And today, the spotlight is on an app that gets us all worked up, our very own Lorem Ipsum Tool

So what does the app do?

It generates legit, dummy content for our web design & development projects. Essentially, so that we DON’T have to use Lorem Ipsum.

We are comically very passionate about it.

You know how from the outside looking in, people ask “Why so serious?” Well, that’s how we are because web design is personal.

” We think lorem ipsum is bad for your web design and should be rid off forever. “

So what exactly is Lorem Ipsum?

It is filler text that shares some characteristics of a real written text, but is totally incomprehensible.

Here’s an example of Lorem Ipsum

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur.

What’s the problem with Lorem Ipsum?

Truth is, there is nothing wrong with Lorem Ipsum itself

But, the most alarming problem with using Lorem Ipsum is that it is meaningless. The texts don’t mean anything therefore does not communicate any message. By using Lorem Ipsum as your filler texts during development, you may confuse clients and project stakeholders.

In a web project, it’s best to have content ready prior to designing your website. In circumstances that you can’t, use readable mockup text that is just a Google search away or now, you can use our Lorem Ipsum Tool

Now why is using legit content important during development?

Everyone in Kureno shares the same pain and views about using meaningless filler text for our projects.

Lets look at some views of from our team and friends.

• @nadsulaiman is our UI Designer at @teamkureno, also Creative Director at @bitter_coffee, she says “No excuses. I will always use readable content when I design anything. You need readable content so you can deliver a design that’s most effective in communicating the content. You’ll also feel more inspired when designing with readable content”
• @iwani is our Band Manager at @teamkureno, also Web Developer at @bitter_coffee. She bites “I completely avoid using Lorem Ipsum or any unreadable filler text in my mockup designs or HTML templates. You’ll risk confusing clients and your teammates as well. I’ve worked with CSS designers and backend developers who use unreadable texts like test123, abcabcaabc and the likes of that – content is king is another story, but the point is – don’t do your work half-heartedly”
• @eizil is our Lead Developer at @teamkureno, also a professional freelance developer, he echoes “I wish all my clients would provide me with mock content if not real before starting any project. During system testing, I prefer to use readable content to avoid confusion amongst my teammates and clients”
• @_mfields is a WordPress developer and runs a blog that focuses on WordPress theme and plugin development, amongst many. He says “IMO Lorem Ipsum is no good to show to clients unless you want a 5min discussion on why their project is in a made up language.”

If you don’t agree with me yet,

Some of my favourite points from Lorem Ipsum is Killing Your Designs by @kylefiedler on @DesignInformer

When you are designing with Lorem Ipsum, you diminish the importance of the copy by lowering it to the same level as any other visual element. The text simply becomes another supporting role, serving to make other aspects more aesthetic. Instead of your design enhancing the meaning of the content, your content is enhancing your design.

By adding Lorem Ipsum to the design you are essentially dressing your king before you know his size.

The point I tried to make is that you and your clients need to be thinking, understanding and gathering content before the design. Using Lorem Ipsum is a way to half-heartedly go about the most important part of your site.

Wouldn’t this be embarrassing if it happened to you?

Mad props to @mkjones for tweeting me a screenshot. Check it out here

Featured / Discussed in

• Smashing Magazine Newsletter #11
• Hacker News
• 6 Different Lorem Ipsum Tools You May Never Heard of + Bonus
• Tweeted by @smashingmag @designinformer @iamFinch @justcreative
• Social Conversation on uberVU
• According to stats on our website, 565 Tweets and 103 Likes
• Analytics stats from June 1st 2010 – January 9th 2011: 36,093 Pageviews and 24,768 Unique Views

Get involved

If you’re not on it yet, get on Twitter today and follow us at @teamkureno – we are gathering views from across the websphere about using Lorem Ipsum as filler texts on.

If you need more than 140 chars, feel free to leave us a comment below

Official URL: things.kureno.com

Coincidentally, today is also WordPress birthday!!

If you’re following us on @teamkureno, codename of this project is rojak. Why Rojak? Rojak is mixed in Malay and things@Kureno is a place where we showcase all our mini applications for people to use hence the codename rojak

What to watch out for

We will be constantly doing incremental updates to the 4 existing mini applications on things. And we’ll also be adding new apps too! In fact, @eizil, our Lead Developer has already suggested another app that we’ll be doing for things pretty soon

Development Team

Lead Developer: @eizil
Front-end Developer: @iwani
UI Designer: @nadsulaiman
Copywriter/Human Engineer: @syakirkhalid

» Read more about us

Making Of

In the next few days, we will release a special Making Of video of things@Kureno, it will highlight the brainstorming sessions, the pre-development, development and post development stages. So be sure to follow us on @teamkureno to find out when it is posted on our blog

Be warned that it is all done via online collaborations with various web apps we’ll cover in the making of video!

Final words

We hope things@Kureno will benefit you and don’t forget to spread the love to your friends! Don’t forget to tweet us @teamkureno or if you need more than 140 characters, do leave us a comment below!

New features for today are an improved menu and a brand new home/landing page

Our menu has been improved to include more categories so that in the future we would be able to re-organize prominent menu and leave the rest to the More section. We’ve also added a new home/landing page which features a brief introduction of JomTwit to our new users, a sidebar with our features updates from our blog and Twitter. And featured tweets as picked by us

We will be rolling out more exciting features in the following weeks, so watch this space!

If you haven’t our introductory post on JomTwit, do read it here

JomTwit is a web application that organizes tweets for easy browsing. We organize tweets by categories (News, Technology, Entertainment, Food, Travel and etc). Interested in news? Just click on the News category and see what CNN and BBC are tweeting. It is an easy and intuitive way for people to browse tweets by topic of interest.

Existing users will find their Twitter experience is more organised. Additionally, they can find new tweets that meet their interest. Those new to Twitter will find it easier to enter the information-overload world of Twitter.

There is more! We plan include the following features:

Customizable categories and tweets – Users may want to add more tweets on Technology or remove some tweets on Food. They may want to add a category name Friends and remove News. JomTwit will be able to support all these. After signing up, users can turn the public default page to their own personal JomTwit page that serves their and only their interests.

Tweets & Categories Management – Users can share Tweets and Categories to JomTwit public page.

Integration of Twitter’s Favourite function – JomTwit’s user will be able to use Twitter’s nifty tool, Favourite where users can favourite a certain tweet they find interesting while they’re exploring JomTwit and then later they are able to trace these fave tweets back on their Twitter account

Moving forward…

Our development philosophy is to release a basic service and then to do incremental update and bug fixes.  Gradually we will roll out all the features that we intended. Keep an eye on our status notification or follow our Twitter @ http://twitter.com/jomtwit as we will update features (hopefully) on a weekly basis.

Additionally do give us feedback so we can update based on your needs as our users.