Let’s see what are main trends in Twitter background industry and learn something about creating them.

1. Repeating pattern
This technique is probably as old as internet. We just need small image and it will be repeated to fill whole background. If we will craft one special tile we can achieve endless pattern. This kind of background will fill display with every resolution.

2. Super large image
This solution provides larger area for our creativity but the drawbacks are large image size (longer loading time) and not full screen coverage on very big resolution.

3. Faded out image
My personal favourite and neatest approach. Combination of image faded out to solid colour and same colour set as Twitter background. This scales up to every monitor size.

Create your own?

There are virtually no limitations regarding designing Twitter background. Only rule to remember is that column with tweets is fixed width and regarding viewers resolution more or less of background is visible.

You can read more and find inspiration in this post about Twitter backgrounds. There is useful Photoshop template available to download.

You are more than welcome to be inspired by my own Twitter background.

Horror Vacui is a strategy board game with one simple rule “Nature abhors a vacuum”. Actually rules are more complex but since you play it a few times they become clear. There are two players: water and earth. Each of them is randomly given one of three cards: hot, cold or neutral. Oposite nonneutral cards neutralize each other. Hot or cold makes neutral hot or cold and neutral stays neutral. Rules are explained in nifty ingame tutorial with animations.

As to the design app is made to look like old 8bit games. It is very interesting to see this kind of design on such a modern device like iPhone. Also the music is stylised to the old console games from early 80′s.

Shaun Inman is working on new game Mimeo. This will be platforming game and I’m really looking forward to it.

First bike ride of this year is behind me!!! I’ve taken out my bike after a half year break. He needed no repairs just quick tyre inflation check at nearby Orlen gas station. Hopefully he will last whole season without any problems. However I have short wishlist of parts I would like to upgrade:

• fork [RS Pike would be nice or anything more sophisticated than Suntour Duro :)]
• grips
• rear derailleur [it's not most accurate after last accident]
• frame [I know that 14kg is not the worst score for bike with fat (2.6") tires but something lighter would be nice, maybe full suspension]

Generally my dream bike would be Specialized S-Works Enduro Carbon but it’s waaaay out of my price range…

So with new season there is time for some new training progress tracking system. So far I’ve been using BikeBrother.com. It was working more than fine but during winter I stumbled on DailyMile.com. DailyMile is nice junction of training log and twitter. The main power of this system is developed Workout Posting module. We can post many types of activities (Fitness, Run, Cycle, Swim, Walk and more), add a new route or select old one, add note and even sync all data from external device. After posting we can view our progress in very nice set of graphs.

I hope that this season will be great. I’m looking forward for summer holiday and maybe anoyher MTB trip… (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7)

Size matters, so if you upload a foto of yourself it is usually resized to fit left sidebar of your profile. Sidebar is 200 px width consequently we need to keep our picture equal or smaller to avoid resizing. As to the height we can create picture up to 600 px. Using whole height we can accomplish neat effect or contain some additional info about ourselves.

Above rules and tips can be applied to Facebook pages.

You can download .psd file with background prepared for developing your picture.

So far my schedule will look like this:

10:00 – 10:20 Conference opening

10:20 – 11:20 Web Development 2.0 – Bruce Lawson
11:40 – 12:40 jQuery: Write Less, Do More – Remy Sharp
13:00 – 14:00 CSS3

14:00 – 15:00 Lunch

15:00 – 16:00 jQuery for designers: the essentials – Remy Sharp
16:20 – 17:20 Mobile Social Location – Matt Biddulph

Full schedule can be found here.

UPDATE: Big news. Inayaili de León will be speaking in CSS3 segment. Cool!

Dokładna data maratonu zostanie ogłoszona na Facebooku.