Entries during Apr 2010
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Apr272010
Switching Themes in Gnome Shell
Update: I originally wrote this app to help changing themes, when there was no other simple way to do this. There are however much better solutions being built atm.
As many of you may know, Gnome3 is due for release later this year, and with it's release, we will see Gnome-Shell become the new window manager for many Linux distributions based on Gnome. I have played around with Gnome-Shell and I have to say that I really like how it's making everyday tasks something that feels natural and simple. I really look forward to the end …
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Apr242010
Open Standards in Digital Design
Though I consider myself a mediocre designer, I have long held the opinion that, good design is not limited by the tools the individual uses, but by the mind of the individual using the tools. What this means is that, using certain “industry standard” tools, does not necessarily make you a better designer.
For this reason I have long been in strong opposition of certain “industry standard” design tools, like for example Photoshop. Don't get me wrong, I think the guys at Adobe have done a phenomenal job and created one of the best tools for digital design. …
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Apr222010
Hosting a Git Repo on Dropbox
Since my laptop is in for repairs, Chris de Bruyne from DesignWave agreed to help me put together the image above.
UPDATE: After using git on dropbox for a week now, I would recommend against using git in this way. I find I'm having far too much trouble for what it's worth, especially when using it on multiple machines. I feel that it's better to use normal git protocols and hosting solutions.
I have been using Git for quite some time …
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Apr172010
Animated PNG on the web
I'm slowly getting more excited about the new web technologies. One of these is the move to support animated PNG in browsers. Animated pictures are nothing new, we've had GIF for ages now, but the problem with GIF have always been that it only has 1 bit transparency. Which means, if you have a transparent background, you will see nasty edges.
PNG's on the other hand are much higher quality images. Here is a quick example of an animated PNG that I quickly made this evening. Note that this picture wont work in all browsers. You can have …
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Apr132010
Google Draw Added to Docs
A new application have recently made it into the Google Docs suite. The app is a drawing application that enables users to make various type of drawings.
Although the current set of features and tools are very basic, they are more than enough to perform most basic kinds of drawings.
Combine to that the fact that it's collaborative, and it opens up a lot of new possibilities.
Here are a couple of screenshots.
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Apr122010
Integrating CKEditor into Django
After writing a post on my reasons for writing my own blogging app, I received a couple of questions on how to integrate CKEditor into Django.
I thought I would write a tutorial post on how to do this, but a friend have since developed a great application that works brilliantly. Shaun's django-ckeditor can be found on github. (Note that we have since found out that django-ckeditor has a name conflict, and will probably be renamed soon)
The app provides 2 methods to integrate the editor, either …
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Apr052010
Moving a django site from MySQL to PostgreSQL
I've recently worked on a project where the client initially insisted on using MySQL for their website. I didn't have any reasons at the time to protest this choice since MySQL is ok for majority of sites and so I used MySQL as per their request.
With the latest updates to their website, we have however run into some MySQL limitations, in particular the default storage engine that MySQL uses.
We added an application called South to django, which manages database migrations as the models are updated etc. South works brilliantly …
