The field of web cannot survive without designers & developers who work in a combination to make things happen. But there is one constrain that is always time taking, lacks resource and cause issue when the design meets the logic.

Pure designer know one thing best that is make layouts that look visually pleasing, colors that bring the Wao effect as soon as you see and typography that just compels you to read. Stuff like this does look amazing on photoshop or a jpg mock up but if you some how hand over your baby to developers there is chance the line height might change, correct font might not be used and maybe the little curve that you put on the top disappears. Stuff like this do happen, designers restrain from coding even HTML / CSS while developers restrain from looking into details.

When ever i conducted interviews for design job and asked if they know how to code html / css there was a “no we don’t” answer and strong resistance to such a query, stating it a technical and non creative job. Is coding non creative … then who said “Code is Poetry” a quote written on the footer of wordpress.

I never resisted from coding to xhtml / css / Javascript & using of jQuery as well rather i fell for it, css is like a beauty for my design and a challenge to solve design problems keeping technical details in hand, if web is limited to 4-5 fonts only i know that when i design, if something in css is impossible i would know and might not put that in my design, in my view coding helps designer visualize better and keep the design he build intact with technical constrains. If i know what can be done with jQuery i can make my layout screen that will make use of it as well.

Being a big fan of 37signals there way of working [4 days of work week], there products and the company itself i have been very inspired by there posts specially the one i recently read “Designer who also develop have more power” it raised a very questionable thought in mind and makes a very strong sense on the benefits if a designer can code or a developer who can design. The most compelling benefit is that things getting done quickly, no one is dependent on another.

Here i will put forward two scenarios say a developer receives layouts for an application as big as facebook, now the layout will be probably be 5-10 pages designed in photoshop delivered work begins and developers finds out there are 10 more pages that are quite similar but the data type & its arrangement has changed what should be done … the work comes to an hold and designer is activated again who spends another day in completing those layout sending them over and so on.

Keep the same scenario and convert the developer into a designer / developer so would there be any halt…. would that person be more resourceful and an asset to the company / client he presents ?

Okai i am going to be breaking this news, Yes Naseeb Networks the company behind Rozee.pk & Naseeb.com is gearing up to launch a social networking / blogging / sms / voice / mail portal in Pakistan for the people of Pakistan.

The portal so far seems to be under tremendous development and might be in stealth mode(untill this post), and it cannot be predicted when Naseeb will be ready to launch Pakistan’s first social networking site. So far the project is focusing under 6 core elements.

1. VoiceMails
2. SMS (super cool feature with tremendous potential)
3. Mail (not so cool we love gMail)
4. Friends
5. Photos
6. Blogs

Naseeb already have a very strong experience with social networking portals (naseeb.com) along with voice & sms services(ringpakistan). Apart from blogging / photos / mail the only two things that seems exciting and new is the SMS & Voice Messages to me.

With telecom companies flooding in Pakistan who have tremendous amount of ad money for promotion of such service the SMS with web will definitely get good attention and funding for Naseeb.  Previously for Rozee.pk Naseeb partnered with Mobilink and i am sure for the SMS service naseeb will definitely be looking forward to them.

http://www.talktribe.com

Finally Go4B (World Call cable internet) opens its eyes looks around and decide to reduce the internet Tariff to a very compatitve package plans so here is what Go4b - (Worldcall Broadband) is offering:

Go4B (Woldcall Cable Internet)  New Internet Tariff 2008

• 1MB         - Unlimited - Rs.25 00
• 512kbps  - Unlimited - Rs.1200
• 256kbps  - Unlimited - Rs.1000
• 128kbps  - Unlimited - Rs.600/

I have used Wateen, WOL DSL & PTCL if i compare to the service provided by Go4b - (Worldcall Broadband) with all the others then i would simply vote for Go4b - (Worldcall Broadband) and question will be why  so here is a comparative analysis that might help you before you sign up for an internet connection.

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Orkut which was of its time a very famous social networking site launched by Google Inc. recently launched its mobile version where from mobile you can use orkut. Though there is lack in functionality as the core purpose of the mobile functionality is the ability to review / reply to your scraps … well to be frank Google people we have moved forward with scraps now we use twitter and every single day i am getting more addicted to twitter reason being its adoptability with diffrent apps, you can twitt from web / mobile / IM which is quite fun & easy.

Though check out Google Orkut Mobile at :http://m.orkut.com

Today i installed and implemented SVN on my desktop & my laptop.

So let tell you a bit about subversion (SVN), it is a version control system initiated in 2000 the core purpose to maintain current & historical version of files which could be source code of a project, design files or could be anything. The core purpose of SVN is to maintain a repositery of files organized and synchronized with the latest version available one click away. This means if there three or four members of your team who are working on a single project at remote locations then they can easily synchronize there file, code without worrying of over writing other users code or files. No need to worry about if you have the latest files or not either cause SVN is made for that. For a developer its like carrying your project with you all the time.

Setting up an SVN was quite easy too, My web host provided the support for the SVN which i setup using there cpanel Once the SVN for a project was setup i download the Tortoise SVN client connected it with my web host and bingo all my source files for a perticular project i have been working on were synchronized on my web SVN from which i can get the latest version any time any where i want to work.

Its an essential tool for IT firms as it will help reduce the load on your locally hosted webserver which always under tremendious load if 8-10 people are working directly on it and ofcoure there are network problems, file getting over written. Although apart from SVN there is another very old version control system which used to come with Visual Basic called visual source safe, but the issue with visual source safe is if there is a violation of file sharing it simply deletes the file (which is quite an interesting situation and a bit funny). I used it many years back i am not sure if that problem still excites.

Resources:

• Subversion SVN (Wikipedia)
• Subversion Tigris