Still pursuing the prospect of creating my own Trillian skin. Haven't made much progress on the coding side of the project - after all, all I've managed is some really basic HTML skill and just tested the JavaScript waters. Still a long way to go; it's going to be a while. I could very well rip Whistler, but I don't think that's something a good dev would do. Don't intend to be a pirate y'know :wink wink:
On the GUI side of affairs, I think I'll give it the ole Parchment Paper style. Maybe try to use a classic curly font like "Old English Text MT" or "Vivaldi" or "Edwardian Script ITC" or "French Script MS" [okay, okay, I pressed {windows/start key}+R and typed "winword" and went through ALL the fonts I have installed; but so what? It's besides teh point anyways!]. Now the question is - how are the edges going to look? I'm personally quite against the curls on the top and bottom; I'd rather have them burnt. I'll turn to Photoshop for that. What kind of symbols do I use for "minimize," "maximize," "close," and "hide"? I'll have to sleep on that one. And teh scroll bar? Hmm...
Now, that reminds me - I need tutorials and more. I think teh pattern that I found over at DA [in my hectic googling attempts] is going to help me. I haven't installed it yet, so I'll prolly include all that info in ver.2 of this report. I also found myself some other tutorials. Wonder how I can integrate all that and come up with something satisfactory. I also *may* need a substitute for "Send" - "onsenden" is the Old English counterpart, but that's a mouthful and doesn't flow right out of the tongue either. Not to mention the fact that it is without a drop of humor.
All in all, I think it's time to start concepting the GUI!
Oh hey, wait a minute! Here's a preview-that-looks-like-it's-done-in-5-minutes-but-took-me-50-minutes-
to-make-because-I-don't-know-Jack-about-photoshop-and-because-I -had-to-google-for-patterns-and-a-number-of-other-dumb-excuses. It's just the IM box, but hey, whatev~
P.S.: A friend o' mine sez it luks liek en RPG game window. (_ _)
As soon as our friendly engineers over at Apple's HQ released Safari for Suffering Windows, I decided to download it and give it a try. I am no fan of IE6 [IE7 is a VAST improvement over IE6 IMHO, but it was too late in the timeline - methinks the market is being consumed by plug-in friendly and open source Firefox] and I was quite keen to know how Safari actually worked under Windows. It was introduced with something along the lines of "similar to iTunes for windows" which immediately knocked my expectations to the floor. Nevertheless, I hit the download link to give it a shot.
First off, the setup icon looks ugly. It was my first time seeing something that was half baked by Apple. Come on, if you can port Safari into Windows, you can defo come up with a better looking icon than something that looks like it's done in 256 colors - were you not enthusiastic enough? After installation, I was curious as to how it performed vs Firefox [never relied on another web browser so much. It does take up memory - something like 40MB - but could care less]. To my disappointment, Safari failed to load. It didn't load anything. Tried to "contact" google.com, but 22.5seconds later, it went dead.
At the same time, my NOD32 AV was experiencing trouble. It wouldn't update. It struck me later on that my IE was setup to go through a proxy server, and that NOD32 uses teh settings by IE. Which meant that if IE wouldn't load a page, then NOD32 wouldn't update. NOD32 don't do manual updates like Norton - what a shame. But anyhoos, I set that up, and NOD32 updated instantly. Now that reminded me - was taht the reason why Safari wouldn't load a page? Does it use the same configuration settings as IE? I then load up Safari, and et voila, it loads Apple start page. I find this rather entertaining.
Does this mean that if you manage to hack into IE, you could use the same/similar trick to hack into Safari? I'm no expert in this field - hell, I am not even a beginner. It's just something that piques my curiosity. Anyone care to find out, anyone?
I'm posting this blog in Safari - first up, it kinda looks ugly. Just a smidgeon. Every text it displays seems like it's bolded. But it's not. Not easy on the eyes at all. DO BETTER, Apple. Safari has a decent load speed, and for a beta, it's not bad. Now if it supported plugins like Firefox, I see a serious contender. Oh, and stop mooching settings from IE, kk?
