Archive for March, 2009

604media has to give a shout out to “activeCollab”, a new project management and collaboration tool we installed in December 2008. We noticed the benefits immediately and I’m sure our clients will agree. Within weeks everyone was fluent in using this new tool.

Who is activeCollab?

activeCollab was developed by a small company, such as ourselves, called a51 development located in Novi Sad, Serbia. There is a lively community using and supporting this product which is no surprise since activeCollab has proven to be extremely useful,  providing essential features in a concise and easy to use format.

Congrats to the a51 team o the well deserved success.

Why did we chose activeCollab?

We looked at a selection of PM tools including: PHProjekt, dotProject and Basecamp. Here is why our research pointed us to activeCollab. For starters we needed a web based portal, without a monthly fee, that could be installed on our own server. This narrowed the field down to three choices: knocking off “Basecamp” which is hosted.

One of our company goals is to support and promote the open source community that is our bread and butter. As such the PHP/MySQL support in activeCollab was a big plus. 604media prefers to maintain control of its essential tools and data so, unlike some of the competition. activeCollab gives us complete control of the source code and a flexible license to develop extensions and modules. On top of this activeCollab takes advantage of the latest technologies to deliver a better interface.

As a must-read in the web design community, Smashing Magazine is a great collection design inspiration, how-to’s, best practices and code examples. Written by a pool of web designers and developers from many different locations and backgrounds, it is a comprehensive resource for web design which I peruse on a regular basis.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com

This is pretty crazy.. While it is obviously in prototype phase, the ideas and already existing functionality of this gets the imagination buzzing.

It could just be that I’m the only person in the world that didn’t know about this, but the microphone on the 3G iPhone headphones is also a multi-function button!!! That just blew my mind.

I’m a self-titled Apple geek, so I’m surprised I am just learning about this now, after having my iPhone for 8 months! All I can say is Apple really needs to step up their marketing game and advertise these little features – it would help improve their public perception in the wake of recent negative press surrounding features missing from the iPhone.

I can’t take credit for this, but am doing my best to spread the wealth. The basic idea behind CSS reset is it attempts to create a level playing field across all modern browsers by neutralizing browser-specific styles. In essence, it creates a base CSS foundation that attempts to make all modern browsers render sites identically.

One of the biggest trouble-makers for web design is Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), because it very often renders websites much different from how the designers intended. As a web designer, I am occassionally forced to use ugly hacks to fix IE6-specific layout issues, which is less than desirable. Once I started using CSS Resets, however, many of those IE6 layout issues dissappeared. I now start every project with CSS Resets and it has saved a ton of frustration and headache in the design process.

I’ve tested a couple different CSS Resets, and I have found the one created by Eric Meyer to be superior to the rest. Check it out, you’ll be glad you did:

http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/

It’s another beautiful day in downtown Vancouver. Spring thus far has been rather cold, but today gives me hope that it will be a hot and sunny summer in the lower mainland.

You need only look as far as YouTube, flickr or Facebook to see that the future of the internet is social, educational, creative collaboration. I believe the centre of the internet, in its current state, is human emotion.

I recently came across a particular lecture, part of the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) series of short lectures, about the emotional world of the internet. Entitled “The Web’s Secret Stories,” Jonathan Harris talks about his work in online art that visually combines, organizes and categorizes millions of examples of human emotion. His work is truly stunning, and you should check it out.

Jonathan Harris tells the Web’s secret stories

As a web designer, I rely on emotion to drive my creative process, but the overtly-technical nature of the internet can often hinder that creative process. I recently read a story about the former Visual Design Leader of Google who left the internet-giant because of the headstrong corporate focus on engineering. Design decisions had to be rationalized in terms of engineering logic and based on design-follows-function.

At 604media we believe that design and function walk hand-in-hand; the design and development teams, while having fundementally different roles, collaborate closely through every stage of every project we do. I believe this is why we are leaders of innovation in our industry – our outstanding web applications epitomize our mantra of design+function.