Hello, gorgeous. I am Bojan Janjanin, freelance hypermedia designer. This is Yesterdayishere, a place where I write about stuff and experiment. Enjoy your stay.
Slijedi citat kolege Maria, Cipranina koji je radio po cijelom svijetu, uključujući Češku i Englesku. Doselio se u Hrvatsku i kod nas se pokušava baviti dizajnom.
The system here is so limiting and chocking for entrepreneurs and small business. What the fuck is the government thinking.
Register at Dropbox and we both get 250MB extra space. It’s a win-win.
What’s Dropbox? An easy way to store, sync and share files online. I use it for daily backup and file sharing.
How to make a good app? Here’s the short version: the secret to making a good iPhone or iPad application is pretty straightforward–you need a solid, simple concept and a great user interface. So many of the apps out there do not get this or do not do it right. The outcome is ultimately the same: the app does not sell.
I needed a stylus simply for testing purposes, as I am working on an iPad app that you can use to write and draw. Since I do not have the need for a stylus apart from testing, I decided to buy a super cheap one on eBay a few weeks back. I’ll make that sort of mistake no more. The stylus was useless. Even tapping was a problem as it required me to press fairly hard against the surface. While I did not expect a quality product for a couple of dollars, I certainly did not expect a useless one. Soon, the stylus found itself in the trash bin.
My next plan was to invest an hour or so into making a DIY stylus. I found some videos online and even found a way to make use of an old aluminum marker. The DIY stylus was actually much better than the eBay one, but I still could not do proper testing. The tapping worked OK, even the writing was fairly easy, but I lacked the precision I needed.
Plan C it was. I decided not to waste more time and order a proper stylus. The decision was an easy one as Capacitive iPad Styra had great reviews and looked really nice. My second choice was Pogo but from what I saw and read online, I liked the Boxwave one much more.
My winter white Capacitive iPad Styra Stylus came in yesterday morning, nicely secured inside a bubbly package. It looks elegant and classy, unlike some of the other products I saw online, which look like a kid’s toy. The stylus is also a ball pen, which may come in handy sooner or later. It is nice and compact, about as tall as the iPhone. It’s heavier than I though it would be, but I am really starting to enjoy the weight of it, it feels and fits nicely into my hand. The tip slides on the surface perfectly and seems to be made from a durable material, as in fact the whole product does.
Capacitive iPad Styra worked on my iPad and my faithful first generation iPhone without any problems whatsoever. Don’t let the rather big, rounded tip fool you–it allows you to be precise in both writing and drawing. I tested it on about a dozen of popular writing/drawing apps and it performed admirably. The same cannot be said for most of the apps though–their technology does not allow for genuinely smooth writing or drawing. There’s either a very slight but annoying delay or the edges of the lines you create are rough. These apps are pretty much useless to me, despite some nice features they may have.
Up until now, aside from work, I’ve been using the iPad mostly for reading. Now, I can use it for quick notes. Jotting things down is almost as easy as doing it on paper. If you’ve tried writing with your finger on the iPad, you know it’s not that easy. With a solid stylus, it is both easy and really fun. Sketching is another thing I will surely be doing in the future. Decluttering my desk and getting rid of as much paper as possible is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. With a proper stylus, I can do sketches and email or upload them in no time. I can see this becoming a part of my work routine.
In conclusion, I can definitely recommend Capacitive iPad Styra to anyone in need of a quality stylus.
A brief break from a few commercial projects has done me a world of good and I was able to finish, or just about finish, a couple of personal ones. One of them is Regenerator, a website for a local association.
The logo was done by Maja Draganić, while the logo typeface is from Nikola Đurek, both great local artists.
For now, the website is a one-pager, with basic info and news. When time permits, I’ll add more content, graphics and code proper HTML5. Hope you like it.
Here’s one of my favorite quotes, found in a book by Velimir Srića. The translation from Croatian is mine.
The incompetent are always competent to make the competent incompetent.
If you want to brush up on your Croatian, here’s the original:
Nesposobni su uvijek sposobni onesposobiti sposobne.
This year marked the 65th anniversary of an article that may have been the article that changed the history of the internet in the making–As We May Think by Vannevar Bush.
In his 10 page article, Vannevar Bush described an imaginary machine called Memex. This machine would allow the user to store and later find documents linked by associations. This kind of linking is similar to what we today take for granted in our everyday life and call hyperlinks. How’s that for innovation?
The article has influenced pioneers as Ted Nelson and Tim Berners-Lee, among others. The rest, as they say, is history.
If you are planning for a year, sow rice; if you are planning for a decade, plant trees; if you are planning for a lifetime, educate people.
-Chinese proverb
The average person in the world who lives life and considers their life boring or uninspiring, it’s because they’ve made no attempt to gain knowledge and information that will inspire them. They’re so hypnotized by their environment through the media, through television, through people living and creating ideals that everybody struggles to become that no one can actually become in terms of physical appearance and definitions of beauty and valor that are all illusions that most people surrender and live their life in meritocracy. And they may live that life and their desire may never really rise to the surface so they may want to be something else, but if it does rise to the surface and they ask themselves if there is something more – Or, why am I here? What is the purpose of life? Where am I going? What happens when I die? – They start to ask those questions. They start to flirt and interact with the perception that they may be having a nervous breakdown and in reality, what they’re doing is that their old concepts of how they viewed their life and the world start to fall apart. We’re in completely new territory in our brain and because we’re in completely new territory we’re rewiring the brain, literally reconnecting to a new concept. Then ultimately it changes us from the inside out.
Movie info: What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?
Perhaps the number one reason for my recent redesign was the desire to break free from the expectations my visitors have. As a designer, I am constantly dealing with having to put myself inside the boundaries of other peoples notion of what good design is. Since this is my personal site I am going to finally treat it just like that. From day one, I have been asking myself “are they going to like this?“, but I’ll ask that question no more. I realize the new design is too minimalistic for many of you and I am fine with that. A jaw-dropping design is not my goal this time around. Instead, I hope to produce a usable one.