Geek Building The Bridge Part 2

SGD $10

Originally uploaded by Framed Geek

I’ve been dreaming to have a figurine such as this. Plamo just doesn’t cut it. So, I’m very thankful to found 12th Toy Fare in Takashimaya. W00t, all break loose. My wife took several items, I took this one for SGD $10 only. Even though I barely know the character, still, it’s a great deal. All totalled in SGD $26. Yahaa!

PS:
There’re not many choices for figurines. Only some Street Fighters and some sad-moe faces. I picked this one for its grandeour hair and black suit

Setelah sekian lama saya berharap, akhirnya Herman Saksono berkenan mengisi blog yang kembali sepi ini. Sebagai seorang pemerhati dan praktisi topik design, usability, etc, kali ini Herman Saksono menuliskan topik tentang Mockup versus Masterpage. Mana yang lebih utama, mana yang efektif? Mari kita simak bersama-sama.

Mas-mas di 37signals pernah bilang betapa tidak efektifnya mendesain UI dengan Photoshop. Maksudnya: tidak efektif kalau dibandingkan dengan mendesain langsung di HTML dan CSS. Saya tergolong orang yang fifty-fifty setuju dan tidak setuju dengan opini tersebut.

Saya, dan teman-teman saya, punya kebiasaan memisahkan proses desain web menjadi dua bagian: bagian mendesain dengan aplikasi raster (biasanya Photoshop), dan mendesain HTML-nya (sekaligus CSS dan JS). Yang pertama disebut mockup; yang kedua disebut masterpage.

Sebuah mockup berupa gambar tampilan aplikasi, sementara masterpage sudah berbentuk HTML lengkap dengan CSS-nya. Dalam kondisi ideal, kami selalu membuat mockup terlebih dahulu. Baru setelah disetujui klien, kami mulai membikin master-page-nya.

Tahap pembuatan mockup sangat cocok untuk merancang palet warna dan bereksperimen tata-letak. Pemilihan tipografi juga terasa lebih kreatif pada tahap ini. Aplikasi semacam Photoshop memang sangat fleksibel. Tidak ada div yang mengkotak-kotakkan ataupun pilihan fonta yang terbatas. Lagipula, memilih warna dengan bilangan heksadesimal semacam #42a070 jelas-jelas tidak asyik.

Permasalahannya, mendesain di Photoshop itu memang terasa bertele-tele bagi orang-orang yang sudah khatam HTML dan CSS. Membuat kotak dengan border 1 piksel jauh lebih cepat kalau dibikin di HTML, daripada di Photoshop. Selain itu, desainer bisa kesusahan kalau disuruh merancang interaction di Photoshop.

Disinilah peran masterpage beraksi. Masterpage yang dibangun atas HTML + CSS + JS memang sangat ringkas untuk diulik. Membuat tata letak yang sederhana jelas lebih cepat kalau dirancang di tahap ini. Apalagi kalau klien minta dibuatin user experience pakai animasi, fade-in, fade-out.

Sayangnya, sekali lagi, model layout ala HTML yang kaku agak membatasi kreativitas desainer untuk menciptakan peletakan yang ‘mendobrak’.

Oleh karena itu, saya rasa tahap mockup dan masterpage memang tidak bisa eksklusif. Keduanya harus dikerjakan berurutan. Perkara mana yang lebih lama, semestinya lebih lama pada tahap masterpage, karena pada tahap inilah user experience mulai disusun.

Selain itu, ada baiknya kedua tahap itu dikerjakan oleh orang yang paham desain dan koding, supaya tidak ada gagasan UX yang terputus ketika mockup masuk ke tahap masterpage.

Herman Saksono is a user-experience lobbyist wannabe who love his cats.

Singapore Food Festival balloon

Originally uploaded by Framed Geek

Didn’t realize that last night was the first opening days of Singapore Food Festival. Going to Lau Pa Sat was not a bad decision after all. Gotta thanks Evan for this.

Too bad, I didn’t (read: can’t) take any good photos. Didn’t dare to try various food as well, while people were ordering saliva-attracting cuisines (lobsters, crabs, etc).

Well, this will be one full month event. Special events and offerings will be held in various places within various dates. It’s possible to go once more, if my pocket is forgiving enough. Otherwise, goind there will end up with yet another “nasi lemak” :D.

Onion and Plurk

Originally uploaded by Framed Geek

Plurk is cool, plurking is fun. Timeline is wild idea, but it’s kinda betraying the web 2.0 rule of thumb of being simple and useful. To many wasted space.

What about the game. Yes, this is a well known strategy. To attach user to your service, give them a game to play. Human want to stand out, they want recognition. Twitter triggerred the following and followers game. Plurk has the similar thing, with an addition of karma. Karma is user score which will open hidden features. A gamer will immmediately notice this strategy.

However, a gamer may be dissapointed that the hidden feature is not cool enough. Some of those hidden features are smileys/emoticons. It’s basically what we can use daily in our IM but Plurk make this smileys exclusive.

That’s what motivated me to ceate the userscript. Onion emoticons is well known and is very famous. It’s cute, adorable, and irresistable. We can easily put the direct link of onion emo url in plurk to use it as Plurk facilitates image live preview. So, there you go. I created a userscript to insert the onion emo panel to help plukr insert onion emo into thir timeline. To use it, we can click on the particular emo, or drag it down into our textbox.

To install it, make sure you already have greasemonkey addon. Then install the userscript here. Thanks to rendy for hosting the Onions. Thanks to Ethan for creating the Onions.

“folderview plasmoid + nepomuk == sweetness”. Nepomuk (service) dalam definisi saya adalah sebuah RDF proxy server. Berbagai macam resource bisa diberi makna tambahan unutk mendefinisikan resource tersebut dengan lebih tepat. Dengan nepomuk berarti kita bisa melakukan query yang lebih dari sekedar “mengandung teks tertentu”, akan tetapi kita juga bisa melakukan query: “siapa saja teman saya yang berkirim surat di hari minggu ini”. Yes, I really mean it. Nepomuk IS that good. Digabungkan dengan plasmoid (KDE “widgets”), kita bisa menampilkan visualisasi hasil query tersebut secara reatime di atas desktop kita. Conth sederhana adalah menamipilkan file-file tertentu. Sepeti yang bsia kita lihat di link ini

“being creative by casting a restriction onto ourself. Hmm, this might just be the perfect solution for my issueâ€. Bagaimana caranya menjadi kreatif? Bagaimana caranya menemukan topik baru untuk ditulis? Dengan melepas diri ria, kita sering berharap kita bisa berkreasi secara total. Padahal kadangkala, melepas diri secara total biasanya berakhir pada terjun bebas dan mendarat tanpa ide sama sekali. Copyblogger menuliskan, salah satu cara menjadi kreatif adalah jsutru dengan membatasi diri. Menarik bukan? Pernahkah anda ingat atau alami suatu kondisi terjepit yagn akhirnya memunculkan ide-ide brilian? Baca selengkapnya di sini

Yah, cuma dua? Hehe, maaf ya. Sudah waktunya cabut dari warnet. Jika anda tertarik lebih jauh, silahkan ikuti feed friendfeed saya.

Notes:

Nepomuk stands for Networked Environment for Personalized, Ontology-based Management of Unified Knowledge. To make it simple it’s like a tool to attach label and annotation to show relationship between stuff.

Have you found yourself running out of time to catch up the news? Would it be fun if we can save site for offline reading later in our free time? Would it be even more fun if we can read it as PDF or print it so we can read it in real touchable paper?

I’ve been dreaming about it recently. Lucky us, that “save it for later” service has been implemented by LaterLoop. Using laterloop we can save a page for later reading. We can even download the pages as ZIP file (consisting of text only pages) for offline reading as well. However there’s still some feature missing. We can’t choose which one we want to take offline. The only option available for offline reading is 30 recent entried, 30 random entries and 30 oldest entries.

While LaterLoop for sure will update their service to support nitpicking offline entries, why not taking it ourselves to the next level? We can create a simple site to convert our laterloop list to PDF, readily printable on paper. My wish getting stronger after reading copyblogger and Bokardo. Special for Bokardo, I found it hard to understand his writing in one shot. I can see his interesting point but to fully understand it I still need to read it a few more times. So it’d be trully a blesing for me if I can have it in paper so that I don;t have to open my browser to read it. For some occassion, paper is still suitable. Eg: bedtime reading (I don’t want my mac book air — if I have any — to be crush when I fell asleep).

So what do we need to augment laterloop? We’ll actually we don’t need to limit ourselves to laterloop only. The reading source can be obtained from anywhere. So what next would be building the converter of (rendered) HTML to PDFs. I can see konqueror can do this, and I’m sure there are many libs/apps to fill this job. So, technically it’s very feasible.

Monetizing plan? Well, ads is once again no-brainer. Printing service will be premium, and the ads here would be premium as well. Ads can be targetted and the best part it’s there forever printed onto paper. This would be magazine 2.0. Printing service itself can be varied; hardcover; monthly or weekly subs, auto create based on source (eg: RWW, Scobleizer, etc), auto-create content base on popularity (RSSMeme, TechMeme), or even based on alert from google alert. The best part is it’s on demand, no stocks, everyone any taste can be covered.

It’s a bit like Lulu, no? Yes, it’s like Lulu. No, we’re magazine, we are newspaper, we are books, we are the new media! No, we are printing agency 2.0

Photo by FelipeArte

Help me answer this question:

Photo by Omar Eduardo

PS:

This post should have been published in June 7th. Apparently I was unable to use the publish in the future feature. Silly me.

Tulisan ini ada sebagai ganti komentar di mangoaddict. I haven’t found anything interesting to write, yet. And my recent post doesn’t seem to reap any answer.

So, here is my version of “the future of web”.

Semantic (and natural language) will be here soon. Saya sependapat dengan Ivan, walau tidak sama persis. Semantic web akan segera bersama kita. benih-benih semantik yang ditanamkan oleh Powerset, Hakia, Freebase/Thinkbase, dukungan Yahoo atas microformat, dan searchmonkey akan tumbuh menjadi pohon rindang. menjaid ekosistem yang memungkinkan lebih banyak orang bermain di dalamnya dan akhirnya akan menyebar ke seluruh penjuru internet.

Desktop will move to web. Sudah banyak aktivitas kita yang kini tak lagi bergantung pada aplikasi dekstop. Mengetik, menghitung dengan spreadsheet, membuat presentasi, melihat attachment, tak lagi memerlukan aplikasi desktop. Di masa depan, sepertinya hanya hardcore geek yang akan tetap memakai photoshop. Khalayak ramai akan lebih fasih dan menyukai aplikasi semacam Picnik. One tool for each task will be the trend. A suite won’t be a bloated app, instead will be a configurable mashup a la user. Your browser will be your ultimate enterprisey app!

Cloud computing for everyone, as easy as blogging today. Hadoop will be the next wave, dan cloud computing pun tak akan jadi dominasi Google dan Amazon. Not even Detik ;).

Social network will go even mainstream, and even granular than what you ever think of. It will be so seamless that every activity you do is social :). Yes, cloud computing can be as easy as making group in social network. So that you can add IBM as your friend to use their computing power.

Expects more freemium. Computing power dan storage terlalu murah untuk tidak dimanfaatkan. Akan muncul lebih banyak layanan gratis di masa mendatang.

Photo by josef.stuefer

Image by puja

Background
I get constant e-mail from flickr telling me that someone has favorited my wedding invitation card. The photo has 73 favorites and 15 thousands view (since Oct 2006). This is a quite clear signal that people are digging this keyword.

What’s our “user focus�

What designer (other type of user/ecosystem player) will get?

Please note that designer (as ecosystem player) won’t be available in early phase. Initial card design will be supplied by subcontracting design job. Print job will likely supported for local area until we can engage with international partners.

UI Guidelines

Navigation

Activity flow

Epilog
This may not the best idea ever. But looking at the niche, it may just work. This demand will always there except breeding/mating formally is no longer necessary for human race. The ultimate revenue won’t come from ads but instead it will be print and packaging service. There’re many exit options to choose as service progresses. It can turn out to be generic card designer, event organizer, designer community, printing agencies, you name it.

I already have some people names in my head, eg: web designer, card designer. So in case anyone willing to invest in this idea, I’m ready to go