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:

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.

In the beginning of 2015 I saw many ways to make my map better. I wanted to use the space more efficiently and to improve the graphical design: remove the dirty gradients and pseudo-realistic shadows, use beautiful peanut-like transfers that I imagined. It took most of the 2015 to design the new map.

Here it is:

I like it on every level, it’s beautiful. I’ve spent much time to perfect the overall shape, the graphical rhythm, the relationships between the widths of the lines, ticks and circles. Inside the Circle line, I’ve found the most even distribution of captions and white space. This not only looks calm and unforced, but also makes possible a significant font size increase as the space is never lost.

I also had to engineer a special version of the PT Sans font for the map. I used PT Sans in the previous version and I like it. But it has a problem: the capital letters are too high. When you have a multi-line caption, you have to make its line height quite large, which is hindrance when you strive for density. So I had to create a version of PT Sans with lower capitals and slightly less prominent accents specially for the map. Thanks to Anna Danilova for help with this.

Go see the new map’s page in my portfolio. There you can also download a PDF to see the map in detail. Don’t forget to share.

Eugene Lazarev has updated Jouele to version 2.1. It works much faster when multiple audio tracks are used on a page. So my blog post on London Underground voice announcements will no longer kill the browser. Also, space bar now toggles pause (after you’ve started playing a track with a mouse).

See documentation on Github. Special thanks to Alexandra Godun for the English translation.

Three years ago I made Jouele, a good audio player for the web.

Eugene Lazarev has made version 2.0. The player has dropped the skeuomorphic look and got even nicer. It is now easier to customize the colours. The new version has dynamic initialisation, and is a jQuery plugin with an API (these are presumably good things). I have installed it on my website.

Related:

• Eugene Lazarev
• Jouele on Github
• My Music

Check out the new official diagram for Chelyabinsk tram network:

Designed by Aleksander Karavaev, directed by myself.

When printed on a matte film it looks like iOS 7:

I particularly like how the lines fan out at terminals. Boom:

In 2013, I’ve released Emerge.js, a framework for coordinated page loading:

Normally, when a complex web page is loading, images appear in random order, causing unpleasant flashing. To replace it with nice and coordinated animations, programming is required. Emerge.js simplifies the task by removing the need to write any JavaScript code. The framework uses a declarative approach, where you specify a desired behaviour for each element and do not think about the implementation.

See also the introductory blog post. I’ve since updated it with new features.

Spinner stuff

In version 1.1 I’ve added a built-in loading spinner. Emerge.js no longer requires spin.js for that. But you can use a custom spinner, including spin.js, if you like.

As before, to display a spinner while an element loads, use data-spin="true". Use the new attributes data-spin-size, data-spin-color, data-spin-direction to control the appearance of the spinner (see documentation on the Emerge.js’s page).

To use another indicator (i.e. one of the nice ones by Sam Herbert) just wrap it into a named div and tell Emerge.js to use the contents of the div as an indicator:

<div id="cool-spinner" style="display: none">
  <svg> ... </svg>
</div>

<div class="emerge" data-spin-element="cool-spinner">
  <!-- while this loads, the cool spinner will be displayed -->
</div>

To use spin.js, make it run inside your div and align as necessary:

<script src="/path/to/spin.js"></script>

  ...

<div id="spinjs-spinner" style="display: none">
  <div style="position: absolute; left: 50%; top: 50%; margin: -8px"></div>
</div>

<script>
  var spinner = new Spinner ({
    lines: 12,
    length: 4,
    width: 2,
    radius: 8,
    corners: 0,
    rotate: 0,
    color: 'rgba(96, 96, 96, .75)',
    hwaccel: true
  })
  spinner.spin ($ ('#spinjs-spinner div')[0])
</script>

  ...

<div class="emerge" data-spin-element="spinjs-spinner">
  <!-- while this loads, spin.js will be displayed -->
</div>

Scrolling stuff

In Version 1.2 with the new data-expose attribute you can make an element emerge only when the user scrolls enough for it to get into view.

<div class="emerge" data-expose="true">
  <!-- this will emerge only when within view -->
</div>

Of course you can combine it with other attributes and effects. This div will emerge with a zoom effect in a quarter second after the users scrolls enough for it to become visible:

<div class="emerge" data-effect="zoom" data-hold="250" data-expose="true">
  <!-- this will emerge quickly after getting into view -->
</div>

For an example, see my Projects page. The data-hold value varies slightly between elements there to add a nice randomness effect.

Update for free

If you’ve bought Emerge.js, you get the updates for free. Drop me a line if you have any questions.