(Flash) Image Galleries

I’ve come across two excellent PHP/Flash image galleries. SimpleViewer developed by airtight Interactive. FIG is a simple, intuitive interface and design for a Flash gallery that doesn’t need much programming. It supports multiple galleries and simple image descriptions. The color styles of the gallery can be changed to match your existing site. The borders, background, and navigation colors can all be changed. When there is only one gallery, the interface changes. The gallery name is displayed at the top, the home button is removed, and the thumbnails load immediately. And it’s FREE!

SimpleViewer is an intelligent image pre-loading flash gallery, it has a very intuitive image navigation and it’s very lightweight (around 17k). You can easily customize the interface - Set text color, frame color and width, navigation position. You can resize the interface as well. Sicne it’s Flash it’s Cross platform - Windows/Macintosh/Linux, however, it requires Flash 7 or higher. It has this nifty Optional right-click to open image in a new window feature - and it’s also FREE!

Another good implementation for a gallery that you are building or customizing is using the Lightbox2 JS library. Lightbox is a simple, unobtrusive script used to overlay images on the current page. It’s a snap to setup and works on all modern browsers. Lots of things are built on this library, like the Suckerfish HoverLightbox,

Tabs and News Like Scripts

Ajax Tabs Content uses Ajax to let you display a selection of external content on your page inside a DIV and via CSS tabs! It’s pretty much like Yahoo’s new homepage, which employs such a concept to show news in an organized fashion.

Featured Content Slider makes a slideshow out of arbitrary content on your page, so users can manually select a content to see or have them rotated automatically. Pagination links let the user quickly pick a content to show. Each content is simply normal HTML wrapped in DIV tags for effortless integration. An excellent tool if you need to display something and you don’t have enough space - or not! This works like the Virtual Pagination script except that the latter is lightweight. You might as well like the Animated Collapsible DIV if you’re short on space.

I also found the Unobtrusive AJAX Star Rating Bar, from Masuga Design Labs, which is a rating bar script done with PHP and mySQL that allows users to rate things like can be done on Netflix or Amazon, all web 2.0-like with no page refresh.

CSS Speech Bubbles is easy to customize speech bubbles coded in CSS and valid XHTML 1.0 strict, that works on Internet Explorer 6 & 7, Firefox 2.0, Safari 2.0, and Opera 9.0. Made by Will Mayo.

Last but not least, the Easy Tabs from Koller Jürgen, which is a very nifty tabs menu that works on hover or onclick instant content display. Very lightweight and easily customizable.

Logo design can be a tricky job. Sometimes it’s hard to satisfy the customer and in the same time stay web 2.0 alike. Since the introduction of web 20 technologies the face of the web designing world has changed. Designers tend to be more KISS and less bold. Microsoft-library like graphics are no longer welcome. The sign of “under construction” held by a bear, who in return, moved his feet is obsolete. Fresh colors and usage of multi-level font size has been of great importance to any logo, header, or banner design. The web is striving to become a real-life place where typography really matters.

Here, I will try to introduce seven of the techniques used by web 2.0 designers to create a neat, nifty, and attractive logo. Read the rest of this entry »

Whether you are designing for the Web, a flyer, cover art, or a GUI – you should be familiar with the fundamentals of graphics design. Designing graphic art electronically is not like painting; you don’t need to be talented. All you need is to familiarize yourself with the basic concepts of an “appealing” design. When designing a work of graphic art, there are three key concepts to be aware of: color, balance, and simplicity. Color, or color theory: your colors must match. No matter the project, your colors must be complement each other. Matching colors is very important - you can ignore the other two concepts and still create appealing artwork.

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Inspired by Marc’s list, the following are my alternative windows software recommendations for the normal (with development needs) user. It is by no means the best approach to your windows experience. You might as well have better software to use. It’s okay that you do! It’s a big world! We can both co-exist!
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AI is not just a technical topic, but more of a science. The engineering of making intelligent machines, as the book says. The complexity of AI is extended to the brain level of understanding the human intelligence. “The computational part of the ability of achieving goals” is the current best used expression to define the word ‘intelligence’. Goals are the reasons of life. Thus, every living creature can be measured in terms of intelligence. While the term intelligence is still generally applied only to humans, it is believed that we can come to a definition that will identify it in terms that are not specific to humanity.
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