It has been long since I wrote here at all, especially about the upcoming fourth version of this website.

Two months ago, a prototype design of the Hypro theme for Powervortex.4 was completed. A preview can be found here. Unfortunately, I had to completely ditch this design for now and return to the proverbial drawing board.

Why? For a couple reasons.

1. My current site layout is too bloated and unnecessarily confusing. I mean, the various parts of the “main site” and having the blog on the side somewhat makes sense…but what the heck is up with the “gallery?” The site layout is too un-streamline.
2. Too much text. Everything on this site is pretty much text-based. This is the past. Looking at various other websites, namely Apple.com, websites today are much more visual. And I call myself a web/graphics designer. =D
3. The HTML/CSS/images currently are too heavyweight. On slower connections, the myriad images, especially in the blog, take forever to fully load. And the header strips on the content boxes are hard to read without the background images loading.
4. Hypro, the working title of the prototype PV.4 theme shown above does not at all fix any of the aforementioned problems with this site. More importantly, and more unfortunately, I one day opened the HTML in Internet Explorer and was shocked at how poorly the layout was rendered in IE (I’ll upload a screenshot someday). It displays fine under both Firefox and Webkit-based browsers like Safari and Konqueror, but it is butchered by IE.

As a result, I give you:

Mayfield is the name for the (second) new theme for the fourth version of Powervortex. It will be more minimal, simpler, and will focus on being more user friendly. It will present less reading, more seeing, with more visuals and less text. In addition, I will scrap the three-tier main site/blog/gallery site layout with one that makes more sense, is more streamlined, and is less confusing. However, I will not be joining the table-less sect of CSS design. I will continue to use tables until I eventually get a hang of making layouts completely with DIV tags and CSS. Mayfield will forcus on greater usability, a more streamlined experience, and compatibility with all of the popular browsers, including IE.

As of May 15, 2008, I have switched to the Apple camp. Yes, that is what I mean. Yes, I am now a Mac user. Here are the specs with a few added on specials:

15.4″ MacBook Pro with Multitouch
2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU (Penryn)
2 GB PC5300 DDR2 RAM
200 GB Hard Drive
nVIDIA GeForce 8600 GT with 256 MB VRAM

22″ NEC Widescreen display
Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse
Apple Keyboard

Even with the awkwardness of getting used to OS X’s interface, I have found that Apple has indeed made their product remarkably user friendly. Not only is Leopard’s Aqua UI stunningly beautiful, so many processes occur without you knowing when you’re setting stuff up that you almost feel that it knows exactly what you want. Yes, I have had an application crash a few times, but compared to Windows, OS X Leopard is very resilient. Moreover, it does so much for you but it is still so fast. I have installed Quicksilver, the ever-handy keyboard-oriented launcher application, but it does not at all seem to drag the system.

On a small sidenote, I have setup Boot Camp and thus have a OS X Leopard and Windows XP dual-boot setup. Though the ingroup bias extant with being a Mac user is developing quickly, I still need Windows for some purposes. However, I have found that many of the hardware features (like multi-touch and my bluetooth mouse) do not work well with XP. There are certainly at times more steps needed to set up things in Windows when compared to Leopard. But in any case, at least everything works great for the time being.