Archive for December, 2006

Posted on December 25, 2006 - by Khaled

Photoshop “Glass Text” Tutorial

As I have announced it before, I am going to be posting Photoshop tutorials on this blog. Some tutorials are old others are new and will be posted for the first time. So stay tuned!
Today I am going to start off with quite a simple tutorial that will show you how to achieve a glassy text effect .

This tutorial was made using Photoshop CS2 but can be achieved using older Photoshop versions. You can now add a cool effect to your text easily. Of course, and as usual, your feedback is more than welcome.

First of all I’ve created a new blank document That is 400×150, Then I have selected the text tool, I’ve set the font to “Gill Sans Ultra Bold”, the size to 60pt and the color to #d41385 (yeah that’s pink!!). Then I’ve typed in my text. Read on (more…)

Posted on December 21, 2006 - by Khaled

The Switchy McLayout

The Switchy McLayout is an adaptive layout technique that allows the designer to define a layout for wide display, one for medium-sized screens and one for hand held devices and PDAs.
And no this not like liquid design because when you design a liquid template that is optimized for a maximum width of 800 or 1024 px you will have a broken layout with gaps if the site is viewed on wider screens, moreover on the small screened hand held devices and PDAs the text and the graphics will be compressed together, so that’s quite a major issue in my opinion! The switchy Mclayout could be a nice solution to solve such issues it behaves as if your layout were a ‘vector’ graphic that scales up and down without loosing quality. Of course it is not as perfect as that but it is a nice and a very useful technique. As I said it defines a layout for each kind of screens.
After defining a range of layouts, the technique consists on detecting the user’s screen width in order to use the appropriate style for that size thanks to a style-switching technique that depends on the class of the body element. This is done thanks to a some nice unobtrusive JavaScript code…

All in all you will see that with the switchy McLayout technique helps designers take as much advantage as possible of the available screen space. This is really useful due to the unceasingly increasing number of the screen sizes for the devices used to browse the net. This technique can help you with such a big challenge.
Still Hungry for further details? find more here!

Posted on December 19, 2006 - by Khaled

BreedSoftware: Beta launch

Today we’re launching our new project called BreedSoftware. The company specializes in developing software and games for the Microsoft Windows platform (not only the desktop Windows platform but also the Windows Mobile platform for Pocket PCs). Currently, BreedSoftware markets various products ranging from website development utilities to intellectual games. BreedSoftware is committed to provide high-performance, and cost effective software products such as text editors, PHP editors as well as high-quality games for our customers.
Visit the website.

Posted on December 7, 2006 - by Khaled

My FireFox Add-ons

I was asked so many times about the add-ons fro Mozilla FireFox I am using. I’ve always given different variable answers due to the fact I was actually shifting from an add-on to another or dropping some they no longer work on the newer Firefox versions (like screengrab for instance). For now I think I have a nice collection of add-ons to use with my Firefox 2.0 installation. So here’s the full list:

1.		CSSViewer{1.0.2}
2.		Codetch{0.4.0.20061026}
3.		ColorZilla{0.8.3.1}
4.		Fasterfox{2.0.0}
5.		FaviconizeTab{0.9.7.1}
6.		FireFTP{0.94.6}
7.		Firebug{1.0b2}
8.		FirefoxExtensionBackupExtensionFEBE{4.0.4}
9.		FoxyTunes{2.0.4}
10.		SaveAsImage{1.042}
11.		TabMixPlus{0.3.5.2}
12.		TotalValidator{3.3.1}
13.		WebDeveloper{1.0.2}
14.		blueorganizer{2.7.1}

I will update the list once I have some changes in it. See the pic on flickr! Enjoy these great FireFox plug-ins.

Posted on December 6, 2006 - by Khaled

Pink’d!

Well I’ve tweaked the look of the blog’s theme. It is obvious, I’ve added a touch of pink. Pink seems to be a color that’s widely used in the modern Web 2.0ish sites and web applications. So why not a touch of pink in ‘No relation’? Moreover Pink looks nice, trendy and slick with lime green… So I took the plunge and tweaked my CSS and my graphics.

Something else that’s new on ‘No relation’ is that I’ve added a “current project” box to the sidebar, this is powered by the lightbox JS V2. Nifty! Also this we’ll let see what I am working on right now, and for the moment it is BreedSoftware Project. BreedSoftware will hopefully be launched within few days.

I’ve also added a Flickr powered Photo gallery to the blog in which you will find some personal pics, some Photo Manipulations with Photoshop (old Dark Art for the 2003 and 2004 year) and some old Projects that I had the permission to post publicly unlike most of the others.

So that’s all! I hope you like the changes…

Posted on December 5, 2006 - by Khaled

Oh! I look like some celebrities!

Believe it or not I do look like some of most famous persons on earth! it seems that we have some common heritage! It seems like I am a mix of Che Guevara, Megan Ewing, Laureen Hill and Adriana Karembeu… You don’t believe me? you are a click away from the truth just click for (more…)

Posted on December 5, 2006 - by Khaled

Photoshop Tutorials Series

Upon some demand from some friends and users I will start posting some of my old Adobe Photoshop tutorials here on this blog. I will also post new Photoshop tutorials soon. The Old tutorials were already published on Kyscorp, good-tutorials.com and SitePoint forums and many other Photoshop tutorials sites. I am gathering them again here. Most of them are for beginners. Stay tuned guys!

Posted on December 5, 2006 - by Khaled

FireBug 1.0 Beta released.

As you all now I am a big fan of FireFox mainly because it is modern, standards compliant, and very extensible and useful for New Media developers and Web designers. One great Add-on for FireFox is FireBug.

FireBug is a noteworthy add-on for Mozilla FireFox, I’ve been using it since a couple of months now and I think it is an outstanding tool for web developers and programmers. Now that version 1.0 Beta was released it’s become a “must have” extension.

With FireBug you are able to inspect, modify, debug and edit CSS, HTML, and JavaScript of any page you want. Now you can open FireBug in its own separate window, you can change the CSS of your page and see it work immediately, the FireBug DOM inspector’s CSS tab displays all the CSS rules for all of the page elements, it even shows the inherited CSS properties. Moreover, if you have CSS boxes that are not lining up correctly you can use the rulers, the guides and the shaded boxes of the layout tab to inspect all the margins, borders, paddings… and this is really great and time saving.

The FireBug JavaScript debugger is very powerful, yet it is very handy and easy to use. With this debugger you can pause the execution of the script at any time in order to monitor what’s going on. On the other hand the FireBug JavaScript profiler is a wonderful tool to inspect performance, tweak it and catch bottlenecks.

All in all it is a wonderful plug-in for Firefox, that helps you to improve you productivity and your work flow, it reveals detailed reports about all the HTML, CSS, JavaScript and even XML errors. But the best thing is yet to come… FireBug is FREE!! Joe Hewitt, the man behind this fabulous bug, was thinking that the 1.0 release will be a commercial product, unlike the previous versions, but he finally dropped that idea and decided that the FireBug extension “will remain free and open source” and will be released under the same tri-license used by FireFox (MPL/GPL/LGPL).

Thanks Joe! If you like FireBug (I am sure you will) don’t forget to donate to the project to keep it running and alive. Go and Donate!

Posted on December 3, 2006 - by Khaled

How The Mozilla Mascot was born?

Today, while browsing the net as usual I’ve stumbled on this article written by the famous illustrator Dave Titus. This article was written back in December 2002 and explains the history of the original mozilla mascot creation since 1994, that green fella dinosaur looks really more friendly than the red Tyrannosaur Rex mascot/icon used today by Mozilla…

Also don’t forget to take a look at the work of Dave Titus here! it is just awesome.

Posted on December 2, 2006 - by Khaled

No relation Blog as a tag graph

Thanks to this little Java Applet , the HTML Graph Applet, devoloped by Sala you can view any website as a tag graph. For instance this is the tag graph for my blog. This a Java Applet so you need to have the Java plug-in installed, also it may take some time to load. Go ahead try it!

Posted on December 1, 2006 - by Khaled

Netvibes!!! get on the Vibe

I was first introduced to this Web 2.0 Homepage solution thanks to Mr. Khaled Koubâa ( president of the Intetnet Society OC tunisian chapter) and Mr. Mondher Laâbidi. Netvibes.com was created as a start-up company in Paris during the year 2005 by Tariq Krim et Florent Frémont. It was meant to be an Ajax-based custom made start page that is quite similiar to google’s personalised Homepage.

At first I created an account, tried it then left on the shelf. I am a user of Fizzle which is a Firefox extension that enables me to read the feeds I’ve ever needed, and I was thinking it was probably the best RSS/Atom Feed Reader around. Then I took a step back to take a deeper look on Netvibes.com, it was a free to use service, it doesn’t only read the feeds you want (like Fizzle does) but it helps you create a page that almost covers all your needs and that gathers a lot of the info you require on the same page, you can check your Gmail, yahoo, hotmail e-mail accounts, you can create web notes, to-do lists, you can use flickr, meebo or MySpace modules…all this with a very simple interface that is yet very easy to customize thanks to Ajax…You can choice your main language, create tabs with different contents, customize the look (I loved the Halloween Theme)…Of course you can access your page from any place around the world, just log in …

Now I am a faithful user of Netvibes, I just love it, I am reading like 30-50 blogs and portals posts daily and Netvibes was of a great help…. So Just try it and you will see by yourself guys …Mr. Khaled Koubâa, Mr. Mondher laâbidi… Thanks again.