast I have made.

Note: Vimeo does not allow to embed HD video if you are not pro member so to see the HD version you need to click on the link bellow the video and watch the HD version on vimeo site.

Mozilla Firefox Competition from Roman Leinwather on Vimeo.

I could see from Google stats that most of the people click on my portfolio but it has been quite empty so far. I have picked couple of samples of my latest work so have a look if you have a second.

I have also started another round of designing of my upcoming application - Project Plus. I have made couple of designs last year and I will use this as guidelines but I am also going to use the knowledge and experiences I have collected during the last year. The new design will be wider to have a better and comfortable workspace and I have also fine tuned the gradients, buttons and other elements. There is still space to improve bits and pieces but the core of the design aspect is pretty much done. You can see the progress on this image. I have change my mind a bit about this application. I will develop the basic functionality and release a first version. The next versions will include modules like invoicing, statistics etc. The only problem is that I have decided to build it with Rails so I need to learn the language first.

Next post will be about my new idea. I will be giving one web design book a moth for free on my blog. Stay tuned.

Before I describe how the application actually works let me just step back and talk about RSS feeds first. I can from statistics for this blog that there are hundreds returning readers but there is only small group which uses my RSS Feed to get the content. I am guessing it might be because of two reasons. One - you do not know exactly what RSS feed is and how to use it. Two - you know how to use RSS feeds but you do not like to read sites in RSS reader as a plain text.

READ Plus should help you in both cases.

Lets start with the first group. IF you do not know what RSS feed and how it works let me tell you. It is very simple and could be very useful for you. Every blog has RSS feed. RSS feed is basically another way how you can get content from almost any site. Once you put RSS feed from any site to your reader (for example Google Reader) you can be informed about new articles on that site without visiting the site itself. And If you are interested in thirty sites you can put all thirty RSS feeds into your reader and your reader will tell you if there is any new article on any of those thirty sites so you do not have to go one by one to check if there is actually new article on one of those sites. Now you probably asking - but how do I get the RSS feed from sites? Trust me it is easy. Usually you can see links or icons on sites which says RSS or Feed. Orange is usually the colour people choose. But what is even more simple you can see in you browser if there is feed on a site. There is an icon in the address bar, usually at the very end of it. Clicking that icon will give you the link to RSS feed. I will tell you later how you can use this link if you decide to use READ Plus.

Now the second group. You know what RSS is and how it works but you do not like to read blogs and content from other sites on blank page with no design. It is my case as well so I am with you here. There are even blogs which tweaks or completely change design for every single post. Very good example is Jason Santa Maria. But it is still also very nice to know if there is a new article on a site or not because that saves a lot of time.

So here comes my solution for you

READ Plus is location based reader and I will come to location bit later. First of all you can use it as simple RSS reader which allows you to add all your RSS feeds of sites you are interested in. It provides graphical interface where you can quickly flip between articles and pick only the one which grabs your attention. Clicking on read more link will get you to the original site so you can read the article and enjoy the design at the same time. When you finish reading the article you can delete it from READ Plus. You should also delete articles which you are not interested to read so they do not appear there anymore.

As I said I will came back to the point how to use the RSS link which you get by clicking on RSS icon in your browser. Once you register and login you will see button “Your Feeds” in a main navigation. This is the place where all your feeds will be displayed and you will also be able to add new feeds from the same place. Just paste the url to the “Add new feed” input and hit the button. You will see soon your feed name will appear on the right site. Clicking on it will get you the latest articles from that feed. Next time you come to “Your Feeds” page you will see number in brackets after the feed name. The number displays how many articles are in this feed. That is why I was saying that you should delete the articles once you read them so when you have read all articles from you feeds and you came next time to “Your Feeds” page you will see in which feed there is a new article so you do not have to go one by to check them.

Do you have your own blog? Promote yourself.

If you have your own site which provides RSS feed you can use READ Plus to promote your site. The only thing you need to do is to put your feed into your feeds. Latest 100 articles from all users will appear on home page and your dashboard once you log in. But what more you can put your articles on map. Lets say you are from United States and your article is about outsourcing in India. You should put the article to India not to US. All articles will appear on map in your dashboard and every user will see them and be able to click on them and read them. At the moment all articles will appear on the map. Once we have more users I can display only latest articles for this month or something like that. As you can image from this simple example we could all build World News Map. If there will be lots of blogger who put their articles on the map we can could see in one place what is going on in the world. Wouldn’t that be cool?

Do not forget to put yourself on a map as well. All users who specify their location will appear on the home page map. As you can see its not just a reader it is also tool which allows you to promote your content and it will also generate traffic to your site if you put your articles on the map so others could see them and follow them.

Its beta

You may found out that in a few cases you are not able to use particular RSS Feed. It happen to me in one or two cases and I have not find out yet why is that but in 95% cases you should be able to use your favorite RSS feeds.

Questions and answers

I have also set up Get satisfaction page. You can get there clicking on Q&A link in the footer of the application.

Design

Just a few words about design. I have tried to design user interface which feels fresh and brings positive feelings. I have tried to simplify the interface so there is its fully focused on its main functions. On almost every page you have big help button which brings you a more details for that particular page. You might also find out map button which allows you to see the world map in a much bigger size.

Hope you will enjoy it. Let me know what you think.

As you might know I have taken a part in the competition Coolest Wordpress Blog. I made it to final twenty and I finished on the eleventh position. Thanks again all you guys who voted for me! The company who organized the competition offered me free web hosting. I was more than happy.

It is not only my blog which is moving to the new server. They are also some test sites I am building for my customers and most importantly my first web application called READ Plus. I have not really had much space in my previous web hosting and the connection with the database was sometimes very slow. I will be writing review on my hosting later but so far I have noticed that the connection between my new application and database is way faster and the customer support is just brilliant. They helped me to move the site and answered all my questions in no time so I had all the necessary details before moving.

Questions

Who is your web hosting provider? Are you happy with their services?

One of the projects I would like to pic is Apprentice or who will get the black cap this week. It is internal project so there is no customer behind it. The idea was to put together a simple application in hours more then days which will be mainly fun but can also show the world what we kind of work we do.

For those of you who are not familiar with Apprentice competition let me just very quickly describe what is it all about. It is basically a competition run by multimillionaire Sir Alan Sugar. The winner will get a job in one of his companies. Every week there is a business oriented task and the one which gets fired will get a black cab for his journey home. It is basically clone of the american competition run by Mr. Trump.

So now you get the idea. One person will be fired each week and you can try to guess who that person will be using Twitter with co-operation of our small application. The only thing you need to do is to Tweet the name of the person who you think will be fired together with the name of the competition which is #ukapprentice.

The one who will be right will appear at the bottom of the page. It also allows other people to see who has already been voted and to follow those people on Twitter if they wish to.

You can see bellow the design. If you like to have some fun with us visit the site and play.

I joined Sutv about year ago as a web designer junior and I will be leaving as web designer/developer. I got the opportunity to get my hands dirty with server side programming, Javascript, jQuery, XHMTL, CSS and so on. I have learned tons of information from my managers and collegues. Thank you guys for that.

I hope I was not only taking and consuming the knowledge but also producing quality work. I took three web developers and designers courses during the period I was working for Sub so that way I was trying to bring more to the table.

During the year I have worked on many web projects. I had a chance to design and participate on development of Student Book. I have also spent lots of the time in Coldfusion, CSS and jQuery code building Subtv music site. This month I have designed the Oasis Competition and I also took part in designing some of the in house web applications. The last project I was working on is new Subtv Media site which is going to replace the current flash site, you will be able to check it out pretty soon as well.

I have not only learned lots of stuff during the last year but I had lots of fun as well. Thank you guys for that.

Here are some of the images of my work in Subtv.

I am also looking forward to the new challenge. Thrusites is expanding, dynamic company with focus on corporate and social web world. They use most of the languages I am passionate about. XHTML, CSS, PHP, SQL, Javascript so I am sure it is going to be fun.

The last mentioned took this approach to the extreme and applied this theory to their whole business and web applications they produce. There are the producers of the most popular applications on the web such are Basecamp or Campfire, which I am sure most of you already know.

What you might not know that 37 signals have published very interesting book called Getting Real. The book is currently available on their site for free. What is also very interesting that the book has made profit about half million dollars before they put it online for free.

The book is amazing. It is written in the same very simple way. No talking around and straight to the point. It talks about the way the guys in 37 signals works on the day to day basis. So how do they do the business? You could say that they do exact opposite what other companies do or even better, they do not do most of the stuff other companies do and they still manage to make several millions of profits.

They manage to remove most of the time which is not actually spent producing. For example. They got rid of the company meetings or at least they shrink it to minimum. They also minimize the code as well as the features of they web applications. They only work 4 days a week and so on and so on.

I really think that this is the fresh air which was needed for so long in the modern business. It is such a difference when people are passionate about the work they do, they feel trusted and when they feel that the company actually cares about them. They become even more productive which brings the value back to the company. I am sure that guys in 37 signals are not less productive then other developers even they work only 4 days. As a matter of fact, looking at they results they are far more productive.

They look at the problems from different angles and that makes them special. Thank you guys for your inspiration! I hope this model will be used by more and more companies. It will bring more values on both sides. I highly recommend to read the book, it only takes few hours.

The back-end part was pretty straight forward. I knew from beginning what I want from this application so there were no moments where I questioned the processed during development.

I have obviously designed the application before I start building it so I knew what elements and functionality will be sitting on each page. I was quite happy with the design and when I finished the back-end stuff I have started building the css based on the design I made. I build couple of pages when I realized that I am not getting the feelings out of it which I would like to. It wasn’t the fact that I did not like the design anymore. I did. I just had a feeling that the design I have made is not right for the type of application I am building.

To give you an idea this is how the design looked.

Starting from scratch

There was no other option I had to start the design from scratch. The good thing was that I did not really have to adjust my markup a lot for the new design so it was all about designing new layouts in photoshop and building css afterwords.

After couple of ours spent in Photoshop I came with a new design for home page. It was clean and fresh. The style and colours where bringing the right type of emotions: New, fresh, young, fun.

Here is what I came up with in my second try.

When I was happy with the design of the home page I started designing all the sub-pages. I know that not every designer designs all the pages in Photoshop. In many cases designers create mockup of the home page and then during the css process trying to match the style of the home page for the other pages. I do not think that this is right. It works lot better for me to design every page ahead. It saves me a lot of time when I know what should the distances be between the elements and what icons and colour I want to use so the design looks right. If I should do all this in css phase it would be lots of save-and-refresh steps while in Photoshop I can just move whole divisions in no time and so on.

The last design changes

Even I was happy with the atmosphere and feelings of the application there were still few bits and pieces which I thought I could have done better. I kept on looking at the top colorful banner and could not stop thinking that the colours are too aggressive. So I have spent couple of hours in Photoshop again trying to come up with different ideas. I have finally came with the idea which I was very happy about. I made the top banner more friendly while still keeping the fresh colours and the atmosphere.

Here is the final version.

I guess, this is the biggest advantage of working on your own projects. I had a time to come back and adjust things after while. If it was commercial project which needs to be delivered in one or two months, there would be no way to come back and fix it.

How do you guys do it when you work on commercial projects. Do you often find yourself in situation when you would like to go back and fix stuff after the project was finished and delivered?

By the way. I am currently in the last phase of this project. Dealing with javascript, ajax. This should not take too long. I will let you know once it is done so you can try the rss reader yourself.

One of the disadvantages of our industry is the fact that when you look at your previous work you will most likely be disappointed. Why? You always learn better ways how to do things. There are always better ways. If you are studying hard you will always find ways to simplify your code, make it more readable, faster, better… New  technologies and techniques comes almost every month. You have to choose which way to go. It is almost impossible to master all web technologies but a good package can make you good professional. As long as you are on the right truck everything is fine. If you want to get there you will. I have chosen my knowledge package about three years ago and have been trying to get all the required knowledge since then. Luckily I have chosen the right combination even I was not really aware of all the options at that time. I have decided to learn these languages: css, xhtml, javascript, flash, php, mysql and also these software Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Flash, Adobe Illustrator, Coda.

I came to the last phase of first circle (as I would like to call it). I am taking Illustrator course right now which is the last thing from the list I have not really touched a lot. What is going to be next circle? Improvements in all these fields and maybe something new. There are other interesting languages out there. Such as rubby on rails or python but I have not mastered php into the level I want yet so these new interesting languages will need to wait. There are also other interesting areas to be explored such as typography and art in general.

But all these studying cost money right?

It all comes to money at the end even I have not chosen to become web designer because of money. That said I do believe that all this hard work spent studying will pay off at the end. So how much does it cost to become web designer? Well in my case a lot. I started with CIW Web designer course which costs Â?1500. After that I took two php courses for about Â?300 each and Illustrator course I am taking right now for Â?250. I bought about 25 books. Average price of the book could be about Â?15. It comes all together close to Â?2800. I have not counted laptop and software I bought because I think that would not be fair to count. You obviously need computer by you do not need MAC Pro to start with but I think you can not start without Adobe Photoshop which is not cheap at all and I do not think there is a real cheap replacement. I bought one of the Adobe packages for student prices so it did not cost me leg. You also need editor for all your code. I went for Coda but I am sure that are some free options in this area and I do not mean stilling code from internet.

As you can see it was not cheep at all but it got me a job one and half year ago so I got the money back since then. Is it worth to pay for your studying? I am sure it is.  I could have done it all with self studying but it would take me a lot longer so at the end of the day it was more profitable this way even it was quite expensive to start with.

Feelings

I have worked in several different positions in different companies in my life but only after I have done all this studying I feel I am professional and I can do my work well. Can I do it better? Of course I can and I will try every day. I found the job I love.

How much did you pay for your studying?

Where did you study? How was it? How much was it? Are you currently studying? Tell me all about it.