From pixels to paper, we're getting noticed

There is no greater flattery than to be made an example of so when we were asked some time ago if we would consent to being published in DesignMeltdown's, The Web Designer's Idea Book, I was truly honored.

Today, I received my copy in the mail and was thrilled to find these kind words on page 102 along side a screen shot on page 103:

"A great example of a unified design is the seyDesign site. It has an office theme, and everything flows together perfectly. The corkboard background creates a terrific foundation to tie the site together. It essentially gives the office supplies a place to exist."

Of course this isn't how the site looks today, but for this 2007 iteration of seyDesign.com to be forever immortalized in print is a true sense of accomplishment. All in all, RapidWeaver developers as a whole had a good showing in this book with various sites. Adam from Elixir Graphics has already written about his contributions. and I've heard there are more, I just haven't had time to look through each page yet.

To get yourself a copy of this most excellent web design resource, go to Amazon.com.

seyDoggy is back in the office.

We are back from or little vacay, and back on the horse, if you will, working through a pile of emails and such. On our agenda this week is to address a few bug issues in some of our RapidWeaver themes, namely a footer issue in wideNas, and a couple of mystery bugs that occasionally rear their head in cataLog and Acumen. We should have all of these addressed this week with their respective update installers ready for download.

And as always we are ever moving forward and onward with the theme developments and ideas. We have quite a list of them to get through over the next year or so so you can be sure to see one or two new themes from us every month. Yes that is an ambitious plan, but this is what we do after all, we might very well be the only full time RapidWeaver theme developers now who do nothing else.

And speaking of RapidWeaver, did you notice that RapidWeaver 4.2 has been released? Yes indeed. I have not yet tried it myself, but I have downloaded it and will be getting into it shortly. Learn more about it's release here.

We're off to London!

I'm off to the UK for a bit of a holiday. We take flight at 9:40 pm October 23 (that's today) and will be gone for about 10 days. We'll be back to answer your support questions on the week of November 1st. Remember that if you have any major concerns between now and then you can always try posting them the the Realmac Software forum and I am sure one of the kind and knowledgeable folks there will help straighten you out enough until I get back.

We'll try to keep you posted on our daily outings. That's likely to occur on Twitter so if your inclined to keep tabs on the leisure time of a theme developer geek like myself then you can come follow me.

Anyhow, stay safe and we'll catch in a few days time.

Old Friends on New Horizons

In late 2005 Chris Pavlicek (of Varsis Studio) and I started talking about collaborating on RapidWeaver themes. We both had something to offer the other; Chris with his unmistakable design style and willingness crack any code and me with my promotional skills and desire to make clean organized and effective code. By mid 2006 we were putting out some pretty revolutionary stuff.

After 3 years and many themes later, Chris and I are talking again. This time it's about me taking over his theme library, the one he has (or used to have) at Varsis Studio. Chris is really focusing hard on his RapidWeaver plugins which as any software developer will tell is very demanding on his time. Before the new seyDesign.com was done we were talking about this and working out the small details.

Today we're starting to see the results of all that talking. I was able to release Varsis Studio Fade on seyDesign.com. Fade is a RapidWeaver theme that Chris did up for a pro developer bundle back in January of 2007. I've spent a few weeks on it, gutting from the inside out and filling it full of new features.

The rest will follow over time, interspersed with a few seyDesign originals, and who knows, maybe even another Varsis/seyDoggy collaboration.

seyDesign 2008 made the cut

With all the commotion as of late it must have totally passed me by that seyDesign.com got a permanent listing on DesignSnack (probably a few weeks back now). It's always an honor to appear on sites like these, especially this one, because it helps you gauge your designs and see if you are really making the grade. Go ahead and give it a vote if you like seyDesign 2008.

I think it was more than a year ago now when the 2007 version of seyDesign got listed on this site so it's nice to see that my designs are still on track and hopefully improving in the public eye. And speaking of seyDesign 2007, that site is actually appearing in Design Meltdown's The Web Designers Idea Book, due out in October, which is just about the biggest honor any web designer can have bestowed upon him. Hopefully the site appears in a good light and not as an example of what not to do, lol. So if you are a seyDoggy or seyDesign fan, or just a fan of great web design, head over to the Design Meltdown store and pre-order your copy.

seyDoggy and RapidWeaver, a new approach

What am I up to right now? Doing what I love doing best; creating new works of wonder for a platform... erm... designing themes for RapidWeaver.

I know I am only speaking to 5-8% of the general population when I say this, but if you are one of the lucky ones who owns a mac, then you owe it to yourself to at least check out RapidWeaver. It's a great, do-it-yourself web authoring app that is insanely extensible by virtue of its proud and dedicated 3rd party development community (of which I am a long standing member).

I have been developing RapidWeaver themes on a professional level for nearly three years. In that time themes have gotten more and more advanced with each new version of the platform. Cric from Rapid-Ideas was the first theme developer to really take themes to that new level of versatility years back when he introduced the first theme boasting some 500,000 variations. Pretty soon we all followed suit.

Before long though (myself included), we all had products that would take a month or more to complete, nearly as long to update, would upload dozens of css files, a multitude of images and scripts, complex themes mean more support... themes and the site they make were getting slow and fat! The mental taxation on the end user swimming in a sea of variation to make a site that only uses 10% of a themes ability is immeasurable. And it goes without saying that this method of theme development is getting costly, especially if a new theme is a dud.

For the last few years I have been looking at ways and approaches to trim the fat. #1 priority was to eliminate support. While developing themes for THEME WEAVER I really looked at streamlining their approach so that support would be nearly non existent. I found that fewer options in a RapidWeaver theme were the key. This was hard to adopt in my own, already established theme library, so I looked at ways of simplifying the user experience.

To do this I started to employ javascript to do some of the dirty work for the end user; rounding corners, adding drop shadows, etc... But with this came compatibility issues with other 3rd party RapidWeaver products, namely plugins that used javascript as well. Though things were getting easier for the end user, for me? not so much. For the last year I have been enjoying great success with very little support; a stellar combination, but on the back of an aging library of themes. I needed new products, ones that I think are hot, designed the way I want them, easy to use, require little support, lightweight, cost effective to make...

That's when the lightbulb went off. I want to make themes for me, a designer... I want to make designer themes! And so a new line was born at seyDesign.com; Designer themes, a new line of RapidWeaver themes that are just good looking and nothing else. Not ground breaking, not revolutionary, not stuffed with feature over feature... just hot themes!

Yesterday saw the release of the first RapidWeaver theme born of my new approach; Tagg.

We finally launched seyDesign 2008

Did you hear that? That was the sigh of relief heard around the world. Why? Because I just launched the biggest site porting I have ever done in my career with nothing more than a few typo's to sully to good name of seyDoggy. In case you've missed the buzz, I am talking about the LONG awaited seyDesign 2008 relaunch, a rather large on-line store and resource that sells RapidWeaver themes.

On the surface it doesn't look like such a big deal right? But underneath it all is a site that consists of more than 280 pages which include product write-ups, downloads, support areas, contact forms and store pages. Nearly all of this was rebuilt from the ground up; new copy, new graphics, new style, new typography... a ton of work! But the most challenging in any site relaunch is not have any broken or orphaned links, files or downloads. So far I have only managed one broken download link. Not bad out of 280+ pages.

Now that I have this monster behind me, it's time to celebrate the Canada Day long weekend the best I know how... CAMPING! I will catch you all again on July 2. w00t!

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seyDesign 2008 is nearly complete

It has been months in the making and may be a week or two longer, but seyDesign 2008 is definitely nearing completion. All that's left to do is tie up some of the loose ends, do some browser testing, write a press release or two...

So in working on seyDesign 2008, I have been able to take a retrospective look at seyDesign, seyDoggy and where things have gone with both branches in the past 3 years. One thing has really struck me; Kitchener-Waterloo is well known for it's tech-sector (thanks in part to R.I.M and our incredible universities), Kitchener-Waterloo has a lot of web designers and web developers and Kitchener-Waterloo has a reasonably good Mac to PC ratio (enough to support both an independent reseller and a Best Buy Apple store)... So why is it then, that I remain the only RapidWeaver theme developer in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, and only one of three in all of Canada?

RapidWeaver is no flash in the pan; it's here to stay. The same is true of Macs. I would welcome the some local camaraderie in this world of RapidWeaver theme development and maybe some day it will happen. If you are a web designer, a Mac user, have heard of RapidWeaver and hail from the Kitchener-Waterloo area, why not drop me a line. There is so much to talk about

FlipSide5 awarded place in DesignSnack

What an honor this morning to find that our submission of the FlipSide5 website to DesignSnacks website showcase, has received enough positive feedback to earn a spot in the permanent showcase. Currently you can find the FlipSide5 site on the front page of DesignSnack or you can have a look at the FlipSide5 submission permalink.

Welcome to seyDoggy 2008

Well I have great news and almost great news. As you can see, seyDoggy 2008 is alive and kicking (that's the great news)! It's been totally rebuilt from the ground up, as you can see, and has been streamlined somewhat, to reflect the usage patters that I saw come across the site over the last few years. I've cut away a lot of the cruft and trimmed it down to the stuff you seem to care about most; the blog and the portfolio.

Here's the almost great news; I was hoping to tell you about a great new site we made for a great new client of ours who makes great products for the iPhone, but... erm... that nasty old NDA got in the way. This time it was Apple vs. my client and not me (phew!) but just the same the site launch has been put on hold until the legal bit and bobs can be sorted out with Apple. It is great news none the less because I am just so please with it's out come that I just can't wait for you to see it. Hopefully the coming week will shine some new hope on a release date.

So let me know what you think of the new seyDoggy.com!

I'm gonna pull some Dog-FU on yo a$$!

seyDoggy is about to undergo a metamorphosis, a coming of age if you will. I am tired of making great websites for everybody, and not having a great one of my own.

In the next day or so you will witness the new seyDoggy.com in all it's glory, accompanied by the news of a great new site that that we made for a client who is very involved in iPhone applications. It will be pretty big news and you won't want to miss it.

Whoa back! Change of plans.

Yeah, yeah, you've been waiting patiently for seyDesign 2008 to be launched and I have told you a few times that real clients keep getting in the way (surely I jest). Well a rather important client has been consuming all my time for the last month or so and in lieu of the results of this clients website we've decided that seyDoggy.com was LONG overdue for a slight tweaking.

So please hang tight for a bit while we get ready to unveil the all new seyDoggy.com. And have no fear, seyDesign 2008 will surely follow... soon... I hope.

Productivity comes down to searching

In my experience, how fast you work is directly linked to how fast you can find things. Finding things fast is key feature on macs with built in services like spotlight and is amplified by apps like Quicksilver but too many people neglect the simplest aspects of these tools. A new article on nutMac reminds us that spotlight commenting is an invaluable feature of OS X 10.4.

Wiggly Wumble Poem: First day of school

Remember your first day of school? Wiggly Wumble writes all about it in their most recent poem titled First day of school. Go and have a read...

Path Finder image conversion trick

If, as a Mac user, you don't already know about Path Finder, I suggest you give it a spin. It is so many system apps built into one that it will make your head spin. To help you through some of it's features mind you, nutMac.com published the occasional article on it's use. Always in search of faster ways of getting things done, nutMac.com has found a quick and convenient way to convert icns file formats into any other workable image type at the click of a button.

Group photography done right

Photographing large groups poses a challenge to many photographers. All too often we try to squash them together or line them up like they're in the military. Merrifield Photography has the answer you might be looking for to help combat this battle of the boring in this how-to article for shooting group pictures.

Show Recent Posts, revisited

You might remember last week when I announced a RapidWeaver snippet, Show Recent Posts, I had been working on was released to the greater public. After some extensive feedback I thought I would dig my heels in and add a function that I certainly know I would want in the snippet, the ability to truncate posts to a predetermined length. I wasn't easy though but with some help from some friends I was finally able to pull it off. Just yesterday I let loose the second version of this RapidWeaver snippet, Show Recent Posts 2, which incorporates the new post shortening function. Enjoy!

New poem at Wiggly Wumble

A new poem showed up on Wiggly Wumble a few weeks back called Alphabet for Bedtime. It is a silly little peek into the bedtime routines of many children worldwide, as the poem makes it's way from A to Z. See if any of it rings true for you and your little ones.

Merrifield is feeling Alpha

And finally, some really good news for all you Minolta hold-outs... well that's me and about 5 other people I'm sure. But anyhow, Merrifield Photography brings us some excellent news.

"Touching" opinions

So... I said there were a few things to get off my chest... we'll my curmudgeonly side shone through on our Mac productivity blog, nutMac.com in a post venting about the new iPods. Have a read here.