November 2010
1 post
Zootool V1
I had a look at all the old pictures on the Zootool Flickr account and felt pretty nostalgic when I saw screenshots of the first version from three years ago. It’s crazy how time goes by and though three years do not seem like a very long time in “real life” it feels like ages on the web.
http://bit.ly/ftJdEH
October 2010
1 post
new website/portfolio
Man, this took me ages! I finally uploaded a new version of my website, with new work and projects and a complete new design. The old website really embarrassed me with all the old stuff, but I was too lazy to update it.
The great thing is that I finally got a playground to experiment with some new stuff like media queries, random colors through php and I also built a new logo with html and css....
September 2010
1 post
2 tags
Singapore-Bali-Nerd-Vacations
Nadine and I had some great holidays and time to relax in Singapore and Bali this summer and here are my favorite nerd-sights:
1. Not sure if we paid the right price for our food in that chinese restaurant in Singapore…
2. The Singapore Airlines entertainment system runs on Red Hat. Good to know that it is not Windows.
3. The Bali Apple Store
August 2010
2 posts
2 tags
Webkit Magic
After finding the solution to one of the most annoying iPad MobileSafari bugs/features some weeks ago, I found a solution for an even worse Safari CSS nightmare today:
Border-Radius-Artefacts
(All credits for this screenshot go to Mike Harding)
This is such a crap. You want to make use of the awesome -webkit-border-radius attribute and unfortunately picked the wrong border/background color...
4 tags
Zootool Default Avatars
When I started working on the new version of Zootool I was so fed up of having boring default avatars. They ruin every design, they are super anonymous and they just suck even if you come up with some crazy creative default avatar design.
I’d been working with Arno Richter on a wiki project for our faculty in University years ago and we generated random pixelated header images out of all...
July 2010
3 posts
20,000
Zootool just reached 20,000 users! This is far beyond anything I expected when I started this thing over 2 years ago as my bachelor project and I can’t tell you how happy I am at the moment :)
Disable inner shadows on iPad inputs
Shaun Inman found out that you can disable the default inner shadow on search inputs on the iPad with
-webkit-appearance: caret;
This is something I’ve been searching for a while. Don’t know why Apple added this at all!!
4 tags
Download Google Webfonts as TTF
Google Webfonts is an awesome service – it’s free, it has some great fonts (though there are only a few fonts available) and the implementation is super easy. They also offer a great preview of all fonts, which is pretty helpful to select the right one, but there’s no official way to download the font file to be able to test it in Photoshop or whatever. IMO it is really essential to...
June 2010
4 posts
4 tags
Cross-browser kerning
I just found a new css wizardry thingy, which actually looks like there’s at least a cross browser solution to have better kerning for the web. Very interesting indeed.
body { text-rendering: optimizeLegibility; }
Cross-browser kerning-pairs & ligatures
Update: just added it to this blog and Zootool. Noticed any difference? :)
3 tags
Gity Icon Replacement
I discovered Gity – an awesome Git app for OS X – some weeks ago and couldn’t use it because I was still running Leopard and Gity needs the snowy version. At least I’ve upgraded and so I downloaded Gity yesterday and gave it a try. All I can say so far is that I really love it. I use the command line every day, but I’m still one of those design nerds who feels more comfortable...
4 tags
iPhone/iPad app flea market
4 tags
MouseContext
When Lauren Brichter came up with Tweetie for the iPhone (which unfortunately has become the official Twitter app now) he introduced a new UI element which was downright brilliant. To load new tweets, all you got to do is to drag and release the whole table of tweets and a nice indicator at the top appears to show you that new tweets are being loaded.
This new feature has been so intuitive and...
May 2010
2 posts
Royal webdesign
A few months ago Julian Zimmermann, a very good friend of mine, told me about the most weird story I’ve heard for a long time. He has been searching for a project for his bachelor thesis in Communication Design and found a real King from Ghana – King Bansah – who lives in Ludwigshafen, Germany and works as a car mechanic in his own car repair shop. To collect money for his people in Ghana,...
3 tags
iPad app rant
As soon as I got my iPad yesterday I tried to get some decent apps for it. There were a few which are really, really good, but all in all I was shocked how crappy the iPad app store is right now. In general, iPad apps sell at a much higher price than iPhone apps which I understand as long as they offer a much better experience, but most of the apps I saw are nothing more than a rushed try to...