Aegea 2.6 has been released. Aegea is a great blogging engine.

What’s new:

• Continuous autosaving of form data in post editors. Data is being saved locally in the browser. If the browser or the OS crashes, when you open the editor again, your latest changes will be there. If you edit the post from another device and save the changes to server, the most recent server version will open.
• The new search finds more relevant posts, works faster and formats the results in a better way. It will not show the full posts, but just the fragments with the search query. If the found post contains images, it will show their thumbnails for quicker identification. For example, try searching “street” in this blog.
• It’s now easier to set a post’s cover image for social networks. Just drag an image into the editor’s page. If you drop in onto the Text field, if will be inserted in text, but if you drop it outside the Text field, it will just get added to the post. Social networks will see it as part of the post, but it will not get displayed in its text.
• Improved database migration from older versions.
• Multiple other small improvements.

An engine is a program that runs on the blogger’s website. It provides the writing tools to the author, shows the posts to the readers and lets them write comments. Medium.com (or similar) is simpler, but they can shut down and take all your posts offline. With an engine, the blog runs on your own website and you have access to the files and the database (you don’t have to deal with the files or the database, but you own all the data).

I want most people to have access to personal blogging in this way. That’s why it uses the most easily available platform: PHP with MySQL.

Aegea powers this and many other blogs. Among my favourites:

• Death by Passive Voice, on writing, by Max Bears
• Daniel Lesden blog, on music production, by Daniel Lesden.

With Aegea, you can use the built-in neutral theme or customise it however you like (this blog is an example). Be flexible with comments: allow and disallow them globally or per post. Refine posts using Drafts. Add images, videos, audio or code to illustrate your point. Organise your writing with tags.

Designers, writers, musicians and software developers use Aegea to show their work, communicate and spread knowledge. They love it because it’s simple and fast yet does everything they need. Aegea is free for personal use and paid for business use.

Learn more and get Aegea at blogengine.me.

A web application’s front end (what the user sees) and back end (what happens on a remote server) are often developed separately. If the back end of some feature is not ready yet, the front-end developer is very limited in what they can do.

I’ve designed the user interface for Mimic 2.0, a web developer tool for mocking server responses in a browser. With Mimic, you can develop as if the server was alive. It’s very easy to set up a simple mock. Say, you want to pretend the server responds with a line of JSON:

It lets you set up very advanced mocks, adjusting HTTP headers, timeouts and what not:

The great thing about Mimic is that you don’t need to set up a local server and change request URIs in your application. It works with the existing applications as they are, right in the browser. And you don’t even need to install browser extensions: you just link one script to your application and that’s it.

Read more about the user interface on the project page.

Introducing Aegea, a great blogging engine.

An engine is a program that runs on the blogger’s website. It provides the writing tools to the author, shows the posts to the readers and lets them write comments. Medium.com (or similar) is simpler, but they can shut down and take all your posts offline. With an engine, the blog runs on your own website and you have access to the files and the database (you don’t have to deal with the files or the database, but you own all the data).

I want most people to have access to personal blogging in this way. That’s why it uses the most easily available platform: PHP with MySQL.

Aegea powers this and many other blogs. Among my favourites:

• Death by Passive Voice, on writing, by Max Bears
• Daniel Lesden blog, on music production, by Daniel Lesden.

With Aegea, you can use the built-in neutral theme or customise it however you like (this blog is an example). Be flexible with comments: allow and disallow them globally or per post. Refine posts using Drafts. Add images, videos, audio or code to illustrate your point. Organise your writing with tags.

Designers, writers, musicians and software developers use Aegea to show their work, communicate and spread knowledge. They love it because it’s simple and fast yet does everything they need. Aegea is free for personal use and paid for business use.

Learn more and get Aegea at blogengine.me.

Sometimes an idea comes to mind when I am running or driving and I can’t write it down. I just want to say it to my phone and I want the phone to remember it. Unfortunately, there was no tool for this.

Siri needs Internet and is stupid. When it fails to recognise what I’ve said, there is no way to get back to it later. Keyboard dictation works offline most of the time, but if you aren’t lucky, the original audio recording is also lost. Also, you have to remember to pick the right keyboard language before starting dictation, otherwise you will also lose everything. The Voice Notes app records audio, but does not recognise speech. To find the necessary recording, you need to listen to each as they all look the same.

That’s why together with the developer Michael Rubanov we made Sayve — a reliable voice recorder and recogniser. It works like this: when you open the app, it starts recording and recognising immediately. When you are done speaking, it underlines the words it’s unsure about.

You can tap the words and replace with the alternatives. If it’s completely wrong, you can re-listen to the audio. Raise the phone to your ear to listen through the ear speaker.

You can change the recognition language after recording, and it will re-recognise the recording. Then you can export everything to Notes.app or whatever.

We can’t always recognise speech without Internet. But audio is stored permanently, so you won’t lose your thoughts in any case. Also we’ll try to recognise it later, when Internet is back.

Here is the button:

Get for free in the App Store

For free for now, but we’ll see.

I made my first Moscow metro map in 2007. The official map was disgusting then, but nobody cared. My work inspired many designers to try to design their own map. I know several designers who gave up after they’ve appreciated how hard the task actually was. I had two major revisions of my map including the one for the official 2013 competition for the new map to be used on the system. In that version I’ve solved the problem of the Biblioteka imeni Lenina junction and invented the Compass (more on that on the 2013 map’s page in my portfolio). I took the second place. It took most of the 2015 to design the next version of the map: it used space more efficiently and the overall graphical design was improved.

Here is the new version, with the new Circle Railway (Line 14) added:

Compared to the official map, this map has almost 35% larger font when printed as same-size poster:

See the project page for detail.

Check out this new Ekaterinburg metro map:

Designed by Pasha Omelyohin, directed by myself.

A large metro network works like teleport: people don’t care how it gets you from point A to point B, it just does. In London, Paris or Moscow metro maps do not show the surface geography: there is no room. And for many people, the metro map is the map of the city.

But that’s not the case for the small metros. Designing a map for a small metro this way makes no sense:

This does not contain any new information compared to a plain list of stations. The need to simplify and get rid of surface details only occurs when the complexity of the map gets in the way of finding your route. Ekaterinburg does not have this problem.

When there is one metro line, there is no teleport effect. It is very important to show how the metro is connected to the surface:

That’s why we list the routes of buses, trolleybuses and trams, show metro exit locations, nearby streets, parks, the river Iset, railway and coach stations: