Vacation… again :)

I wasn’t able to write a lot during the last weeks: since I know I am going to another vacation trip – and especially since my clients know this- I am flooded with last minute work which has to be done. So there wont be any updates here until 25th August, when I safely arrive at Vienna Airport again. Well tanned from the Portuguese sun and relaxed hopefully =)

When I am back I will release my first WordPress Theme which is nearly ready now, so stay tuned!
Best Regards to all of you ;)

New Laptop?

Well, most of the time I give advice in some form or another, be it trough my tutorials or my comments, but today I would like to hear some advice from you. As you can see in the picture beside, my companion for the last 2 years, my MacBook, has suffered severe damage from the heavy use in this time.

I dally with the idea of buying a new notebook for some time now, cause the look of the macbook is far from stylish ever since the white chassis turned into dirty dark yellow. Ok, I am not that kind of a brag that I would throw away my laptop only because of its looks, but the hard drive I bought 2 years ago is far to small, the RAM is too little, and the screen is to tiny for long lasting Photoshop works.

The chassis cracked now for the second time (the first time apple customer service fixed it but I didn’t extend for the 3-year Apple Care plan) and I think its time to get something better. I like to work with Apples OSX but I don’t really care which operating system I use, due to the fact that I was working on Windows XP for several years before.

 

After browsing tons of sites with windows laptops I startet to like the Idea of bying a MacBook again, this time the Pro version of course. Appart from the neat look, they seem to fit my needs in a much better way than other companys notebooks.

What I want to know from you is:
Do MacBook Pros discolour and fall apart as well as the normal versions after 2 years?
Would you recommend buying one or something totally different?

Would be glad to hear some advice ;)

Vacation

I’ll be on vacation the next 6 days (sailing in Croatia ;D, lucky me ) so no posts, tutorials, comments or any other sign of life from me until next week =)

I wish you all the best, have a nice week!
Kriesi

Set a Guinness World Record – Enjoy a Better Web

This is the slogan spreadfirefox.com uses to promote the release of Firefox 3. The evil master plan is to make Firefox 3 the most downloaded software in 24 hours and therefore increasing its popularity.

And since I love Firefox with its myriads of plugins and themes which make developing websites so much easier I thought I could spread the word.

Participating is really easy: just download Firefox3 the day it is released. Release date will be announced soon, if you want to you can pledge to download the browser, spreadfirefox will inform you via mail when to download…

Just a few words…

Finally I got the new design ready. A dark color scheme this time, because I really like it how dark backgrounds play together with vibrant colors. I wrote some nice wordpress plug-ins to make my life easier and switched from mootools to jQuery.

I’m more than ever fascinated by the web and while i did struggle the last time I wanted to post on a regular basis, I will now try it again and hopefully succeed ;)

Since most of my visitors seem to be from non-German speaking countries, I use this as an excuse to polish my English, since its getting worse every day. So the navigation, the blog and my tutorials section shall be written in English from this day on; rest of the site will remain German… at least for now.

My main navigation

Since the article Navigation Menus: Trends and Examples was released on Smashing Magazine in February, I got quite a number of mails from fellow designers, who asked how to accomplish the sliding effect of my main menu. Even enough mails, that I thought about writing a little tutorial, but I must admit I am to lazy at the moment =)

mootools.netAnyways, here are some tips for creating a similar menu: Head over to http://mootools.net and get a little familiar with this extraordinary Javascript Framework. In the demo section of the page, you will find a sub-menu entry called Fx-Elements which contains everything you need to build a so called “kwick menu”. By analyzing the HTML, CSS and Javascript you should be able to accomplish similar menus in almost no time.

jquery.comThose who use Jquery (which is my prefered Framework atm, because of the steeper learning curve) can use the plugin, recently written by Jeremy Martin at jMars blog. I haven’t tested it for now but looking at the preview examples, it seems to work pretty well.

Hope I could help those of you who seek aid in creating a similar menu.

Update: I am using jQuery now, as well as jMars Kwicks plugin and it works like a charm ;)