lewro’s blog - 2.1 - web designer beginner

As usually there is a lot going on in the lewro’s life. Last Saturday I spent on the MAC Expo London 2007. You can see couple of images on my flickr site. So, how was it? It was really cool. The most interesting was presentation of the new MAC OS - Leopard. I have seen most of the new features presented on the apple site but they showed us couple of new once as well. Specially very interesting was how you can create widgets directly from the Safari browser window. For example departures of Tube on the selected station. Creating widgets with zero programing knowledge, that it really cool.

There have been couple of other companies doing presentation among them Microsoft with the latest Office for MAC and Quarks, Crumple and others. I have also spent some times on the presentation of digital photography by Nikon. The reset of the time I spent wondering around with a coffee in my hand, ten minutes here and ten minutes there. It is a pity there were no hardware presentations by Apple. I would be interested to see the iphone, new ipods and ibooks. But anyway it was time well spent.

There is going to be another interesting presentation, this time specially about photography. One of my favorite companies Canon will be presenting in the London in about one week time. I hope I can learn more about digital photography and techniques for editing images. I am looking forward to this one. London is such a great city for this kind of free events where you can watch top professionals.

New books

Except the events I am attending I continue my study of web design and development. I bought couple of new books. Most of them are books for web designers but as you see I am going to study PHP and My SQL. So I am widening my spectrum towards development as well. After reading a book called DOM Scripting I have used the knowledge from this book in the couple of projects but what is more interesting it showed me that programing is not as difficult as I thought it is. I will let you know if I was right in case of PHP programming but that is going to take me some time. I am going to read and study this book as last one from all of these books which you can see on the image bellow.

Work in progress

So that was all about the access to information in different forms but obviously I am working as well. My full time job is giving me a great opportunity to grown, specially working in Photoshop is improving and speeding up. I am very happy about that. I have learned a lots of shortcuts which are extremely useful. I have still long way to go but it is a good start. I have also started a new project. This time it is print. It is going to be finished this week so you can find it later on my flickr, in the design section.

I wish the day had at least fifty hours so I could do more interesting things. I can not find the time to draw for example. But may be during the Christmas holiday I find some time. There are so many things I would like to draw. One of them would be motor bike Vespa or a car Mini. That are such design icons. I absolutely adore their shapes.

Question for you

How do you guys study? What source of information do you use?

There are several reasons why I have decided to by MAC. The one I have chosen is MAC Book Pro because of its hardware parameters such are 2GB RAM and so on. I am going for 15 inch version because the 17inch is way to expensive for me.

So why MAC?

I will start with the less practical point and that is the fact that it is the most beautiful laptop ever made. The design is just perfect. Anytime I see it in the apple store I feel like I want to start working on it. I am one of the people who feel extremely motivated by working space and tools. So the new MAC apple is going to participate hugely on this. I am sure about that.

Software

The next reason for the swap from Windows to MAC is the software you can get for MAC. Very good example in my case is software called coda. I adore this product. I think it was done for people like me, designers who spend lots of time hand coding. It even looks perfect. I just want one of these. The next software I want to have is messenger called adiumx. This messenger supports all different kind of messengers I have come across in my whole life. Both of this software are MAC only. There are plenty of other examples and if you are web designers I am sure you know about a lots of them.

iPhone

Another very good reason for my switch to MAC is iPhone which I am going to get very soon. I can finaly sync all my contacts, tasks, calendar etc. Which mean having all the data with me all the time. Having Safari browser on it will allow me to be better organized because I will be able to access my emails, my upcoming events, google maps, lastFM radio and so on. Obviously iPhone is cooperating with MAC the best of all the operating systems out there so that is going to be a very good connection on my IT department.

Negative side

There are some negative thinks about moving to MAC. As a web designer I have to test in all available web browsers and most of them run on Windows so that would mean that I will have to buy parallels to run Windows on MAC as well. I am thinking completely get rid of MS Office and switch to Google online docs and spreadsheets. Most of the other software I have been using is going to be OK with MAC. The only chalange I am going to have is installing Appache, PHP and MYSQL on my MAC. I have had quite a few problems to install it on my Windows machine before so I am a bit worried about that.

Recommend and give me some ideas

If you guys can recommend me some cool software for MAC and give me some ideas like what is the best way to do this and that on MAC that would be extremely useful for me.

After checking stats and graphs on google analytics for the past month I have to say there is one think I am truly happy. Who would have thought that these numbers become reality. And hey I am not talking about the number of people visiting my site and talking about the browsers they use. It is just incredible. Look at the image bellow and specially the blue area. That area belongs to Firefox. The best browser ever. This is just amazing. Almost 70 percent of all my visitors use Firefox.

The number must be influenced a lot by enormous number of visitors coming from smashing magazine site which is well known as one of the best web designers magazine on the net. So obviously most of the professional web designers use Firefox. But comparing to other months the difference is not that huge. In June it was 58 percent and in July it was 59%. So here we go. I feel much better when I know that the world is going the right way.