Anyway. I handed in a piece of coursework. It was my currency converter. Although the code is pretty scrappy it works exactly as intended. At some point though I will give the code a re-work, make it cleaner and to reduce the amount that I repeat elements. For that I need to get a better grasp on PHP Functions. I am trying, I swear. I will also add a nice pretty front end to it, so that you don’t have to edit the URL and look at XML. This will have to wait though. You can view the currency converter from my portfolio page.

On a slightly happier note, I am going to USA soon (10 days in fact). Looking forward to that, be glad to get out the country for a while.

Despite this I have to take my laptop with me, no getting away from work that easy. Good times.

Oh, and something for waaaay into the future. The site will be getting a re-design (and re-code). So much stuff on here that I am not happy about. Especially those cheesy headings and sub-headings in the top-right. What WAS I thinking…?

This is not as bad as it sounds though. Once piece does not require it to be finished as per my spec, which is good. It is not that I have been lazy, it is just that it is very hard and I have had troubles with it.

Still, as I go along pieces are being handed in / completed, why only today did I do a presentation. Not bad, for the first time in my life I had a presentation with too much information. It lasted half an hour, with questions too. Which is pretty epic. Would like to thank one Lewis Malpas for that. He did a wonderful job with this work.

Lots more to come though, lets see how i do. Hopefully I can do more than I think I will. Fingers crossed eh?

I am currently so busy with Uni work it is unreal. Working on making a shop, heavy on the JavaScript. Should be cool, though I haven’t managed to get very far with it. If you want to have a look you can go here. I am a link.

It is built in codeigniter, which I might add is awesome. Still it is a rather large learning curve.

In the time that I have been away quite a lot has changed. I have moved house, still in Bristol though. Not only this I managed to get a web design job for a month and a half, that was cool. It funded me to buy a new MacBook. This was necessary because my old Sony Vaio packed up and I wanted something decent. New phone too, the iPhone of course (all designers need one, it’s a trademark) and I am in my third year of Uni, which is my last year. Scary…big wide world.

Going to the USA soon, Easter holidays. That will be cool. Will try to post some pictures and things. Woo, I’m quite excited for that, especially as it is going to be warm (screw you English weather).

So this is my newest update. Will promise to add more when the time comes.

Exams. Fun things really aren’t they…yeah, right. I’ve had two already, one writing essays on HCI (Human Computer Interaction) and Web Programming (Mostly about XML, couldn’t do the OOP PHP). Another 3 exams to come and a presentation to do too, then school’s out for summer.

In other news I’ve been working on a few sites, two of them not so major. A wordpress site where I just enter most of articles and order the backend around, throw in some style editing and it is pretty much done. Have two more smaller sites to crack on with, but those can wait as I have a major project to work on; a Joomla site with social networking interactivity. Granted a lot of the stuff is in the form of add-ons for Joomla, but I have to get it to work the way the client wants. Can’t really say much more about it right now, they want it kept quite until it’s mostly finished.

Once this is done I have a few site improvements/fixes to do on this site, not least fixing the blog page. If you haven’t already noticed it’s slightly different to the rest of the site. Pain in my arse.

Any way thats about it for now, catch you on the flip side y’all

It has been a while in the making, but this new site layout is around 99% complete. Little tweaks here and there need to be done and it is finished. =]

Any recommendations or improvements are welcome as well as suggestions for my random tagline that I will be creating at some point

This is all about the lovely little Twitter app known as Blu. It’s created by an unknown (well I’ve never heard of them) company called thirteen23. You can download Blu from their site here.

Ok. So you’re at their website and it says ‘Vista Twitter client’. Well if you are on Windows XP you may turn away at this point. DO NOT. It works for you. Now rejoice. So download it, ignore what it says about correct software installed on your comp. Thats all rubbish.

Oh, quick note, you will need Windows .NET 3.5 before you can run this little app.

So you may have noticed that you don’t need to install this thing as such. Awesome, less HDD space taken. First impressions visual and audio wise are very nice. It’s all see through and cool!! But, lets work through this app. So just log-in with you’re Usual Twitter details and click remember me. Hurrah your logged in, such a simple process to get this (unless your Steve Lacey).

Now for the main part. In the centre taking up all the space are the tweets. Hundreds, thousands, millions of them. I say this because you can scroll for an infinate amount of time. If you have had Twitter long enough you could scroll back years!! Impressive, but a little pointless.

Time to make a tweet to the interwebs. You click the speechbubble icon which glows rather nicely, then up pops the dialog box in an awesome fading fasion. In the background of this box you see a counter of how many characters you have left to use. This thing even has spell check. How nice.

Click the image to get a better view

Other icons on the ‘task bar’ of the app include favourite list (I’ll explain more in a bit), the home icon (where all the main tweets can be viewed), all your @replies from your many followers, your direct messages and the refresh button.

Don’t hit refresh too many times though, you will run out of twitter API requests, only get 100 per hour

To reply to a tweet, direct message a user or re-tweet a tweet, just hover over it and the options pop-up

Now for the ‘favourite’ part of the app. Basically this is where all the people that you want to pay special attention go to. In here is only one tweet, the latest one, from each of your favourite people.

Nice little add-on, but I haven’t really used it. I guess the more people you follow the more useful it is.

To add a person you your favourites list, you just go to their profile and add them

Here is a users profile. To get here you click their Twitter display picture. Easy!

This place features the users latest tweet, and the options to favourite/unfavourite, unfollow and to block. Unless you hate the person, you will just use favourite icon.

One last feature I’d like to point out is that it has tinyurl integration. Much easier than visiting the website, don’t you think?

All in all I love this little app. Its easy to use, light on the system and looks and sounds awesome. It auto refreshes and if there is a new tweet gives you a little ‘bing’ sound to let you know. The icon in the top left also shuffles its wings every now and then just to let you know its alive

I strongly recommend you twitter users who run Windows XP or higher to get this. It is a quality piece of software.

The most noticeable will be of course, the new fading featured content slider on the homepage and on the services page.

Some small other improvements have gone on too, with aligning objects properly to make the site look a teensy bit better, though you won’t notice.

Another new addition to my site, is tutorials. I will be doing a few tutorials every now and then and I hope they prove to be useful to some

Start with your document, I started with 1440×900 pixel size, but you can do any. Fill it with a dark grey. Mine was #0a0a0a.

Select a large brush with the hardness set way down to 0 and use a lighter grey, I used #2c2c2c, to place a highlight in the centre of the canvas.

Import your image. You can download mine here. It’s an image I found on my computer from a while ago, I don’t know where it came from and I don’t know the permissions of it. But I used it anyway.

Now comes the fun part. We have to cut the guy with his guitar out from the background. There are many ways of doing this, but I used the pen tool. For this image you could probably use this tutorial as it has a fairly simple background.

Copy the cut-out into your current background canvas and position in the top right. Or if you want you can go Edit->Transform->Flip Horizontal to get it in the top left.

Duplicate the guy layer, and give the first one a glow with these settings. The glow colour is #0072ff.

On the second guy layer you created, de-saturate it (turns it greyscale) by either pressing (on pc) ctrl+shift+u, (on mac) command+shift+u. Or going Image->Adjustments->Desturate.

Set the blending mode to overlay.

Almost finished now.

Either select some circle brushes you have, or create your own shapes. Create a new layer behind both of your guy layers, but above the background layer and start brushing around your guy with the colour of the brushes as #0072ff.

I would supply the brushes for you, but I forgot where I got them from and I’m not sure of the permissions from the original creator. Sorry. Hopefully you will be able to achieve something similar to mine. There are some other brushes used in there too.

A good resource for brushes is Qbrushes

With your circle brush selected again, create a new layer behind the blue one and add a few more circles with the colour #bf0249.

Last thing to do is select a grungy texture background, Google provided mine, but I lost the link. Useless aren’t I?

Import it into your background underneath every later except the background. For mine I changed the blend mode to multiply and set the opacity at 71%. These values are likely to be different for you, so play around with them.

I hope this tutorial was good, though it was my first one so I don’t expect it to be perfect. Any feedback you have will be gratefully appreciated, I’d also like to see what you come up with so comment or mail me a link.

Since I first uploaded my first website, I have swapped and changed it a lot, always iterating the design, the layout and the content to what you see around you today. No doubt there are more designs on the way, but thats not for a while as I’ve finally found a layout that I like and works for me

Below you get to see the designs that evolved over the past year, excited yet?

xandesigns version 1

My first design. Ugly beast isn’t it. Don’t think much of the logo either. To think I was really happy with it at the time.

A very dull shade of grey, and not much going on. I got alot of the inspiration for this from a flash media player i found online

xandesigns version 2

Well a definate improvement on the first design, but still not much to go by. A lack of content also made this one seem a little boring.

Much, much lighter this time around. I was pleased with it, but never got to finish as at that time I got hit with a shed load of coursework.

xandesigns version 3

This was actually my design for a while, and it only changed just after christmas 2008. I spent a lot of time on this making it look pretty. It was very functional for what i wanted, and I was pleased with it.

I managed to make a nice dark design work, woo go me. Thing is certain parts of it annoyed me and it had to be gone. Sorry design!

This site is actually live. Give the image a click!

xandesigns version 4

Now we are getting to the good stuff. I was actually annoyed to replace this site. I still am. I worked really hard on this site.

I had a full nights session going on this to get a fully functional one page website animated by jQuery. It had options to change the colour scheme too! How cool!

Unfortunately the content I have doesn’t fit the design, and there was a lot of ‘mystery meat’ navigation going on. So it had to be scrapped. Good for learning though

This site is actually live. Give the image a click!

Now we come to what you see around you. This hasn’t been live for that long, yet I believe it is one of my better sites and I am happy with it, for now.

As for the future, who knows.

xandesigns version ?

This could be a future layout. I’d certainly like to code it, when i have the time though.

It’s all very childish, but I can see that it’s not going away despite how annoying it is. So I’ve decided to join in and laugh along with them instead of getting annoyed.

Oh by the way, the Facebook group is continuing to grow in size by the hour, at the time of writing this post it has 39 members, and another 180 waiting to accept invites. This is quite interesting.