STUPID Studio had an awesome blog. But together we’ve just added some more awesomeness with the updated STUPID theme 2.0. The most significant change is that the site isn’t “just” a blog anymore. It’s a full-featured corporate site also with cases.

We’ve added a really cool live filter to the case-section. In three levels you can filter out what sort of projects you would like to watch. Kind’a cool!

Visit the site here or our STUPID case here.

“Welcome To Macintosh” is a well-done documentary about the history of Apple. The ups and downs, the “CEO-chaos” through the 80′s and 90′s, and the development of the company when Steve Jobs came back in control in 1997, and off course the never-ending rival and competitor, Microsoft.

trailer:

quotes:

Because this documentary holds so many good quotes, I’ve listed a couple here;

“I use Windows to the extend that I had to use Windows. And I just cannot understand some stuff  there”

“I’ve hated Windows for a number of years, and I  could never figure out why, and about three years ago it finally hit me, that the reason I hated it, was that it always make me feel stupid”

“The PC users really get off on how complicated it is. It makes them feel superior when the sit down with somebody and totally confuse them”

get more:

Rent or buy the documentary in the iTunes store, or go to the official web site to read more.

You’ve probably seen HDR images many times, and thought wauv! How can anyone catch these colors and depth…? Well, it’s actually quite easy! At least if you have the right hard- and software by your hand.

You need;

- a camera capable of shooting pictures with different exposure
– the software Photomatix Pro (Also Adobe Photoshop can be used)
– your eyes

I was playing around with this in the evening, sitting in the sofa with my laptop, so I didn’t went out to shoot my own pictures. Instead I found the images below, which where perfect for just learning the software and the basics;

Normal

Over exposed

Under exposed

Well, with your three photos you are now ready to make your first HDR photo.

Step_01

Open up Photomatix and click “Generate HDR image”

Step_02

Browse or drag the files you want to base your HDR photo on. In this case I use the “venice”-files. Click the “OK”-button

Step_03

A new window opens. I used the standard settings, as you see below. But you can play around with the settings as you like…

After you click “Generate HDR” Photomatix will start working with the images;

Step_04

Sometimes you can get an odd looking image, but don’t worry. Just click the button “Tone mapping”…

Step_05

Now you use the sliders and the tools to make your HDR photo. If you know a bit about image editing or have worked with Photoshop before, all the sliders and tools will make sense to you.

When you are satisfied, you go click “Process” and afterwards you can go to “File” > “Save As” to save a tiff or jpg file.

Step_06

Below you see a couple of results from my first HDR experience. I hope soon to get out and shoot some photos myself, and process them.

Credits

I learned a great deal of this from abduzeedo’s tutorial.

It’s been an exciting journey! The Stupid Studio blog is now open, and on the first day it ran away with a WeLoveWP award – congrats! The theme is quite advanced, with the possibility to theme every post or page individually. Build upon dynamic classes the color theme can easily be updated through the admin area. It makes the blog flexible, and opens up for the possibility to give every post or page it’s own little universe…

Enough said! Take a look; http://stupid-studio.com/

We love WordPress – nothing less… The blogging platform has rapidly developed into the preferred in it’s category worldwide! The flexibility of WP makes developers capable of developing great content management systems (CMS) with WP, which have been a great influence on it’s popularity! Another thing that have made WP so popular is the handling of, and the big library of, plug-ins. A plug-in is a small kind of add-on to the default WP installation / theme. And with more than 5.500 plug-ins, the flexibility is endless…

All around the web you can find top 10s, top 20s, top 50s etc., of the best WP plug-ins. But you’ve never seen a list like this one. The Mums list of WordPress plug-ins you should know about! Hang on…

01_Scissors

A powerful tool which makes you capable of cropping, resizing, rotating, watermark, etc. images right within the upload module. No more Photoshopping for an our to create content for your blog-posts. Do it all in the WordPress admin panel.

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/scissors/

02_TinyMCE Advanced

This plug-in adds several improvements to the write panel. Highly customizable!

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tinymce-advanced/

03_Advanced Excerpt

While we’re at it, remember this one. I really find this one a must-have! Among other things, this plug-in allows HTML markup within the excerpt. Nice..

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/advanced-excerpt/

04_Custom Post Template

Another, in my mind, must-have! Gives you the ability to work with different post templates. Just like different templates for pages, this opens up for the use of different post templates. Really handy if yo post both “text-based” posts, video-posts, gallery-posts, etc.

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-post-template/

05_More Fields

If you use custom fields, this the plug-in you’ve dreamt of! Instead of pasting code / URLs into custom fields, this plug-in makes you capable of using file-lists (drop-down), nice text areas, WYSIWYG boxes, etc., instead of default custom fields.

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/more-fields/

06_WP CSS

Looking to speed up you blog? This is one of the solutions… These two plug-in will strip your CSS and JS docs naked and compress them into one CSS file and one JS file… With the capability to cache everything, it can really make a difference on your page loads. Off course depending on how many kbs of CSS and JS you have…

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-css/

07_WP JS

Same functionality as WP CSS, just with Your JS docs! Smooth huh…?

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-js/screenshots/

08_Contact Form 7

For a long time I preferred cForms (http://www.deliciousdays.com/cforms-plugin) because I thought their admin was a lot easier to use… Now I’m completely opposite… Contact Form 7 is flexible, easy to use, easy to skin, simple, and just nice!

Use it…

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/contact-form-7/

09_Google XML Sitemaps

If SEO is important to you – and I’m sure it is – this is a killer plugin! The plugin creates a Google XML-Sitemap of your WordPress blog. It supports all of the WordPress generated pages as well as custom ones. Every time you edit or create a post, your sitemap is updated and all major search engines that support the sitemap protocol, like ASK.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO, are notified about the update.

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/

10_NextGEN Gallery

Though I know that almost every WordPress user know this plug-in, I had to list is here… The plug-in gives you a powerful gallery in itself. But with a little PHP / HTML /JS knowledge, you can use this plug-in for complex AJAX galleries. The sliding gallery in our project-pages is powered by this plug-in. The possibilities are many…

Link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/

Do you know other WP plug-ins which you think I or people should know about, feel free to comment on this post!

Update

We removed the preloader functionality on our site, because external sources such as flickr and twitter sometimes made the preload go for 5-8 seconds. But if your site isn’t pulling data form external servers, go ahead!

____

Preloading entire pages has always been something belonging to Flash sites, but recently I found a solution with the excellent jQuery! Take a look here, and achieve a preloader functionality as on mumsstudio.com.

Demo

Example

Background

We want to have a div which is covering the whole site, and disappears when all content is loaded. The preloader requires the jQuery library – you can see the code in the source which can be downloaded at the end of this post.

HTML

The markup is very straightforward. Right after your place something like;

<div id="preloader"></div>

A simple div…

CSS

The CSS is more up to you. You can change color and the preloader graphic (a simple animated gif). In this example I go with this code;

div#preloader {
 position: fixed;
 z-index: 999;
 width: 100%;
 height: 100%;
 background: #c6d6c2 url(ajax-loader.gif) no-repeat center center;
 }

Javascript

$(window).load(function(){
 $('#preloader').fadeOut('slow',function(){$(this).remove();});
 });

Simply, when window (all content) is loaded, fade out the div with id preloader and remove it.

Easy and smooth!

Links & downloads

Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file.
Easy ajax preloaders
Example