Nerdburn - Web application & graphic user interface design blog by Shawn Adrian

My eyes feel grimy, I have a coffee buzz, and my feet keep tapping to the unrelenting drum beat in my head as this week comes to a close. My task list feels monumental even though I've been steadily chipping at it all week (I'm imagining it looks a bit like the post-nuclear version of the Washington Monument in Fallout 3 - check it out if you haven't yet).

Ah, but victory is sweet, and Gavin and I are close to releasing the first version of Chubby, our CMS Framework - one of the first of it's kind. Chubby is a PHP5 framework created specifically for creating customized CMS's, removing the need to hack and slash at Wordpress, Joomla, or whichever giant you've been slaying this week. It weighs in at around 150kb so far.

Almost as exciting is the release of A Practical Guide to Designing for the Web, by Mark Boulton. I bought the PDF for $22 CAD, which I'll be honest, feels a bit steep for a PDF only book, especially since it fell apart when I tried to open it on my PC (half the fonts are missing), but thankfully the folks at Apple have saved me once again and it works fine on my Macbook. I'm dying for a hard copy of the book though, as what I've read so far has been really juicy. I've given it to my fiance to read so she doesn't need to go to design school.

In other news, I read a great article on stopdesign about Google's new Gmail buttons. After attempting to make stretchy html buttons of my own for a number of years and only achieving the horizontal variety, with irritating floats or positioning, Douglas' approach seems so simple I'm kicking myself with inspired awe.

I finally got my beta account at graphicriver.net, the new product from our friends at Envato, so I'm excited to upload some goodies for the masses. Additionally, I'm eagerly awaiting the unveiling and beta access to Gist - it's something to do with email that makes me really curious.

And that's it folks, keep checking back for some upcoming great content. I'm still working on my aforementioned interview with David Kaneda, the creator of Outpost (an iPhone app for Basecamp users), and some new tutorials as well.