This article almost perfectly echoes my programming philosophy and reasons I’m interested in software in general (to rid the world of crappy HCI). Read it.

These Things I Believe – Not the User’s Fault

I just found an article by the guys at 37signals: Why we skip Photoshop. I trashed Photoshop (and pixel-perfect mockups in general) five or six sites ago and haven’t looked back. In addition to their reasons, I’d add that I’m generally faster at creating interfaces in HTML/CSS than Photoshop anyways, so why even bother? Working in code from the beginning also forces me to get a first-hand feel at how difficult certain interface aspects are to implement—I used to come out of Photoshop with something that looked pretty simple only to find that it took all amounts of fugly wrapper divs and CSS hax to accomplish. I’d like to keep my code as slim, semantic, and generally “pure” as possible, thankyouverymuch.

For fairness’ sake, here’s a post by Jeff Croft of Blue Flavor: Why we don’t skip Photoshop. Personally, his reasons for using the ‘shop don’t ring true for me: I’m not sure I have a firmly established visual aesthetic, and while I do tend to err on the side of simplicity, I think my approach benefits the user in the end. But, as Jeff says, to each his own.

The deeper issue here was, I think, communicated nicely over at A List Apart: Sketching in Code: the Magic of Prototyping. They attack it from the “mockup vs. prototype” angle, and point out many of the practical benefits (and faults) of rapid prototyping. It’s a good read for anybody looking to tweak their design process.

It’s been awhile since I posted anything new here, but it’s because I’ve been hella (that’s right, hella) busy over the past month. Here’s a brief rundown of what I’ve been up to:

• Much time has been put towards a group project for my Database Design class. We’re creating a database and some simple applications to keep track of college student/faculty/course records. Lots and lots of diagrams and documentation.
• I created a UNIX shell from (basically) scratch as part of a lab for my Operating Systems class. It’s tiny, and not incredibly useful, but here’s the source in case anyone is interested (I did a lot of this late at night while alternately drinking myself stupid and smashing my head into the keyboard, so the code is a tad messy).
• I learned AJAX.
• I updated the Moving Box Studios site with AJAX spicyness and worked on making things a bit more accessible (though it’s still got some ways to go).
• As always, I put a lot of work into AuditionHQ.
• I got paid for hooking these guys up with a custom version of Silk to manage their site.
• A bunch of other miscellaneous schoolwork (“it’s almost over” is my new mantra) and dealing with stuff in my personal life.

You can expect to see some more of my old essays soon.

UPDATE: Finally after switching gears for awhile to catch up on some of my schoolwork (because it would suck to fail my senior year), I had some time to go back and make the Moving Box portfolio work more or less the way I wanted it to. Then I did it all over again for IE (everyone’s favorite part of web design), and now it’s finally live. You can check it out here.

The guys at Moving Box Studios are getting into the lucrative wedding video business and, being the web intern, it was my job to create a site that they could refer potential customers to. I whipped up a simple design and gave it brains with Silk—sort of overkill for a whole two pages, but I wanted to test out some new features and get more development time in. All content is in Textile so it will be easy to maintain.

This is the first site I’ve ever made where I didn’t have to change a single thing after cross-browser testing. It even worked out of the box in IE5!

See it live »

This is a Ruby on Rails application I’m currently developing as part of my internship at Moving Box Studios. It’s an open database of auditions, casting calls, and talent searches for independent artists and actors. Some auditions can be submitted directly from the site.

I’ll post more information, images, etc here as development progresses.

Classmate is a simple courseware application focused on assignment management and scheduling.

I made it for my senior project at Ithaca College with Tenzin Zingshuk, a fellow IC student. I used this project as an excuse to learn Ruby on Rails, and haven't looked back since. It's not entirely done, we didn't get a chance to implement a few core features (such as messaging and class schedules) and didn't do much cross-browser testing (IE users beware). Nevertheless, I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out, and someday I might go back and finish things up.

See it live »

Silk is a simple PHP web framework for small to mid-sized sites that don’t need (or want) a database to store content. Site content is parsed directly from files and the directory hierarchy is massaged into a tree-based data structure called the “content tree.” Arbitrary metadata can be attached to any piece of content (using YAML syntax); this can be used to create complex named relationships between files.

Silk has templating features that separate content from design, allowing easy content management and updates. Other features include caching, object-oriented page design, an extensible plugin system, and many different content types by default (PHP, HTML, Textile, plaintext, Flash, images, etc).

Silk is still in its alpha stage. I generally don’t develop it unless I’m working on a web site that uses it, so I can’t really estimate when it will be “done.” Once I feel it’s ready for general consumption, I’ll post more info here. I’m currently expecting to release Silk under an open license.

I made this site for my mom's horse farm when I was a senior in high school. This was one of the first sites I did after my dark age of web design (frames, tables, DHTML... yikes). I think I came up with a pretty solid design for my first real shot at CSS. The site was originally built entirely with Notepad and MS Paint, though I later went back and photoshopped the graphics to get some decent anti-aliasing. I recently ported this site to Silk to make the update process easier (even though that happens once every blue moon).

See it live »