35 Designers x 5 Questions

I'm always on the look out for great web design and CSS tips. There's no lack of either on the web. I usually stumble over dozens of them - all claiming to be the best thing since sliced images - and they soon become very bland. Here's one that stuck out for me.

Smashing Magazine (which does look like a rather smashing magazine) asked 35 web designers five design related questions. The answers are a wealth of knowledge. The amount of knowledge in the invisible college of web design is staggering, and quite disconcerting to new web designers. The best shortcuts, tips and of course IE bug workarounds are divulged openly. It's a great place to touch up your design skills and add a couple tricks to your toolbox.

How it should have ended ...

I've got to thank the crazy for this one. The guys from How it should have ended just seem to have the same sense of humour that we do. They've taken all of the best movies (and Borat) and changed the endings, just like the title says. For honesty like that I'm going to have to add an extra banana.

My favourite has to be the Superman ending. Maybe that's because I'm a big Batman fan from back in the day.

This one is a 9 banana-er for sure.

Itchy Animation's Light Tutorial

Lighting in 3D animation makes the biggest difference. That's my opinion. You can model the greatest looking Chinabean in the world but lighting is what really makes it magic. The best looking scenes in movies, 3D and otherwise, look that way because of the lighting. Getting great lighting is difficult though, especially if you don't know what you're doing. When it comes to lighting, I don't have a clue. That's probably why I found this lighting tutorial (http://www.itchy-animation.co.uk/light.htm)
) so interesting.

Itchy (or whoever the dude is who wrote the tutorial) really goes into the technical detail - getting you to think about all the light that makes up a scene. Its really in depth, I even learnt quite a bit about lighting in photography. Parts 5, 6 and 7 didn't exist when I wrote this, but I hope he will be adding them soon. It is a great read for any 3D artists, and maybe even photographers and artists could get something out of it.

True Combat:Elite

True Combat Elite is an entirely free game based on another free game Wolfenstein Enemy Territory. Both games are available for Mac, Windows and Linux and can be downloaded here.
Its a FPS (first person shooter) with awesome graphics and physics. No AI though :(

Also, the download process wasn't the best, in fact it was downright horrible - I had to try more than a couple of times to get the whole thing. It was pretty irritating, especially the AusGamers web site which didn't allow more than two download streams. Of course it was only after about 100Mb before they cut you off, apparently for no reason. Eventually I found a small side note spelling out the "Thou shalt have no more than 2 streams" rule. Forget about resuming your download as well. In the end I just got it from another mirror.

Remember to download the 200+Mb of Wolfenstein first, you need it to play TC:E. All in all its a download of 600-700Mb. Pretty big, but the free game is definitely worth it. 9 Bananatjies.

Themed Fonts at TypeNow

Yes, I finally managed to update the logo on the page, and it only took three days to blog about it. If you're wondering, I got the Lego font from TypeNow. There's a whole bunch of really cool movie, game and band themed fonts there. Great for any purpose, especially themed events. I would read up carefully on the license before using it for anything commercial - They are free, but I would still be careful. Eight bananas.

Wii have a problem

Nothing really special about this site, it just gave me a good laugh. Check it out here. Its a site solely dedicated to the injuries incurred to household furniture at the hands if butterfingered, over enthusiastic Wii players.

For those who don't know, Wii is Nintendo's latest game console running in competition to Sony's Playstation 3 and Microsoft's XBox 360. The console comes with a remote that you can swing around to control your player. Wiihaveaproblem is a collection of what happens when the remote flies OUT OF CONTROL and the strap breaks. Its very funny.

Wikipedia's Entry on the Fine-Tuned Universe

I actually found this whilst reading about the atheist Anthony Flew. It explains the idea that life in our universe would not be possible if the constants (such as our distance from the sun) that govern it were changed slightly. If one of these were tweaked by even the tiniest amount it would be utter chaos. Well, more like utter nothing, but utter chaos sounds cooler.

As with most controversial topics, I prefer reading the Wikipedia entry over a specific Christian view, mainly because you get to see both sides' views. This isn't always true however. The entries on Wikipedia are written by the public and are subject to the bias of the writer. Keep this in mind whenever you're researching something there.

Be warned that this may not be everyone's chocolate moose, or even their chocolate yak, especially if the word universe sends you to slumberland. If you're like me however, this one is right up your milky way. I'd give it 8 bananas.

www.stumbleupon.com

StumbleUpon.com is a crime. Sites like that just shouldn't be allowed on the web. Its really just a site that you plug in your interests and it sends you to a random page that it thinks you would like. Before you know it you have been caught up in a hopeless cycle of finding cool sites. Its definitely worth getting the toolbar, but if you do, then don't expect to get any work done. You can spend hours just clicking the Stumble button.

Brabys maps and Shell Geostar

Ever been looking for directions? Here are two fantastic sites worth having a look at:

www.brabysmaps.co.za/brabys/directions.asp

and

www.shellgeostar.co.za

Both give you step by step directions to your destination with distances. Braby's gives you the speed limit as well. It also provides you with the option to change your route, but I couldn't for the life of me get it right. That feature would have been nice because both sites sent me down some extra roads. For example, for my trip down to Plett it sent me off and on the main highway a couple of times.

Either way the maps did end at the right place, and they even started pretty much from my house.The distance and time feature is also really handy for calculating long trips.

Updated: Found a lot more bugs with these sites. Still quite handy though (especially if you're trying to clock up kilometers on your car allowance :D) for generating maps to functions and emailing them.

Lately I have found Google Maps quite handy. I used it to find my way out to the last church camp out past Magaliesburg, and it was great. The roads were all there - well until we got to the dirt road, but I had no pie-my-eye dreams of seeing that so it was fine.

Knocked it down a notch as promised. Got you're spice weasel? BAM!

www.wheretostay.co.za

Here's another nice site I found useful in searching for holiday places to stay. The web interface is really nicely done and the site is so easy to use. The information on each resort is really good and up to scratch. I'd give this about an 8/10.

www.wheretostay.co.za

neatfonts.com

I found this catch on blendernation.com. Neatfonts.com is a free online font library. I always find it hard to find a good font and usually end up going with something plain, so I am always looking for good font sites. Neatfonts.com is nice and easy with a ton of really nice looking fonts and quick and easy download.

Moofx and Script.aculo.us

There’s actually two websites for today. The first is moofx, which is a simple javascript library that allows for cool dynamic html effects. Probably the coolest is the accordion effect, which is really effective. Click on the headings of each section and see how they fold up. Fantastic. I didn’t get round to using it, but it looks really simple and has minimal extra code to use.

http://moofx.mad4milk.net/

The second one is script.aculo.us which is a more hardcore javascript library with some fantastic effects. This one is for the more hardcore web developers, and might require a bit more to get it working with your pages, but it sure is worth it. Be sure to check out the demos page.

http://script.aculo.us/

www.brick.com

Yes, this is the site of Acme brick company, which naturally sells bricks. Not too exciting at all, but also on the site is an architectural tool which allows you to choose the exact brick, brick laying style and even cement colour. The final image can be saved in a number of image formats making it the greatest tool I have come across for generating realistic brick textures.

A fantastic tool for anyone doing 3D architectural models. For more details see the latest blenderart magazine (http://www.blenderart.org/).

Cons:

• Textures are non-repeating - however you can make the textures really large.


• Bandwidth heavy - downloads textures from the net as you need them, so you will need a fairly good connection

Gantt Project

Here is a fantastic open source project organizer similar to Microsoft Project. It is cross platform so you can use it on mac (X only L) and linux as well.

http://ganttproject.sourceforge.net/

I have actually known about this for a while, but I saw it in action on the MakeHuman (which is also worth taking a look at) site.

There are also lots of third party tools, which I haven’t played with, so I can’t really say much about them.