Social media has become an integral part of modern society. There are general social networks with user bases larger than the population of most countries. There are niche sites for virtually every special interest out there. There are sites to share photos, videos, status updates, sites for meeting new people and sites to connect with old friends. It seems there are social solutions to just about every need.

Webdesignerdepot has reviewed the history and evolution of social media from its humble beginnings to the present day. Their conclusion is that Social media has come a long way since the days of BBSs and IRC chats and media continues to evolve on a daily basis. With major social networks and social media sites making changes and improvements on an almost daily basis, it’s sure to keep evolving in coming years.

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The guys from teehanlax+lax have designed a iPhone application that introduces a new optional home screen. A screen that doesn’t require you to scan for red dots with numbers inside of them. Instead it would display information and notifications of things that are new and relevant to you.

I think their propose is quite interesting and awesome and Apple might implement it.

View here other screenshots.

Origami is the Japanese art of folding paper, but the goal is to use small folds and creases to bring about delicate and intricate objects.

Origami Web 2.0 Logos

Paddy Donnelly has turned the Web 2.0 Apps/Sites Logos into origami style. You can download them here.

Tutorial

If you want to learn to make a simple origami logo you can start with Zen Elements tutorial: Create an Origami Logo

Google Wave is a new real-time communication service that will launch to the public later this year. What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document, where people can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

If you want to find more about Google Wave:

• Google Official post
• Mashable Google Wave complete guide
• or Google the Web

One of the elements that need to be translated are the buttons. They are very fancy, with icon and glow effect so I’m implenting them using the full-button-resize technique that I described in a previous post. Everything is going ok but I have some problems with Safari, the height of the button should be with 1px less that the Firefox css code, so I search for a css hack.  Nobody likes css hack but most of us have use of them once in a while.

Here is the way that I solved my problem:

@media screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio:0) {
/* Safari 3.0 and Chrome rules here */
}

From the Youtube Blog:

Last year we launched our eCommerce platform for YouTube, which allows users to easily “click-to-buy” products — like songs and movies — related to the content they’re watching on the site. The past few months have demonstrated that great content on YouTube leads to increased sales. For example, when Monty Python launched their channel in November, not only did their YouTube videos shoot to the top of the most viewed lists, but their DVDs also quickly climbed to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies & TV bestsellers list, with increased sales of 23,000 percent.

Hat tip to Xavier Casanova of VideoRetailer.org for posting this news update on the Youtube ecommerce project.

A simple tool that allows web designers and site developers to quickly and thoroughly estimate the time and materials required for a proposed web project. Pretty cool.

To use, simply enter the title of the project and your default hourly rate. Then adjust your anticipated hours accordingly to generate your total project estimate. When finished, you can view your finalized estimate in a print-ready format in case you’d like to save a PDF or print a copy for your records.

http://estimator.astuteo.com/

Long time no post … Well I’m busy with projects like everybody else and I couldn’t fine time for blogging (good excuse).

Latest News? A big change, I switch to Mac Book Pro. There is not more Dell laptop and Microsoft programs in my mind. A change that worth the pain … of migrating the files, photos, work, emails ….

As soon as I got the it and after I learned the keyboard (I’m still search for home/end keys) and the way that it works I installed all the application that I need to do better UI designs, development and have fun.

• Firefox (with Firebug and other extensions)
• Macfusion
• Adobe CS4
• Linotype FontExplorer
• iWork
• Transmit
• Textmate
• NeoOffice
• Adium
• Skype
• MAMP
• VMware Fusion (for IE6)
• NeoOffice and other utilities

… everything is working like a charm and at the end I’m happy to say: Hi I’m a Mac user!

Aviary is a suite of powerful creative applications that you can use right in your web browser. It’s also a community of friendly artists to share and collaborate with.

You can choose from a variety of tools:

• Image editor
• Vector editor
• Pixel pattern recognition
• Smart image resizer
• Painting simulator
• 3D modeler
• Audio editor
• Music generator
• Video editor
• Word processor
• Desktop publishing,
• Color swatches and palettes
• Visual laboratory

Is missing something? This is the best online tool for designers.  You can check some work http://a.viary.com/popular. They are really super-mega-beautiful for a web tool.

Some of them are releases and some are beta, I suggest that you should sign up.

http://a.viary.com/

As a entrepreneur, he has a lot of business ideas, and he quickly goes to GoDaddy and register as many domain names related to that idea as possible. Well I might have some ideas from time to time, maybe not the best but when I go to search for domain names, I never get lucky :) It looks that there are not more .com or .net domain names.

What he thinks about domain names:

Are they a good investment however?  I’d argue…yes.  Domain names are your name on the web.  Whilst search engines don’t send you to domain names, rather websites, they are how people relate to you after search.  It’s your brand, it’s your identity. I believe that great domains hold significant value as domain names are timeless.

When I was trying to find a domain name for this blog I wanted to be simple and at the point, just “Candes” but it wasn’t available and the Mr. owner was never to be found, so I had to a attach another word to it: “Projects” which is related with what I do.

Like Darren said:

99% of the time, I don’t do anything with them and end up collecting cyber dust.

So I’m starting to invidious on this people who are buying domain names for nothing. Maybe I should do the same … from what is left :)

And to close this post I would like you to take a look at the next video and tell me your opinion about domain name and what is your strategy to find good domain names.

It is supported by the major browsers: Internet Explorer 7 & 6, Firefox 2 & 3, Safari, Opera and by the Google new browser: Google Chrome.

Buy the theme only for $75, or you can get the developer licence theme for $119.

You can see a Live demo and if you have any question don’t hesitate to contact me.

I share a list with 7 sources for UI-Patters sources and hopefully people will contribue the list and tell their opinion about UI-Patters.

UI Pattern Factory

UI Pattern Factory is a mix of user interface design pattern library and UI gallery. It is a place to find user interface best practices, get design inspiration, and share design solutions with others.

UI Patterns

Their purpose is to fill some of the gaps – especially by providing code examples as to how how the different patterns can be implemented: to join theory with practice.

Yahoo! Design Pattern Library

UxMatters

Dynamic Help in Web Forms

Welie.com

Pattern library

I will to the list also some Flickr Patters gallery:

• Brian Christiansen – Design Patterns
• Peters Moville – Search Patterns

If you know more sources please contribute to the list!

A campaign initiated by Savethedevelopers.org and it focuses on assisting users in upgrading their Internet Explorer 6 web browser. The campaign will result in former IE 6 users having a more enjoyable experience on the web while (hopefully) creating a less stressful and complicated environment for web developers by hastening the retirement of an outdated browser.

Join The Movement

If you’d like to support the cause, you may do so by going door to door urging the inhabitants of your town to upgrade their browsers. Alternatively, you can place a call to our browser detection/upgrade recommendation script on your site to show your support:

<script src="http://www.savethedevelopers.org/say.no.to.ie.6.js"></script>

I really appreciate the campaign and I joint it! IE6 "bugs" has become a really big issue when I’m developing websites.

What do you think about the campaing?

Turing

Turing would definitely be a kayak (thank you for comments). It’s small. It’s human powered. It’s often used as a beginner “boat”. And it’s also very Canadian.

Original photo by naokomc

Java

Java is a cargo ship. It’s very bulky. It’s very enterprise~y. Though it can also carry a lot of weight. Will carry a project, but not very fun to drive.

Original photo by cfarivar

Perl

Perl is a tugboat. Powerful enough to tug Java around, in 80 characters or less.

Original photo by xeeliz

Ruby

Ruby is difficult to describe. It’s sleek, sexy, and very fun to drive. Here’s a picture. Very trendy.

Original photo by Tony Falcon

PHP

PHP is a bamboo raft. A series of hacks held together by string. Still keeps afloat though.

Original photo by permanently scatterbrained

C

C is a nuclear submarine. The instructions are probably in a foreign language, but all of the hardware itself is optimized for performance.

Original photo by Ryan C. McGinley

C-sharp

Like a luxury cruiser. Sleek, good looking and quite comfy. However, not very fast , expensive and somewhat limiting.

Python

Undeniably beautiful and elegant in the water, tends to be solid and reliable. Will work with little intervention, but also provides sails to help you go that little bit faster.

HTML

HTML isn’t really a programming language boat.

Original photo by ascendeddaniel

Javascript

Like James Bond Q Boat. It’s small but powerful and it’s really easy to get yourself killed trying to use it.

FORTRAN77

A concrete boat that still lurkes under the surface. You wouldn’t want to set sail with it though. Try navigating around it.

There’s a lot more to the list, and it’s all up for discussion. You can read more opinions on the forum.

My big question is why PHP is a bamboo rafting, and why Rails is better that PHP.
Maybe they didn’t look at PHP5? They are many good frameworks and I really enjoy working with it.

Anyway I thinks PHP is a fishing trawler. Not fancy, not super speedy, but it does exactly what it’s supposed to do, takes a lickin, keeps on tickin. And, it’s cheap.

How would your favorite programming language fare in open waters?

If you don’t know how to upgrade you blog read the Upgrading instructions or contact me and I will help you.

But!!!! Writing the previous post I found one big problem or bug. I do not know exactly in my case if this was a bug. I could not upload images to the post, and I wasn’t very happy about this. After a long research I found a list of solutions to the problem, Things to try. In my case the #7 worked, it was the only one that I tried because the other I excluded:

1. Make sure you uploaded all the WordPress files correctly. Really, this is probably the most common upgrade problem.

2. Clear your browser cache, restart your browser. Do it twice. Browser caches can be persistent little things.

3. Update your Adobe Flash to the latest version (esp you Linux users!): Flash

4. IE has specific known issues. Download these two files, replace them in your WordPress installation: IE-Fix

5. Another known issue is where the media buttons don’t appear at all. This happens when you have an older plugin interfering with the JavaScript. I encountered this problem with an older version of WP-Amazon, but any plugin loading its own jQuery can cause the issue. Disable your plugins and see if the buttons appear. If so, reactivate one by one until they don’t appear any more. Upgrade all your plugins as well.

6. Bad Behavior breaks the uploader. Disable it. There have been reports that editing the “blacklist.inc.php” file to remove the line containing “Shockwave Flash” also works.

7. mod_security might be causing problems. Disable it to see if that is the problem. To do this, make an .htaccess file in your wp-admin directory. Add this to it:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</IfModule>

That will disable it for the entire wp-admin directory. It’s possible to be more specific about it, this is just a quick and easy test to see if mod_security is causing your issues.

8. Worst case… Disable the flash uploader for now, using this plugin: No-Flash-Uploader

But most importantly, stay tuned. If any new developments or fixes come to light, we’ll update this post. For now, not all problems can be solved. Patience.

If you have more troubles with WP 2.5 you can find some answers here.

For those that don’t have a blog you can download the new WP 2.5 and if you need a design don’t hesitate to contact me.

There are 4 books written by Julius Wiedemann: Web Design Studios 2, E-Commerce, Flash Sites, Best Portfolios

A great catalogs of the best web studios in the world. Very usefull as a benchmarking guide in webdesign area. If you’re interested in web 2.0 you will enjoy these books because they are a great resource packed with lots of web design ideas and executions.

Some of the inside pages: