Archive: January, 2012

We’ve had a new intern at Clearleft for the past few weeks: Alex Jones. He likes a good coffee and as it’s his first time in Brighton, I promised I’d tell him where he could find the best flat whites. So I made a map tale of Brighton Coffee.

When I wrote about responsible responsive images a few months back, I outlined my two golden rules when evaluating the various techniques out there:

1. The small image should be default.
2. Don’t load images twice (in other words, don’t load the small images and the larger images).

I also described why that led to my dissatisfaction with most server-side device libraries for user-agent sniffing:

When you consider the way that I’m approaching responsive images, those libraries are over-engineered. They contain a massive list of mobile user-agent strings that I’ll never need. Remember, I’m taking a mobile-first approach and assuming a mobile browser by default. So if I’m going to overturn that assumption, all I need is a list of desktop user-agent strings.

I finished by asking:

Anybody fancy putting it together?

Well, it turns out that Brett Jankord is doing just that with a device-detection script called Categorizr:

Instead of assuming the device is a desktop, and detecting mobile and tablet device user agents, Categorizr is a mobile first based device detection. It assumes the device is mobile and sets up checks to see if it’s a desktop or tablet. Desktops are fairly easy to detect, the user agents are known, and are not changing anytime soon.

It isn’t ready for public consumption yet and there are plenty of known issues to iron out first, but I think the fundamental approach is spot-on:

By assuming devices are mobile from the beginning, Categorizr aims to be more future friendly. When new phones come out, you don’t need to worry if their new user agent is in your device detection script since devices are assumed mobile from the start.

There’s definitely something stirring in the geek zeitgeist: something three-dimensional.

Tim Maly just published an article in Technology Review called Why 3-D Printing Isn’t Like Virtual Reality:

Something interesting happens when the cost of tooling-up falls. There comes a point where your production runs are small enough that the economies of scale that justify container ships from China stop working.

Meanwhile The Atlantic interviewed Brendan for an article called Why Apple Should Start Making a 3D Printer Right Now:

3D Printing is unlikely to prove as satisfying to manual labor evangelists as an afternoon spent with a monkey wrench. But by bringing more and more people into the innovation process, 3D printers could usher in a new generation of builders and designers and tinkerers, just as Legos and erector sets turned previous generations into amateur engineers and architects.

Last month Anil Dash published his wishlist for the direction this technology could take: 3D Printing, Teleporters and Wishes:

Every 3D printer should seamlessly integrate a 3D scanner, even if it makes the device cost much more. The reason is simple: If you set the expectation that every device can both input and output 3D objects, you provide the necessary fundamentals for network effects to take off amongst creators. But no, these devices are not “3D fax machines”. What you’ve actually made, when you have an internet-connected device that can both send and receive 3D-printed objects, is a teleporter.

Anil’s frustrations and hopes echo a white paper from 2010 by Michael Weinberg called It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw it Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology:

The ability to reproduce physical objects in small workshops and at home is potentially just as revolutionary as the ability to summon information from any source onto a computer screen.

Michael Weinberg also appears as one of the guests on an episode ABC Radio’s Future Tense along with Tom Standage, one of my favourite non-fiction authors.

But my favourite piece of speculation on where this technology could take us comes from Russell Davies. He gave an excellent talk as part of the BBC’s Four Thought series in which he talks not so much about The Internet Of Things, but The Geocities Of Things. I like that.

It’s a short talk. Take the time to listen to it, then go grab a copy of Cory Doctorow’s book Makers and have a poke around Thingiverse

On Twitter the other day, Justin Hall wrote:

hah! 18 years ago today, I posted my home page on the public web; here’s a 27 January 1994 version bit.ly/AraMW0

Eighteen years! That’s quite something. For reference, Justin’s site links.net is generally acknowledged to be the web’s first blog, before John Barger coined the term “weblog” (or Peter coined the more common contraction).

If you go right back to the start of links.net, Justin explains that he was inspired to start publishing online by a 1993 article in the New York Times—he has kept a copy on his site. What’s fascinating about the article is that, although it’s talking about the growth of the World Wide Web, it focuses on the rising popularity of Mosaic:

A new software program available free to companies and individuals is helping even novice computer users find their way around the global Internet, the network of networks that is rich in information but can be baffling to navigate.

From a journalistic point of view, this makes a lot of sense: focusing on the interface to the web, rather than trying to explain the more abstract nature of the web itself is a good human-centric approach. When the author does get around to writing about the web, there’s a lot that must be explained for the audience of the time:

With hypertext, highlighted key words and images are employed to point a user to related sources of information.

“I realized that if everyone had the same information as me, my life would be easier,” Mr. Berners-Lee said.

From a small electronic community of physicists, the World-Wide Web has grown into an international system of data base “server” computers offering diverse information.

Links, servers, the World Wide Web …these were actually pretty tricky concepts to explain, and unlikely to elicit excitement. But explaining the browser gets straight to the heart of how it felt to surf the web:

Mosaic lets computer users simply click a mouse on words or images on their computer screens to summon text, sound and images from many of the hundreds of data bases on the Internet that have been configured to work with Mosaic.

Click the mouse: there’s a NASA weather movie taken from a satellite high over the Pacific Ocean. A few more clicks, and one is reading a speech by President Clinton, as digitally stored at the University of Missouri. Click-click: a sampler of digital music recordings as compiled by MTV. Click again, et voila: a small digital snapshot reveals whether a certain coffee pot in a computer science laboratory at Cambridge University in England is empty or full.

These days we take it for granted that we have the ability to surf around from website to website (and these days we do so on many more devices). I think it’s good to remember just how remarkable that ability is.

Thanks, Tim Berners-Lee for dreaming up the web. Thanks, Marc Andreessen for giving us a tool to navigate the web. Thanks, Justin Hall for publishing on the web.

At last November’s Build conference I gave a talk on digital preservation called All Our Yesterdays:

Our communication methods have improved over time, from stone tablets, papyrus, and vellum through to the printing press and the World Wide Web. But while the web has democratised publishing, allowing anyone to share ideas with a global audience, it doesn’t appear to be the best medium for preserving our cultural resources: websites and documents disappear down the digital memory hole every day. This presentation will look at the scale of the problem and propose methods for tackling our collective data loss.

The video is now on vimeo.

The audio has been huffduffed.

I’ve published a transcription over in the “articles” section.

I blogged a list of relevant links shortly after the presentation.

You can also download the slides or view them on speakerdeck but, as usual, they won’t make much sense out of context.

I hope you’ll enjoy watching or reading or listening to the talk as much as I enjoyed presenting it.

I use my walk to and from work every day as an opportunity to catch up on my Huffduffer podcast. Today I started listening to a talk I’ve really been looking forward to. It’s a Long Now seminar called Universal Access To All Knowledge by one of my heroes: Brewster Kahle, founder of The Internet Archive.

As expected, it’s an excellent talk. I caught the start of it on my walk in to work this morning and I picked up where I left off on my walk home this evening. In fact, I deliberately didn’t get the bus home—despite the cold weather—so that I’d get plenty of listening done.

Round about the 23 minute mark he starts talking about Open Library, the fantastic project that George worked on to provide a web page for every book. He describes how it works as a lending library where an electronic version of a book can be checked out by one person at a time:

You can click on: hey! there’s this HTML5 For Web Designers. We bought this book—we bought this book from a publisher such that we could lend it. So you can say “Oh, I want to borrow this book” and it says “Oh, it’s checked out.” Darn! And you can add it to your list and remind yourself to go and get it some other time.

Holy crap! Did Brewster Kahle just use my book to demonstrate Open Library‽

It literally stopped me in my tracks. I stopped walking and stared at my phone, gobsmacked.

It was a very surreal moment. It was also a very happy moment.

Now I’m documenting that moment—and I don’t just mean on a third-party service like Twitter or Facebook. I want to be able to revisit that moment in the future so I’m documenting it at my own URL …though I’m very happy that the Internet Archive will also have a copy.

Aral recently released the videos from last September’s Update conference. You can watch the video of my talk if you like or, if video isn’t your bag, I’ve published a transcription of the talk.

It’s called One Web, Many Devices and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. It’s a short talk—just under 17 minutes—but I think I made my point well, without any um-ing and ah-ing. At the time I described the talk like this:

I went in to the lion’s den to encourage the assembled creative minds to forego the walled garden of Apple’s app store in favour of the open web.

It certainly got people talking. Addy Osmani wrote an op-ed piece in .net magazine after seeing the talk.

The somewhat contentious talk was followed by an even more contentious panel, which Amber described as Jeremy Keith vs. Everyone Else. The video of that panel has been published too. My favourite bit is around the five-minute mark where I nailed my colours to the mast.

Me: I’m not going to create something specifically for Windows Phone 7. I’m not going to create a specific Windows Phone 7 app. I’m not going to create a specific iPhone app or a specific Android app because I have as much interest in doing that as I do in creating a CD-ROM or a Laserdisc…

Aral: I don’t think that’s a valid analogy.

Me: Give it time.

But I am creating stuff that can be accessed on all those devices because an iPhone and Windows Phone 7 and Android—they all come with web browsers.

I was of course taking a deliberately extreme stance and, as I said at the time, the truthful answer to most of the questions raised during the panel discussion is “it depends” …but that would’ve made for a very dull panel.

Unfortunately the audio of the talks and panels from Update hasn’t been published—just videos. I’ve managed to extract an mp3 file of my talk which involved going to some dodgy warez sitez.

I wish conference organisers would export the audio of any talks that they’re publishing as video. Creating the sound file at that point is a simple one-click step. But once the videos are up online—be it on YouTube or Vimeo—it’s a lot, lot harder to get just the audio.

Not everyone wants to watch video. In fact, I bet there are plenty of people who listen to conference talks by opening the video in a separate tab so they can listen to it while they do something else. That’s one of the advantages of publishing conference audio: it allows people to catch up on talks without having to devote all their senses. I’ve written about this before:

Not that I have anything against the moving image; it’s just that television, film and video demand more from your senses. Lend me your ears! and your eyes. With your ears and eyes engaged, it’s pretty hard to do much else. So the default position for enjoying television is sitting down.

A purely audio channel demands only aural attention. That means that radio—and be extension, podcasts—can be enjoyed at the same time as other actions; walking around, working out at the gym. Perhaps it’s this symbiotic, rather than parasitic, arrangement that I find engaging.

When I was chatting with Jesse from SFF Audio he told me how he often puts video podcasts (vodcasts?) on to his iPod/iPhone but then listens to them with the device in his pocket. That’s quite a waste of bandwidth but if no separate audio is made available, the would-be listener is left with no choice.

So conference organisers: please, please take a second or two to export an audio file if you’re publishing a video. Thanks.

By far the most common use of media queries is to execute CSS based on viewport width (using min-width or max-width). Lately there’s been more talk about using media queries based on height as well.

Paul talked about using min-height media queries to adjust content appearing above the fold. Owen Gregory wrote his superb 24 Ways article on using viewport proportions and device-aspect-ratio for media queries. Trent has documented his use of horizontal and vertical media queries to bump up the font size for wide and tall viewports.

One of the areas where I’ve found height-based media queries to be quite handy is in combination with another CSS3 module: multiple columns.

Splitting text over multiple columns is not something to be done lightly on a screen-based display. If the columns drop below the viewport then the user has to scroll down, scroll back up, scroll down again …you get the picture. It works fine in print but it’s not something that should be attempted on the web unless the entire text is visible at one time.

Well, with media queries we can get a pretty good idea of whether the text will fit on the viewport …assuming we know the length of the text.

Here’s an example (thanks to Space Ipsum for supplying the text). It splits the text into two columns if the viewport has enough width and height:

@media all and (min-width: 40em) and (min-height: 36em) {
    [role="main"] {
        column-count: 2;
        column-gap: 2em;
    }
}

If the viewport is wider still, the text can be split over three columns. In this case, the test for height can actually smaller because the text is spreading over a wider area, meaning the overall height of the text is shorter:

@media all and (min-width: 65em) and (min-height: 25em) {
    [role="main"] {
        column-count: 3;
        column-gap: 2em;
    }
}

The actual CSS is more verbose than that: vendor prefixes are still required. You can grab the example from Github if you want to have a play around with it.

While I was in San Francisco for the last Event Apart of the year in December, Luke pulled me aside while he was preparing for his A Day Apart workshop on mobile web design. As befits the man who literally wrote the book on web forms and also wrote the the book on mobile-first design, Luke was planning to spend plenty of time covering input on mobile devices and he wanted my opinion on one of the patterns he was going to mention.

Let’s say you’ve got your typical checkout form asking for credit card details. The user is going to need to specify the expiry date of their credit card, something that historically would have been done with select elements, like so:

January February March April May June July August September October November December 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020

With the introduction of the new input types in HTML5, we can now just use input type="month".

That’s particularly nice on mobile devices that support input type="month" like Mobile Safari since iOS5.

But the behaviour on non-supporting browsers would be to display just like input type="text" …not ideal for inputting a date.

So the pattern that Luke proposed was to start with the traditional double drop-downs for month and year, and then use feature detection to replace them with input type="month" in supporting browsers.

That was an angle I hadn’t thought of. Usually when I’m implementing new HTML5 input types (like input type="number") I put the new type in the markup and then try to come up with JavaScript polyfills for older non-supporting browsers. In this case though, the old-fashioned way is what goes in the markup and JavaScript does the enhancing for newer browsers.

The only downside is that some the desktop browsers that do support input type="month" do so in a way that—from a UI standpoint—seems like a step backwards from simply having two selects: Safari displays it with a spinner control like input type="number", while Opera shows an entire Calendar (days’n’all).

Anyway, I threw a quick hack together as a proof of concept so you can see it in action. I’m sure you can improve upon it. Feel free to do so.

Here’s a nifty piece of in-browser behaviour…

Fire up Chrome and in the address field type “huffduffer.com” followed by a space and BOOM! …the address field transforms into a site-specific search field: “Search Huffduffer.”

That’s thanks to this XML file that’s been on Huffduffer since day one. It’s the most straightforward example of the OpenSearch format.

It’s the same format that powers Firefox’s search providers. If you visit Huffduffer with Firefox and click in the browser’s search field, you’ll see the option to “Add Huffduffer” to the list of search engines.

I can’t imagine many people will actually do that but still, no harm in providing the option.

Another option that’s been added to Huffduffer recently (thanks to Andy’s hacking) is the ability to access the API through YQL. Feel free to open up the console and have a play around.

Local lads British Sea Power have started up a residency, playing the first Friday of every month down at The Haunt. Myself and Jessica went along to the inaugural event, which was great fun.

The only downside was that it clashed with a one-off screening at The Duke of York’s of The Thing, the 1982 classic that conspicuous by its absence from the recent John Carpenter all-nighter.

Now I’m sure you’ve probably seen the Thingu parody that’s been doing the rounds.

Personally, I’m still laughing about The Thing: The Musical.

But there’s one piece inspired by the film that’s genuinely interesting. The Things by Peter Watts is a short story that tells John Carpenter’s tale from the perspective of the title character.

I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair. MacReady has told me to burn Blair if he comes back alone, but MacReady still thinks I am one of him. I am not: I am being Blair, and I am at the door. I am being Childs, and I let myself in. I take brief communion, tendrils writhing forth from my faces, intertwining: I am BlairChilds, exchanging news of the world.

A few years back, Craig took some lovely pictures of four generations of sushi chefs:

The story goes something like: Jiro trained Shiro who ran off to Seattle, started one of the first sushi joints in the city, and trained Taiichi, who now runs his own sushi shop. Jiro also trained his son, who works at Sukiyabashi Jiro and (one assumes) plans to take over the business once his octogenarian father retires (which, according to Jiro, is when he dies).

I love the additional photos that Craig took of each chef making their nigiri-te (the hand motion they use when forming nigiri).

The undisputed Jedi master of these sushi chefs is Jiro Ono. He’s the subject of the forthcoming documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi.