06 January, 2013

2013 Web Design Trends

Graphic and web design is an ever-changing field, constantly evolving with the needs and trends of society.

Designers must make it a common practice to keep up with and prepare for changing trends. While trends in the design world are somewhat hard to predict because of their quick fluidity, there are some ideas for what the coming year’s web design style holds.

Trend #1: Responsive Design

It’s glaringly obvious that technology has moved – and continues to move – to more mobile devices.

Virtually everyone in our society owns a smartphone or tablet that features smaller screens and touch screen interaction. Not to mention the ability to view the screen portrait style or landscape.

Designers used to have to design a separate website for each viewing format. With responsive web design, the same site is communicated on any format, without having to show different versions.

A lot of WordPress templates offer built in responsive design.

In short, the site design responds to the format it is being viewed on so that it is usable on any device.

Trend #2: Parallax Scrolling

A growing trend for interactive websites is parallax scrolling, which is when elements on the site scroll on different lines to create movement and a 3-D effect.

It captures the viewer’s attention and is more entertaining than pages overloaded with text or simple one-way scrolling, like this example from Bagigia:

Another system of scrolling that is more common is vertical scrolling – overtaking the few layouts that still use horizontal scrolling as well.

Internet users want usability and convenience; having to scroll both vertically and horizontally – especially on a small touch screen – does not reflect these qualities.

Trend #3: Full Page Backgrounds

It’s becoming more common to find websites with backgrounds that interact with the foreground, rather than distracting from it.

This is often the case with parallax scrolling as well, because everything works cohesively, as opposed to separate elements that the eye has to jump between. The Amazing Spider Man Game site below is a great example of a well done full page background:

This can help emphasize the personality of the site’s brand, as the background is attention grabbing. And it takes away the need (or the illusion of a need) for disjointed photos that don’t do anything for the brand.

High quality photos or vectors are needed to pull off this trend, as poor images will only distract the reader.

Pro Tip: If you don’t have high enough quality photos, try using stock photos to pull of this trend.

Trend #4: Big Buttons

With more and more internet time being spent on phones and tablets and without a mouse to click with, it’s a safe prediction that the size of buttons on touch screens will grow in 2013.

As mentioned, usability and efficiency is key in pleasing viewers. Tapping the wrong button because it’s so small is annoying and inconvenient. With the growing number in touch screen users, it’s only natural to make the buttons more useful to them.

Trend #5: Typography Design

Given all the creative possibilities for type design, websites should feature the same typographical creativity.

Many designers are beginning to lean toward more simplistic and spacious web layouts, and designing solely with type. Often an underused art, typography can communicate just as beautifully as images, like this examples from Gareth Lawn:

Trend #6: Videos on Landing Pages

With such little time to capture your site visitor’s attention, a block of text explaining your product or service is deadly for the life of your site. Consider instead creating a landing page video that draws in the attention of your users.

Many sites are beginning to employ this powerful and captivating design element. Don’t have access to a major studio to make a high production video? Plenty of stock footage exists for those on a bit of a budget.

Source: http://www.divine-project.com/gbp-web-design-trends-2013

08 December, 2012

Running PHP5 and PHP4 simultaneously on Windows

Running PHP5 and PHP4 simultaneously on Windows. Are we lazy ?

This is my rant about this topic ! Since the early days of PHP, I see regularly articles on this subject. Today I just read a new article about that, Reminder : You *Can* Run PHP4 And PHP5 On The Same Box At The Same Time. What’s the problem ?

When we write PHP scripts, we often want to know if our code runs well on other versions of PHP that the one installed on our system. Often this is to test PHP4 and PHP5, but not necessarily. I read many answers to this problem :

Running one version as an Apache module for .php files and the other one as cgi for .php5 files (or vice versa for php4) : Install PHP5 and PHP4 on the same Apache server

Install two Apache services : Switching Between Multiple php Versions Using Apache on Windows

PHP as an Apache module for one php version and another one using CGI inside a VirtualHost Plusieurs versions de PHP sur un même serveur french

Running one PHP version as an Apache module and the other one as CGI via mod_suphp, as Stuart Herbert article suggest (I never heard of “mod_suphp” before)

Finally Stuart Herbert article point us to Configure Apache to work with PHP4 and PHP5 that sums up above methods as well as different more advanced ways to do it.
Do we really need to run simultaneously PHP4 and PHP5. I don’t think so. Yes we need to test with both versions, but when we start a coding session, we do not test every function or method with both versions as soon as we write them, but instead once we have added a new feature or something like that. Are we become so lazy that we can’t just change directory names and restart Apache ?
As powerful and genuine are the above tweaks, I feel they are over complicated for the goal they want to achieve, at least for a developement system. And I put aside drawbacks. Who want to change its php extension name from .php to .php5, just to run them in php5 ?! If so, how do you test third parties code with php5 ? Do you want to edit all their files, and yours once you want to change back PHP version ? Also if cgi is used for one php version and an Apache module for another php version, your script does not run exactly in the same environment. You’ll get better performance with PHP setup as a module. Not only you will not have to deal with the CGI performance hit, but you’ll be able to use PHP’s database connection pooling. Also if some or you scripts use basic http authentication, it does not work if you run PHP as a CGI.
Here is how I deal with this problem. I put these 6 lines in a batch file php5to4.bat :

then I build a php.ini file, one for each PHP version inside its directory, and set the PHPRC environment variable to point to H:\httpd\php so that the running version of PHP will always find its ini file.
Then I put a shortcut to this batch file in my quick launch bar. Same thing for php4to5.bat. So what ? It takes me 0.1 second to change php version ! There is also a problem that I never read in these articles, the PEAR files :
If you have installed PEAR and use it, you know some of the core files have paths to PHP hard coded and some of the PEAR config parameters point to PHP, not PEAR directory. If you installed PEAR with default settings, PEAR is a sub-directory of PHP. This is a problem because if you change PHP version using one of the aforementioned methods, PEAR files you just installed with PHPx won’t be available to PHP. You can copy all PEAR files installed with PHP4 to PHP5/PEAR directory, but this is a pain, and you will not be able to run PEAR command with PHP5 because pear.ini and pear registry will be out of sync with your installed packages and paths.
The solution is to copy your PEAR directory outside your PHP directory, then run PEAR config-set to update PEAR configuration. For example, my PEAR config-show looks like this (some lines removed) :

CONFIGURATION (CHANNEL PEAR.PHP.NET):

=====================================

PEAR executables directory     bin_dir          H:\httpd\php

PEAR documentation directory   doc_dir          H:\httpd\pear\docs

PHP extension directory        ext_dir          H:\httpd\php\ext

PEAR directory                 php_dir          H:\httpd\pear

PEAR Installer cache directory cache_dir        H:\httpd\pear\pear_cache

PEAR data directory            data_dir         H:\httpd\pear\data

PHP CLI/CGI binary             php_bin          H:\httpd\php\php.exe

PEAR test directory            test_dir         H:\httpd\pear\tests

User Configuration File        Filename         H:\httpd\pear\pear.ini

System Configuration File      Filename         H:\httpd\pear\pearsys.ini

If you use this method, only one PHP version running at a given time and always inside the same PHP directory, you will have only one PEAR installation directory to deal with, whatever PHP version you run. Nice and simple.

Source: http://www.thierryb.net/site/Running-PHP5-and-PHP4-simultaneously.html?lang=fr

16 October, 2012

New Firefox Developer Tools Help You Build Responsive Websites

Firefox 15 will offer web developers a couple of cool new tools when it arrives later this year, including a very handy new “Responsive Mode” for testing your responsive websites.

It took a while for mainstream websites to catch on, but these days even Google recommends using responsive design, and now Firefox is adding tools to help web developers do just that. Mozilla developer Paul Rouget recently added Responsive Mode to Firefox’s nightly builds channel.
If you’d like to see the new Responsive Mode in action, grab the Firefox and head to Tools >> Web Developer >> Responsive Mode. (ctrl+shift+M)

Country list in Html Drop down with Arabic

Country list in Html Drop down with Arabic Name

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