Boris Smus

Since starting this site, I’ve been using a lightly tweaked version of the ClockWorkAir theme. The old design featured a prominent quote in prime screen real estate and a tag cloud in the upper sidebar. A blue title bar, reminiscent of the default wordpress theme, graced the blog header. The main text was small and there was hardly enough room to place images in the left margin. As I had hoped, the design class I’m taking at CMU gave me some good ideas. read more…

In anticipation of 48-739: Making Things Interactive, I’ve been itching to build something interesting. I decided to create a printing plotter out of my brother’s Mindstorms set. There are already many excellent plotter designs floating around in the Mindstorms community, so I decided to try something new. Plotters typically draw straight, edge-aligned lines, since they have a caret motor which travels along the x-axis and a feed motor which aligns along the y-axis. There are many variations on this theme.

read more…

In late March, I was completely thrilled to hear that the Carnegie Mellon University Human Computer Interaction Institute accepted me into their Master’s program! In addition to admission, they offered a very juicy scholarship to spend part of the time on the beautiful island of Madeira. CMU was my most far fetched reach school, so I attribute this wonderful fortune to a clerical error made by the admission committee.

read more…

Somehow I often find myself arguing in defense of the web browser as a viable platform for developing rich applications. In many such discussions, the issue of interoperability with the desktop arises. Someone will astutely observe that they can’t even drag and drop from their OS file manager into their browser, and all hell will break loose.

read more…

Web design used to be a black art. Ten years ago, browser differences used to be so dramatic that the only viable solution for an HTML designer was to fall back to the least common denominator for page layout, which was HTML tables. In today’s web design community, using table layouts is considered to be a heinous crime, since most popular modern rendering engines (IE, Gecko and WebKit) are converging to some shared interpretation of web standards. Unlike layout engines on the web, though, rich mail interpreters have remained stagnant, and in some cases have regressed. Without pointing any fingers

read more…