Blog Thoughts, Opinions, Random Ponderings
Are Tablets and Touch Screens Changing the Way We Design?
by Bill Kalpakoglou posted Dec 28th, 2011 at 1:56pm
You'll find a slew of articles and tutorials that cover the topic of optimizing your website for tablets, but that's not what this is about. This entry is about how graphic and web designers work and the software we use. Recently I reviewed a handful of web design apps for iPad, and while none of them were as robust as a Dreamweaver, a couple of them were extemely impressive and arguably have all you'd need to code out a entire website. While there was no "Design View" or code-hinting, there was color-coding, preview, FTP transfer, and an array of web languages that were recognized. In short, you could code with it very comfortably.
Another software necessity for designers is Adobe Illustrator, or a decent vector drawing app. To my surprise the iPad has a slew of really good ones. I couldn't believe it. I thought vector drawing was something reserved for "real" computers...with mice. I READ MORE
iPad Web Design and Development Apps Reviewed
by Bill Kalpakoglou posted Oct 9th, 2011 at 12:48pm
I've had an iPhone since 2008, and ever since I've wondered if it would be possible to work on my websites on it. Or, dare I dream, if it was possible to create an entire website on one. Surely it would be a challenge, but I'm guessing every designer with an iPhone has had similar thoughts. So I searched to see if there really was "an app for that." There were, but in the end, apart from minor edits I just never got around to making a full-fledged attempt at iPhone website design (Angry Birds, you are partly to blame.) Now with an iPad and its bigger screen, more serious attempts could be made. It's very easy to do productive design and development work on your iPad.
Without further ado, here are my thoughts on the best iPad web design apps I've found:
FTP On the Go Pro
This was one of the first of and when there weren't many players in the game, it was the best. It has some handy features like being able to change permissions to your files and being able to READ MORE
Why the Flash Hate?
by Bill Kalpakoglou posted Mar 18th, 2010 at 12:05am
Recently I've encountered a slew of comments on Twitter and in user forums praising HTML 5 and the embedding feature that will allow dynamic content like movies to be played within a web page without the need for a plug-in. This really does sound exciting, as does all the buzz around Apple's brainchild, Canvas, a new drawable region of web page real estate that javascript can access and create “Flash-like” vector animations.
Along with this praise however, I've seen a lot of bashing and a “ding dong the witch is dead” attitude towards Flash which I just don't understand. A Twitter comment by a well-known CSS website declared in a recent tweet “Good to see the pending death of Flash. Designers should be using CSS anyway!” Really? To me these types of ridiculous comments sound a lot like if carpenters were to s READ MORE
