DualMinded - Home

Bought it, iMac 24"!

2008-01-20T18:02:00Z

A couple of months ago I've written about the new iMac's that Apple recently released. I thought it was such a beauty that It could make you wanna slap yo momma, right? Well I just bought one, 24-inch version! And uuhh no, didn't slapped my momma ;-)

Here are some shots of this baby:

As always, beautifully packed.

Nice detail: iSight camera (and built-in microphone on top).

The full setup.

I did had plans for purchasing a MacPro though. But after a good couple of months researching, I finally made up my mind.

Obviously a very happy me....

Once you go MAC you'll never go Back

2007-12-17T15:46:00Z

I know, Its been a while. But I'm still alive. I'm just a little busy with work and some several personal projects along the way, that's all.

Anyway, my Macbook pro 17" has been send back to Apple to replace my display clamshell (had some dead pixels). Now I'm stuck with a replacement laptop which BTW runs Windows.

It's been a week now and I really miss the simplicity, beauty and security that MacOSX gives me out of the box. Now, people hear this alot and the first thing they tend to ask is "Why is a Mac Better?". It's hard to convince somebody why a Mac is much better on many fronts than Windows, if that person never experienced it. "Just Saying" why it's so good, doesn't cut it for everyone. You have to experience it with your bare hands in order to be really convinced or to form an own opinion which of the two is best.

The thing is that it's more of a personal choice, which is an important thing. Life would be boring if we didn't had choices.

MacOSX is in my opinion really in a different league then its competitors in terms of user experience and friendliness. It's innovative, simple and amazingly powerful. Whenever I'm busy with a project on my Mac, or any other normal daily stuff, I genuinely enjoy my tools which makes be me more productive. More importantly It makes me love what I do even more. And really... who can describe love?

If you find pleasure in re-installing your computer over-and-over, cleaning up spyware, worrying about viruses, running patches every week, defragmenting your PC (like I used to do), then stick to your PC. Just know that there are (much) better things out there where you don't have to worry about any of these things.

Understand your UI by "XRAYing" it!

2007-08-19T18:48:00Z

Whenever I'm busy developing a webapplication and its UI, I always find myself stuck in the UI design process. A certain element may look good in one browser but terribly in a other. To better understand your UI, there's a great lightweight javascript tool called XRAY.

If you're running Safari or Firefox, simply drag and drop the icon below to your bookmarks bar.

XRAY

Now go to any website, hit the XRAY bookmark (a modal will appear), and click on any section of that site to see it's details.

Pretty cool right? Make sure to check out the XRAY website for more info.

Apple redesigned their iMac line

2007-08-07T00:46:00Z

Apple has redesigned their iMac line and it's simply gorgeous! So gorgeous, just makes you wanna slap yo momma. I always preferred the "Pro" series though (Powermac, Powerbook Mac Pro, Macbook Pro etc.) because of it's high quality and beautifull aluminium casing.

I had plans to purchase a Mac Pro at the end of this year, but I it's now totally disturbed and ruined. The new iMac's seems much thinner then it's predecessor, more sexy (aluminium casing) and like always very detailed-focused and consistent. To make the overall image complete, they even redesigned the keyboard into a thin macbook-like/low-profiled way. Remarkably the new iMac has some similar design features from the iPhone (black/silver).

Besides all of this, Apple is on a roll of some major product releases, including (probably) a full screen video iPod. While all of this is great, I'm wondering when the Macbook Pro notebooks will have a completely new redesign since it's been there for quite a while now. Oh well a great design lifes forever I guess (but still.... wondering and wondering, time will tell).

UPDATE: a must see picture.

Driving school: Personal advice

2007-07-02T22:17:00Z

I get this question quite often, so let me quickly sum it up. If you're currently living in the Netherlands and looking to get your drivings license you already know there's lots of schools to choose from. Alot of them are some serious 'jokers' that just want to get a rip of your money.

View really deliver by providing exceptional education. One of them is a school called "HQ-Driving", currently active in the regions Amsterdam and Almere. So if you're a dutchie, be sure to check out their website.

Honey, I'm a Bachelor now!

2007-06-25T17:09:00Z

Today was a very special day. I had to defend my final graduation paper. And with success, because I received a 9 out of 10 for it. In my overall study I had some good marks too. So uhhh yes, today it has come to the conclusion....... a Bachelor in Business Informatics. Terrific!.

I could pursue for a nice Master of Science (M.Sc.) title, but maybe that will come in the future because I have some very interesting oppurtunities at the moment.

Debugging in Safari

2007-06-21T20:37:00Z

Firebug is a very nice tool to do some debugging in Firefox. There's a little trick to do some general debugging in Safari as well. Here's how:

Make sure you quit Safari. Open up the Terminal and type the following command:

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1

Restart Safari and you'll see a new menu item all the way on your right... It's not as slick as Firebug though, but good enough to do some general debugging stuff within Safari.

Safari goes Windows

2007-06-19T16:06:00Z

Very interesting... Which was a rumor for quite a while, Safari, the official browser of MacOS X will now be available for Windows as well. In particular Safari v3, which comes standard in MacOS X Leopard.

I was wondering how well some specific web(2.0)apps would interact in this browser. So I tested the public beta version and was overall pleasantly surprised. Some ajax effects doesn't work smooth at times, probably because it's still in beta, but something that immediately had my attention though, is that you can resize textareas which could be nice for accessibility.

More importantly I'm delighted to see that the WYSIWYG editor in gmail and other apps finally works. If you used Safari (mac) before, the user experience will be the same. You'll get nice anti-aliasing, blue highlight markers in (selected) textfields, apple-like (submit) buttons etc. In my opinion just another reason to remove Internet Explorer from your windows machine.

Pure excitement: Bought the Nikon D80

2007-06-14T08:15:00Z

Picture myself with big eyes, a broad smile and acting like a 10year old... That's the face I pulled yesterday when I finally purchased the Nikon D80 SLR camera (with a 70-135mm lens).

I did some extensive research of this camera, and eventually ended up with a dilemma between the Canon EOS400d and this one. The EOS400d has some nice features (auto anti-dust system), and is known for a great SLR camera for less money. However when I first had both of the camera's in my hand, the Nikon just felt better in every aspect. It has a better built quility, and in my opinion feels more professionally as well.

All the buttons are at the right place and within perfect reach. The menu and all the options are very easy to use which makes it pleasant and suitable for an amateur like myself. All in all a purchase well made (............I hope).

Missed RubyEnRails 2007 event because of school

2007-06-08T12:40:00Z

I was looking forward to go to this event for months together with my buddy Eloy Duran. But due to a critical last minute change I had to make for school for my final (graduation) paper, I just could't make it :(

I sure hope there will be some downloadble videos of the presentations. It seemed to be a very succesfull day. Geoffrey Grosenbach, the creator of peepcode, was generous to give everyone in the room during his presentation, a peepcode screencast for free! Now..... why did I just had to miss that one...

Google Analytics: Like 10 years further in time

2007-05-17T23:09:00Z

I just received an email from Google Analytics announcing the launch of their new version, and @!z#^& damn it looks sick!! It's more userfriendly, more interactive, and far more prettier. It's so pretty and interactive that you just keep staring at your statistics instead of looking and studying it. Here's a snapshot of mine account:

I'm very impressed how they made all the advanced and (a bit confusing stuffs from the previous version) simple and clear. I liked "mint" alot, but this one just kills them all.

Yet another Hello to the World!

2007-04-27T21:29:00Z

After struggeling designing a clean and simple layout that had to be viewable in a resolution setting as low as: 800x600px this is the result I came up with. I've used my favorite colors in the design and got some shiny spots from here to there.

In the design process Internet Explorer was driving me crazy, in every single (real)browser my website displayed properly, but of course there's always Internet Explorer to turn your hair grey in a nut shell and just have to make your life miserable. It was in particular IE6 which is actually no longer being developed. A lot of bugs in IE6 are fixed in IE7, but since there's still a big proportion of people using IE6, I just couldn't ignore this.

So I took my time to do some debugging for this site to be viewable in every major browser and make daddy W3C proud by making it XHTML Strict and CSS compliance at the same time, and phweew I've succeeded. I've even managed to end up with just a single CSS file instead of a separate one especially for you know who.

With that said, I'm very happy with the result and I hope you like it too. Greetings to you all......!! So there you have it, yet another hello to the world!