Note: This was done on off hours. Therefore a week’s work is about ten to fifteen hours.

This theme is more modern looking than the previous two. There is adequate white space surrounding objects and consistency has been preserved across pages. I have also made every attempt to make it look good on all browsers. Different sections of the theme (header, main menu, content area, etc.) have different appeals to it so that they do not conflict with each other in appearance.

The most notable element on this design is the large desktop area on the top of the page. On my previous two themes I used an area similar to this to designate specialty. For example, for Halloween, I had jack-o-lanterns on this space. But the header blended with the rest of the design too well to the point where it was not noticeable. There was also a lot of work involved as a change in the header was in fact a change in the entire design. Now on this design, the header has been made an integral part of the design while without making it a part of the content.

With the introduction of this theme, I’m going to release the previous theme to the WordPress community. It will take some time though as it needs some modifications and patching before making it more public aware.

Thank you for visiting nStation.

Ergonomics of the right-handed design: The practice of creating right hand oriented icons has come in to play from industrial design as almost all devices are right-hand oriented. If you haven’t noticed this before, the right-handed design is the same reason why your TV remote is well operated from your right hand compared to the left hand. The power button (or any other crucial controller) is conveniently placed where your thumb finger would rest when you are holding the remote. This is the same reason why controls are placed on the right-hand side of the elevator; and the list can go on and on.

To illustrate this, I’ve shown the left hand orientation in the Google Android UI icons here. See how the Android design is completely opposite to the common design in certain cases.

Primary and secondary objects are used in these icons to suggest the left hand orientation. For example the Alarm Clock, Browser, Calculator and Calendar icons are oriented towards the left hand side. The Dialer and Messaging icons clearly show the left hand orientation as the handset and the pencil is held left-handedly.

Android screenshot courtesy androidcommunity.com.

Certainly the current Android prototype is too early to sustain till the final release. Probably the entire set of UI icons will be changed in the final release. Maybe this is done purposely to be different from the rest of the world. The guys at Google are famous for doing things differently. I’m not complaining here — just enjoying the fact that someone has made a design that suite my style as I’m a left-hander!

Hi Resolution Images

BilliTones 2005 Poster (36×24′)
BilliTones 2005 Poster (17×22′)

More Details

Project Name: BilliTones 2005 Sri Lanka Tour Posters
Date Created: 2005
Project Type: Freelance
Duration: 2 weeks
Software: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator
Delivery: Flattened Artwork

Note: the color theme of the website was chosen by the client.

Screenshots

More Details

Project Name: AMDCCI.org Website
Date Created: 2003
Project Type: Freelance
Duration: 1 month
Software: Ulead PhotoImpact, Adobe Dreamweaver (then Macromedia Dreamweaver)
Delivery: HTML source files and related images

Usage

My preferred way of using portable apps is to use them on a different partition where I usually keep my documents, music and other stuff. I use the PortableApps Suite that has the well designed start menu like UI. There are three flavors to the PortableApps Suite installer and my choice is the Platform Only edition as it is all what’s required if you prefer to hand-pick the software titles that will be installed later on.

Organization

The PortableApps Suite installer creates two folders (Documents and PortableApps), an executable called StartPortableApps.exe and an Autorun.ini file on the root folder of the partition.

The Documents folder is similar to the Windows My Documents folder and has three sub directories for Music, Pictures and Videos. This is where I keep all my files, music and videos. You can also point your Windows My Documents folder to this folder so that when you save in My Documents, you are really saving instead here.

The PortableApps folder is where the apps are installed. This folder will grow as you install applications. All portable apps are installed in a sub directory under this directory. If you ever need to uninstall an app, just remove the relevant folder from this directory.

The StartPortableApps.exe is the application that initiates the PortableApps Menu. If you install the suite on a portable device (such as a USB Pen Drive) the Autorun.ini file will make sure that this file will run automatically when you connect the device to your computer. Since I’m installing this on a fixed device I make a link to the StartPortableApps.exe on my desktop and run it every time I start Windows. The PortableApps Menu puts an icon on the system tray and hence you access your favorite portable applications.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Most portable apps do not use the Windows registry. They save settings on a file on their own folder. This is a key feature of portability. The other main feature is that they have minimal disk utilization. This makes the applications run slightly faster than their counterparts.

A major disadvantage is security. The partition you have selected to install portable apps may be accessible to others who have access to your machine and hence your files are exposed. This is not a major issue if you are the only person who’s using the computer or you have set proper privileges to prevent others from accessing the partition. You may also go that extra mile and use TrueCrypt to create an encrypted volume so your data is totally out of sight for others.

Conclusion

Life becomes a lot easier when using portable apps since managing your favorite software and files becomes a matter of copying and pasting. Although I have written this post with Windows is mind, please note that most portable apps have Mac and UNIX distributions. The list shown below is my favorite set of portable apps.

• AbiWord Portable
• Audacity Portable
• InfraRecorder Portable
• Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition
• Mozilla Thunderbird, Portable Edition
• Notepad++ Portable
• Pidgin Portable
• PNotes Portable
• Sumatra PDF Portable
• ToDoList
• VLC Media Player Portable
• WinMerge Portable
• WinSCP Portable
• WordWeb Portable

Mini FAQ

What if I want to use the same set of portable apps at home?

Copy the folder PortableApps along with the StartPortableApps.exe to your home machine. Use a partition that is not the system partition to prevent data loss in the case of a reinstallation.

How easy is it to install a new portable application?

Open the PortableApps Menu and select ‘Options -> Install a New App’. If you manually copy the application folder inside the PortableApps folder then select ‘Options -> Refresh App Icons’; the PortableApps Menu will pick up the newly installed/copied application and show it in the list.

What if I want to move all the content on this partition to another partition? Will portable apps still work?

Yes. Almost all portable apps use relative paths to store data and do not depend on where you save files. Just copy the contents of your entire partition to the new partition and run the StartPortableApps.exe from the new location and you are good to go.

I reinstalled Windows. Do I have to reinstall PortableApps Suite?

No. Just run the StartPortableApps.exe on the portable apps partition. For convenience you can create a shortcut on your desktop to this file.

Do I really have to use the PortableApps Suite Menu?

No. The PortableApps Suite Menu is just a launcher application with a few other handy features (like backup/restore) to make your life easier. You can absolutely be on your own and run individual apps by going in to the relevant folder.

Screenshot

The following image is a screenshot of the main player and playlist.

On Facebook the main navigation is on the top of the page and it show links to Profile, Friends, Inbox, etc. This is fine as long as you are on the home page or on your own profile page. But often users visit other people’s profile pages for obvious reasons. What happens here is that (naturally) users associate the top navigation with the current profile owner. In other words, even when not in your own profile page people tend to associate the top navigation bar with the person they are looking at. So in order to see who’s friends with the currently profile owner, users click on the ‘Friends’ link on the navigation bar. Consequently the association between context and task has been broken and hence the user is mislead.

In experience design word such as ‘my’, ‘your’ and other subjective terms are used to prevent this misleading when the same action can be performed on different objects of the same class. Although this won’t make everyone aware of the current context; it will at lease reduce the confusion among the majority of users.

Apparently everyone is in a hurry to give their site a new look and Mozilla falls no short. Check out the new Firefox Add-ons site with the hip search bar and pretty inner pages. Although the previous website didn’t have any serious usability pitfalls in its design, the new look-and-feel is very compelling to use. I love the fact that they’ve decided to show a couple of thumbnails on the main page and provide a clear rating and reviewing panel on the convenient right-hand side of the page. Furthermore that green color search box somehow invites me to explorer more. Another good example for effective use of color to uplift the usability of a design.

It is also worth mentioning the drop-down categories list on the left hand side of inner pages that is so well designed that it is not one of those “hover me and I’ll show you myself” kind-a-design. A note to all you AJAX loving, “I’d do whatever the dudes do” web designers, learn from the pioneer.

I experienced this as I was installing the Windows Live Mail program on my laptop. After I started the setup program I notices two very interesting messages appear on the setup dialog box that actually made me smile.

The first one showed up as the setup was taking longer than expected to download the packages from the Internet:
“Sorry, this is taking a little longer than expected. Please bear with us just a few more minutes”

And the second one showed up when it was installing the downloaded packages:
“Installation may take a few minutes. Feel free to do other things while you wait.”

This way of acknowledging the user is very important for a better human-computer interaction. I think the traditional 3 limits for response times have to be altered to facilitate the sophistication available on modern hardware. Nowadays, the time limit for keeping the users attention on a given context is way below 10 seconds. This value continues to shrink down if feedback is further delayed from the machine. You may have heard people say ‘my computer is so slow’ if the software has lack of appropriate feedback. Software installation packages that download certain parts of the package from the Internet are notorious in breaking users’ patience. This eventually leads the user disliking and discontinuing the software. The move towards providing friendly messages certainly help people to bond with their software better than they are now.