Andrew Stevens » Tools

An eee T91

Andrew — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 02:06:20 +0000

I remain a fan of the ASUS eee series. Further to my old eee, I have now picked up a new T91.

The specs:

Intel Atom Z520 Processor
1GB RAM
16GB solid state drive, 16GB SD Card, 20GB Eee Storage
8.9″ LED-lit resistive touchscreen
Windows XP Home
WLAN 802.11b/g/n (draft)
225mm x 164mm x 25.2-28.4mm
0.96 kg weight

SUMO Paint

Andrew — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 23:07:05 +0000

I am always tweaking images for one reason or another, sometimes for a client sometimes for me, but this looks handy…

Sumopaint is a fast, easy, simple but powerful image editing software.

Try it out here: http://www.sumo.fi/products/sumopaint

Need to run multiple versions of Firefox on Windows or Linux?

Andrew — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 08:06:27 +0000

I have had a few people ask recently how to run multiple versions of Firefox on the one Windows machine. The procedure is the same for Linux.

What you need to do is to install each version of Firefox into it’s own folder with a different profile for execution.

On Windows, create shortcuts like this:

“C:\Program files\Firefox\Firefox-1.5\firefox.exe” -p Firefox-1.5 -no-remote
“C:\Program files\Firefox\Firefox-2.0\firefox.exe” -p Firefox-2.0 -no-remote
“C:\Program files\Firefox\Firefox-3.0\firefox.exe” -p Firefox-3.0 -no-remote

Away you go…

Pattern Libraries

Andrew — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 01:41:59 +0000

I am currently working on a project that has had to review and implement user interfaces. The customer is in a hurry, as always, and the user (i.e. the people that pay the bills) are in danger of being ignored.

So what is the solution to this?

Well apart from negoitating and adovcating the user experience at every turn, I also educate others through the informal demonstration of Pattern Libraries like these:

http://welie.com/ - Patterns in Interaction Design
http://ui-patterns.com/ - User Interface Design Pattern Library
http://patterntap.com/ - Web design patterns and inspiration
http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/ - Using YUI?

So why another post full of tools? I am finding that blogging good tools is easier than bookmarking them. I get to share the gems of my research and I think it will be interesting to see what I was doing at a point in time by the tools I was using.

UI tools for you to check out!

Andrew — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 00:59:59 +0000

I do a lot of interaction design and like to experiment with lots of different tools. Have a look at these:

Balsamiq – A Flash based mock-up tool with a desktop version. I have used this and I like it a lot.
RapidRabb.it – Browser based prototyping. My next tool to try.
Pencil Project – Firefox browser based GUI prototyping. I don’t do many GUI applications (I mainly do web applications) but I am determined to test this out.