Archive for July 2008

Dropbox Beta Invites

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

Fresh on the heels of receiving my Aviary Early Bird Invitation, I received a Dropbox invite!

Basically, Dropbox is another online file sharing service that works with both Mac OS and Windows. Check out the Dropbox home page for a screencast and information about the service. Their FAQ page also has plenty of information.

The beta program includes 2GB of free storage…but sign up now because once the beta is over, new accounts (FREE) are currently slated to receive only 1GB.

If you are interested in “beta testing” Dropbox, I have 9 beta invites remaining. I will send them to the first 9 people who request one.

Update: I’m all out of invites…

Aviary Early Bird Invitations

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

If you haven’t heard about Aviary:

“Aviary is a suite of rich internet applications geared for artists of all genres. From image editing to typography to music to 3D to video, we have a tool for everything. At Worth1000, we are creating a complex ecosystem for artists and providing the world with free, capable collaborative tools and an approach to collaboration and rights management that will turn the marketplace for online art on its head.”

I signed up for an “early bird” invitation months ago and last week, I finally received my invitation email. I’ve been playing around with Phoenix and Peacock and am very impressed with the quality of the tools.

The tools are definitely designed more for the “advanced hobbyist creators”, however if you’re familiar with Photoshop, Phoenix should look very familiar. [screenshot]

If you are interested in “beta testing” Aviary, I have 4 early bird invites remaining. I will send them to the first 4 people who request one.

Update: I’m all out of invites…

How To Create WordPress Themes From Scratch

Friday, July 18th, 2008

Even though my current design is fairly new, I’ve never been very happy with it. As a result, I recently started the process of designing a new WordPress Theme from scratch, and was planning on blogging about my experience.

While researching WordPress Theme tags and functions, I came accross a site called ThemeTation. Launched on June 5th, 2008 by Kai Loon, it is a well designed site that includes a WordPress related Weblog as well as free WordPress Themes (SuperFresh and Blue Blog).

What really caught my attention was the very informative series Kai Loon put together on creating a WordPress Theme from scratch. If you’ve ever considered taking on that challenge or are just interested in how WordPress Themes work, I suggest you take a look:

Part 1 - Structuring, Designing in Photoshop

Part 2 - Slicing and Coding

Part 3a - WordPress Implementation

Part 3b - WordPress Implementation cont.

Thanks Kai Loon!

ProgrammerMeetDesigner.com

Monday, July 14th, 2008

I stumbled across this site today and thought it was worth mentioning. It offers a service that helps programmers, designers, writers and entrepreneurs connect.

From ProgrammerMeetDesigner.com:

“This site was created to unite programmers and designers because rarely is a person good at both programming and designing. PMD helps programmers and designers partner up to make websites and web applications that look and work great.

Now content writers and entrepreneurs can also join up to find people to work with.”

What I am most intrigued by, is the ability to look for people interested in partnerships, not just single projects (which is also an option). I have a number of projects that I’m interested in exploring and am excited at the prospect of finding a designer to work with.

So, if you have a project or idea but can’t do it alone, take a look at ProgrammerMeetDesigner.com. Oh, and if you are a designer, who’d be interested in working together with me…let me know ;)