Bits and Bytes

The Browser Reinvented

2009-06-23T11:10:00.000+02:00

Yes, you read that correctly! I am participating in the latest Mozilla Design Challenge. With the help from my friend and colleague Vojta Outulny we produced a concept and submitted it in the current (Summer 09) challenge. The public voting starts today, so check the Showcase later today. The video (with my crappy narrative) is just an ad to lure you to our micro site dedicated to the concept.

The hunt for a nice and cheap mockup tool.

2009-05-28T10:41:00.000+02:00

Time has come for my pet project to assume a form of a software program. And this marvel will have a user interface. Being a User Experience professional I can't leave the interface to just come to be by anyone who happens to be in charge of the IDE churning out the code. There must be a propper process. The hunt for a tool, that will help me create the mockups has begun. FYI My tool of choice

Dawn of War 2 - Free Soundtrack Available!

2009-04-30T11:09:00.002+02:00

Landing on the Steampowered store page for the Dawn of War 2 today did reveal a nice gift. The soundtrack for this game is available as a free download (direct link, ~190MB, RAR archive)!Sounds like a top notch album to me! Don't hesitate and give it a listen, even if epic heroic soundtracks aren't your cup of tea.

Amiestreet.com - all your features belong to us!

2008-11-06T11:06:00.008+01:00

This is a continuation of my last post, where I was discussing the usability mistakes the Amiestreet.com team did while re-designing their site. The changed features were intentionally omitted. Unfortunately, to understand the negative sentiment of existing users, one has to consider the features as they're the main reason behind rejecting the new UI.Note, that this review will be written based

Amiestreet.com redesign usability failures

2008-11-04T09:18:00.002+01:00

So Amiestreet.com was redesigned and access to the old site was cut off recently. That would've been good if the new design was better than the old. Which isn't. Read on to find why I think it is so.Just one note before I dive deep into the comparison - being a longtime user of Amiestreet my views can differ from yours. Missing features would not be obvious to you, so I tried to avoid mentioning

Some Velvet Morning - Rock you should not miss!

2007-11-15T11:13:00.001+01:00

'Some Velvet Morning' is a rock band, that recently published their debut album 'Silence Will Kill You'. And it does ROCK!You can still get it from amiestreet.com quite cheaply (around $9 now, will not get past $10.78 anyway). And its all high quality (~256kbps VBR) mp3s without DRM. Listen for yourself ...

Alone in the Dark - another legend destroyed

2008-04-23T15:20:00.002+02:00

So I saw the video interview with some Atari woman talking about Alone in the Dark. To cut it short for you ...CameraThe original game was innovative in its time - think 2D adventure turned 3D. The CCTV perspective - you played the game, but watched it as if through CCTV cameras - enhanced the atmosphere considerably. Plus the game creators had control over what the player would see. Pure visual

GameGuru Dead/Hacked?

2008-02-08T16:37:00.000+01:00

I don't know what exactly happened, but this showed up on http://gameguru.box.sk (the old address of my favourite gaming news site):Accessing their new address (ggmania.com) produces a Server Not Found response. :(I miss you guys already!Update: Seems like this was some technical glitch and they're running now.

Finding Firefox extensions for 3.0 Beta

2008-02-08T13:39:00.000+01:00

I finally got pissed with my inability to reduce the scope of addons.mozilla.org to only those extensions, that work with Firefox 3.0 (beta 2). After a quick tuning, this query is what finally helped me to get to a usable list:+"3.0" "Works with" "Firefox:" site:addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addonhope you find what you seek ...

What a wonderful bubble ...

2007-12-05T09:49:00.000+01:00

... this must be if people are making such nice videos about it! Watch it if you haven't done so yet. I haven't seen such fun presentation of facts in a long time.

Divide and Conquer gets double click - all it took was an email.

2007-11-01T10:05:00.000+01:00

Well, the title says it all. Since my son was born the pool of free time has shrinked considerably, so most of my past projects have come to a halt (or progressing very slowly). 'Divide and Conquer' was one of them. Sometimes it takes an email (thanks to Veselin Stoev) to get me going. So without further ado, here's a newer version of DnC (v 1.1), that adds double cliking. This new function is

AutoHotkey + Lifehacker = Not enough sleep :)

2006-11-09T04:40:00.000+01:00

The life flowed around peacefully ... until I read this article on lifehacker.com. My mind could not rest until I analyzed the usability of the small utility. I have not felt such urge to try something new for a long time. Perhaps too long.I saved the autohotkey.com page to my del.icio.us account today yesterday at 14:57:27 (2:57:27 PM). Since that time my life just started to speed up.There were

The INSERT COIN plague spreads

2007-10-18T17:37:00.000+02:00

Could not resist the temptation. I just had to ...Now you know. The credit for this goes to Yaakov.Update: If you try this, please:take a photoupload it to flickrtag it as "HP Insert Coin" (one hpinsertcoin tag please)watch the collection grow!Share your fun!;)

Sellaband - You're the record company!

2007-08-24T09:32:00.000+02:00

Are you:searching for good new music?pissed off with the big labels?passionate about the artists you listen to?If you answered yes to one or more of the questions above, you could be interested in sellaband.com.What's so special about them you ask? They're a music promotion place. They work for the artist and for you - the investor. Yes, 'investor'. Because it's you and only you (and others like

Ressurection!

2007-08-22T08:47:00.001+02:00

This blog is officially ressurected. Content about music available on amiestreet.com and sellaband.com will be available. Maybe I'll even add some UI designers' rants ;)Stay tuned for more ...

Old games made new?

2005-06-20T16:23:00.000+02:00

I read an interview with Todd Howard from Bethesda (the guys, that did the Elders Scrolls saga) on telefragged.com recently. The interviewer mentioned the previous games in the "series" and I began to remember what they were like ...... the yellow goblins in Arena chasing me through the dungeon ...... the fun, when I jumped with all kinds of steed from various roofs in Dagerfall ...... the

The Earth is SMALL

2005-06-03T08:09:00.000+02:00

I played (GuildWars) with a ?man? from Wisconsin (US) yesterday and found out I needed a tool to quickly check local time in various timezones.Having a passionate love for programming, I thought at first about creating such a tool by myself. Thankfully I posses many of the programmer's virtues, among them a good deal of laziness :)Google helped again and came with this page. You can even compare

Guild Wars

2005-05-19T17:25:00.000+02:00

I am playing Guild Wars. What a wonderful on-line RPG!Did I mention you don't need to pay monthly fees? Just buy the game and you're good to go!Very good graphics and various very thought out rules to prevent griefers. Read the reviews here.

My game free week ended yesterday ...

2005-04-21T14:09:00.000+02:00

... with a big comeback of Battle Isle: The Andosia War! This continuation of the classical Battle Isle saga (every piece of the series was a masterfully crafted game!) is a good looking, turn-based 3D strategy game. I set the the graphics card to do 4xAA (with temporal anti-aliasing), 8xAF and went gaming.The results amazed me, the game looked incredible and the gameplay was as good as the day I

the resurrection

2005-04-18T10:45:00.000+02:00

My box is alive an kicking again! :)The reinstallation was less painfull, than expected. I was quite amazed, that all my settings remained intact and the system remembered KDE settings, gkrellm skins and many other things. Having the /home directory on a separate partition was a good decision!For a while I played with the thought of installing another distro (debian and gentoo), but I had to get

why am I using lynx to write this

2005-04-16T21:48:00.000+02:00

I had a working Mandrakelinux 10.0 installation some 30 minutes ago. Now I am using lynx to write this blog entry. You never heard about lynx before? It's a textmode web browser and I am happy to have it.In my effort to install amaroK from source I had to upgrade various parts of my installation, because it would not compile otherwise. What I didn't know was, that replacing some of the required

./configure --enable-debug=full --prefix=`kde-config --prefix`

2005-04-14T23:25:00.000+02:00

... downloaded amaroK source a few hours ago, but couldn't get the thing to ./configurenow it doesthe thing was I replaced the >`< with >'< ... don't know why ... I just wanted the command to look better ...

1 2 3 ... ahem ... this is me, speaking

2005-04-14T21:00:00.000+02:00

So there's spare time to set up a blog. Finally. In a recent dispute with my wife, she accused me of being hooked on computer games.Well, she's wrong.But I had to agree to her terms and will have a game-free week. I wonder if she changes her mind when I will start the computer without playing any game in the next 7 days.