
Salad Niçoise on a nice warm evening.
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Salad Niçoise on a nice warm evening.
Checked in at The Bugle Inn. Sunday session — with Jessica
There was a week recently where I was out and about nearly every night.
One night, Jessica and I went to the cinema. There was a double bill of Alien and Aliens in the beautiful Duke of York’s picture house. We booked one of the comfy sofas on the balcony.
The next night we were out at the session in The Jolly Brewer, playing trad Irish tunes all evening. Bliss!
Then on the third night, we went to see Low playing in a church. Rich and Ben were there too.
It really felt like The Before Times. Of course in reality it wasn’t quite like old times. There’s always an awareness of relative risk. How crowded is the cinema likely to be? Will they have the doors open at The Jolly Brewer to improve the airflow? Will people at the Low gig comply with the band’s request to wear masks?
Still, in each case, I weighed the risk and decided the evening was worth it. If I caught Covid because of that cinematic double bill, or that tune-filled gathering, or that excellent gig, that price would be acceptable.
Mind you, I say that without having experienced the horribleness of having a nasty bout of coronavirus. And the prospect of long Covid is genuinely scary.
But there’s no doubt that the vaccines have changed the equation. There’s still plenty of risk but it’s on a different scale. The Situation isn’t over, but it has ratcheted down a notch to something more manageable.
Now with the weather starting to get nice, there’ll be more opportunities for safer outdoor gatherings. I’m here for it.
Actually, I’m not going to literally be here for all of it. I’m making travel plans to go and speak at European events—another positive signal of the changing situation. Soon I’ll be boarding the Eurostar to head to Amsterdam, and not long after I’ll be on the Eurostar again for a trip to Lille. And then of course there’s UX London at the end of June. With each gathering, there’s an inevitable sense of calculated risk, but there’s also a welcome sense of normality seeping back in.
Checked in at Haus On The Hill. Sunday roast — with Jessica
An ode to an ode. Both of them beautiful.
Playing tunes.
Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Tunes 🎶☘️🎻
BREAKING: Elon Musk to tell Twitter that in order to close this deal, they must first “Bring me a shrubbery!”
Glenn Davis of Project Cool’s Cool Site Of The Day from waaaay back in the day is writing his online memoirs.
Depending on when you got online, this will either bring back a lot of memories or sound like something from a different century (which technically it is).
Check out the line up for this year’s UX London. I know I’m biased, but damn! That’s objectively an excellent roster of smart, interesting people.
When I was first putting that page together I had the name of each speaker followed by their job title and company. But when I stopped and thought about it—not to be too blunt—I realised “who cares?”. What matters is what they’ll be talking about.
And, wow, what they’ll be talking about sounds great! Designing for your international audiences, designing with the autistic community, how to win stakeholders and influence processes, the importance of clear writing in product development, designing good services, design systems for humans, and more. Not to mention workshops like designing your own research methods for a very diverse audience, writing for people who hate writing, and harnessing design systems.
You can peruse the schedule—which is almost complete now—to get a feel for how each day will flow.
But I’m not just excited about this year’s UX London because of the great talks and workshops. I’m also really, really excited at the prospect of gathering together—in person!—over the course of three days with my peers. That means meeting new and interesting people, but frankly, it’s going to be just as wonderful to hang out with my co-workers.
Clearleft has been a remote-only company for the past two years. We’ve still got our studio and people can go there if they like (but no pressure). It’s all gone better than I thought it would given how much of an in-person culture we had before the pandemic hit. But it does mean that it’s rare for us all to be together in the same place (if you don’t count Zoom as a place).
UX London is going to be like our off-site. Everyone from Clearleft is going to be there, regardless of whether “UX” or “design” appears in their job title. I know that the talks will resonate regardless. When I was putting the line-up together I made sure that all the talks would have general appeal, regardless of whether you were a researcher, a content designer, a product designer, a product manager, or anything else.
I’m guessing that the last two years have been, shall we say, interesting at your workplace too. And even if you’ve also been adapting well to remote work, I think you’ll agree that the value of having off-site gatherings has increased tenfold.
So do what we’re doing. Make UX London your off-site gathering. It’ll be a terrific three-day gathering in the sunshine in London from Tuesday, June 28th to Thursday, June 30th at the bright and airy Tobacco Dock.
If you need to convince your boss, I’ve supplied a list of reasons to attend. But you should get your tickets soon—standard pricing ends in just over two weeks on Friday, June 3rd. After that there’ll only be last-chance tickets available.
The idea that only Designers should Design strikes me as a kind of protective gatekeeping, not unlike the idea that only Priests know the word of God, and it should be spoken in Latin.
— @PeterMe
It turns out that in 2022, for a lot of apps, the dream of write once run anywhere has finally arrived.
Every year browsers and web technologies become more capable and more powerful. Every year there are more kinds of app that you can make cross platform.
So before you start your next project, why don’t you take a look at cross platform web apps. Maybe they aren’t right for your project, but maybe, like me, you’ll discover that you can code once and run everywhere. And I think that’s amazing.
… blogging is great isn’t it? You don’t have to write every week or every day. Just write when you have something you want to write about, and up it pops in RSS feed readers, or posted to Twitter, or whatever. Lovely.
— Phil Gyford
Design Thinking didn’t change business at all, rather it changed Design into business, adopting its language, priorities and techniques. It sold out Design in an attempt to impress those in power, and in so doing lost its heart.
A fascinating and inspiring meditation on aerodynamics.
I added a “notes” section to this website eight years ago. I set it up so that notes could be syndicated to Twitter. Ever since then, that’s the only way I post to Twitter.
A few months later I added photos to my notes. Again, this would get syndicated to Twitter.
Something’s bothered me for a long time though. I initially thought that if I posted a photo, then the accompanying text would serve as a decription of the image. It could effectively act as the alt
text for the image, I thought. But in practice it didn’t work out that way. The text was often a commentary on the image, which isn’t the same as a description of the contents.
I needed a way to store alt
text for images. To make it more complicated, it was possible for one note to have multiple images. So even though a note was one line in my database, I somehow needed a separate string of text with the description of each image in a single note.
I eventually settled on using the file system instead of the database. The images themselves are stored in separate folders, so I figured I could have an accompanying alt.txt
file in each folder.
Take this note from yesterday as an example. Different sizes of the image are stored in the folder /images/uploaded/19077
. Here’s a small version of the image and here’s the original. In that same folder is the alt
text.
This means I’m reading a file every time I need the alt
text instead of reading from a database, which probably isn’t the most performant way of doing it, but it seems to be working okay.
Here’s another example:
In order to add the alt
text to the image, I needed to update my posting interface. By default it’s a little textarea
, followed by a file upload input
, followed by a toggle (a checkbox under the hood) to choose whether or not to syndicate the note to Twitter.
The interface now updates automatically as soon as I use that input type="file"
to choose any images for the note. Using the FileReader
API, I show a preview of the selected images right after the file input.
Here’s the code if you ever need to do something similar. I’ve abstracted it somewhat in that gist—you should be able to drop it into any page that includes input type="file" accept="image/*"
and it will automatically generate the previews.
I was pleasantly surprised at how easy this was. The FileReader
API worked just as expected without any gotchas. I think I always assumed that this would be quite complex to do because once upon a time, it was quite complex (or impossible) to do. But now it’s wonderfully straightforward. Story of the web.
My own version of the script does a little bit more; it also generates another little textarea
right after each image preview, which is where I write the accompanying alt
text.
I’ve also updated my server-side script that handles the syndication to Twitter. I’m using the /media/metadata/create
method to provide the alt
text. But for some reason it’s not working. I can’t figure out why. I’ll keep working on it.
In the meantime, if you’re looking at an image I’ve posted on Twitter and you’re judging me for its lack of alt
text, my apologies. But each tweet of mine includes a link back to the original note on this site and you will most definitely find the alt
text for the image there.
Checked in at Vine Street Tap. Daydrinking — with Jessica
Brighton in the sun.
Checked in at Loam. Coffee and a sandwich — with Jessica
Time to go play some songs with @SalterCane.