August 5, 2019

It’s official, Sketch is dead!

For those who hasn’t heard, Figma recently rolled out a new version which support plugins.

This is huge and I’ll tell you why.

As we all know, even now (2019) Sketch still has the largest market share among all the screen design tools, despite being behind in every aspects (platform dependency, speed, features etc.) except one: its plugin ecosystem, which is essentially the only thing that other tools hasn’t been able to catch up to Sketch.

Until now anyway.

Figma recently rolled out plugins on Wednesday, and it’s already taking over the community by storm. The plugin repository only contains handful of entries right now but it already massively expanded Figma’s functionality, and even fixing Figma’s own shortcomings in a couple of instances. Better yet, this repo is expected to massively grow in the future, especially as Figma overtake Sketch as the reigning champion.

Here’s a few favorites of mine:

-Autoflow: adding flows is one of those

May 25, 2019

How to install the latest version of NodeJS on MX Linux 18 “Continuum”

I recently needed to install a couple of packages using npm on my MX Linux box. Now MX Linux is fantastic distro, but their repos leave a lot to be desired.

I basically did a standard sudo apt-get install nodejs, I soon realized that this version of node is severely outdated, and thus utterly completely useless, as you can’t even call npm from the CLI. So I turned online for help, surely someone else must’ve come up with a working solution.

Turns out, somebody did.

The problem is, it didn’t work.

Not on my installation of MX Linux anyway. The script always failed with this message

## Your distribution, identified as "Continuum", is not currently supported, please contact NodeSource at https://github.com/nodesource/distributions/issues if you think this is incorrect or would like your distribution to be considered for support

This puzzles me a lot because Continuum was clearly listed as one of the supported distributions right inside the script itself. So I turned to Reddit for help, and they delivered. It appears that listing Continuum alone wasn’t enough, you actually need to append MX or mx-linux in front of it to be identified correctly.

So long story short, here’s the instruction on how to install the latest release of Node.js on MX Linux 18 Continuum

Read More

May 17, 2019

Freebies: Arkenea HTML Template

As you may know, I’m an avid Linux user. I still need to use Windows at work but I run Deepin Linux at home, so naturally I build my workflow around cross-platform tools. In this regards, the ElectronJS project had been a godsend. Likely half of my current workflow is made up of Electron powered apps: Figma, Zeplin, Fontbase, Gravit (before they sold out to Corel), Brackets, XMind just to name a few off the top of my head.

I recently discovered Bootstrap Studio, an excellent visual HTML/CSS editor that is also developed with Electron (though for some reason they weren’t listed on Electron’s website).

I spent 3 days learning my way around the app (would’ve taken less time if I was more familiar with Bootstrap, which I am now). To learn it I picked out a random PSD template called Arkenea (generously provided by Prashant Dwivedi)  and attempt to convert it to HTML using BS. The end result is pretty satisfactory IMO. I figure I should share it for those who might find it useful.

Demo
Original PSD (Dribbble)
HTML/CSS (ZIP)
.BSDesign

Hope you guys like it, enjoy 😉

May 11, 2019

Full Dark-mode: ya or na?

So if you’ve been following my works recently you’d notice that for the last couple of months I’ve been working with nothing but dashboards. And for most of them I tend to use bright, vivid colors. Why? Well because they’re considered safe for most clients.

But during recent years, dark mode seems to be all the rage. Everybody started implementing it, Telegram, Slack, Skype. So when tasked with creating yet another crypto dashboard design, I thought to myself: “how about jumping on the bandwagon?”

So I quickly whipped up some screens, what do you guys think?

Main Dashboard: Dark

Main Dashboard: Dark

 

Main Dashboard: Light

Main Dashboard: Light

 

Table view: Dark

Table view: Dark

 

Table view: Light

Table view: Light

 

I’m still kinda on the fence about this though. I guess it’s best to make it a toggle.

What do you guys think I should choose? Leave a comment below.

March 9, 2019

Retro Computer Terminal

I’ve always been fascinated by these old terminal when playing Fallout. In reality I’ve only ever seen them once or twice in my life. Most of the images I find on the web are 3D renders.

So I’ve been thinking about building one myself, DIY style. Right now I have a few spare parts available, an old AMD 5600K CPU-Mobo-Ram combo and an old IBM ThinkVision L150 monitor. All I need to build is a housing to put they all inside.

Problem is, I only own a few primitive hand tool, and my skill with them leaves a lot to be desired. Creating those curves probably gonna be quite a challenge. Not to mention the engineering works.

So maybe something like this SVM Commander 3D render?

Or maybe one of these real models?

msVDLL5

The possibilities are endless. Argh I’ve been losing sleep over these.

December 12, 2018

Supporting Firefox

With the news about Edge switching to a foundation using Chromium a lot of the conversation has centered on browser engines slipping into something of a monoculture. I believe these fears are coming from a good place – a monoculture certainly is not desirable, and a persistent challenge from competitors keeps tech at its best. Compounding this news was also a link floating around stating that Mozilla Firefox was staring at a market share of below 9%. What gives me pause, however, is that much of the advocacy for Firefox seems to stem from the fact that it’s not Chrome. The pure logic of such a strategy is clear, but is it particularly convincing as a technique?

Speaking more broadly for a moment, we as a society apply a lot of pressure on people to do stuff – to save the planet, and make the world a better place, and all the rest of it. Much of it is advocated through what I would describe as almost ‘fear-based’ language – kind of “do x or y will happen” type scenarios. To be fair, much of it is set up that way. There’s no real selfish benefit to e.g recycling, its pretty much about the altruism. In fact, if you read the news, the stakes are pretty high it would seem. For me, the conversation around Firefox strays too close to these heavy ultimatums. I think this kind of conversation is naturally fatiguing, and creates a particularly negative means of ushering new users into the platform – almost as hostages, rather than excited participants.

It’s time we analyse what Firefox does better than Chrome, and sing those praises. For instance, it’s arguably easier to avoid tracking with Firefox if that’s your speed. I’m sure there are other things – does Firefox beat Chrome out for speed? Or is it better featured in some areas? Perhaps Firefox is lacking things; I’ve been using WebSockets a lot recently, and Chrome’s frame-by-frame view of a WebSocket connection is invaluable. As far as I’m aware, Firefox doesn’t have this (yet). These aren’t concrete suggestions, but maybe ideas of where the conversation can go.

I think about Chrome’s usurping of Internet Explorer (IE), and I wonder (antitrust and all aside) would Chrome have usurped IE if it wasn’t for IE stagnating? I remember when I was younger and jumped ship to Chrome – personally, it wasn’t about using Chrome because it wasn’t IE, it was about Chrome beating IE in a foot race and offering me a clean user experience.

Firefox is a fantastic browser, and the need to grow its market share is more pressing than ever. By making people excited to use Firefox rather than wary of using Chrome, I believe we can more effectively galvanise support for Firefox, and improve the health of the browser ‘market’ all round.