Link archive: February, 2012

SETILive

This is not only the single most important human endeavour that you can participate in, it is also ridiculously gorgeous.

Science!

ImageAlpha — lossy compression for 24-bit PNG images

From Kornel, the genius who gave us ImageOptim, comes another Mac desktop tool for optimising PNGs, this time converting 24-bit PNG to 8-bit with full alpha channel.

scott_lynch: Against Big Bird, The Gods Themselves Contend In Vain

It turns out that Big Bird is a god-defying instantiation of Moorcock’s Eternal Champion. Magnificent!

Big Bird and Snuffy go with him to stand in the Hall of Two Truths at the gate to the afterlife. The gigantic foam balls on these guys! Sure, Elmo loves you, but when’s the last time Elmo held anyone’s hand on the threshold of eternal night?

nathanford/pngy - GitHub

A script that attempts to detect connection speed (by requesting a test file three times in a row) in order to determine whether hi-res images should be requested or not.

A Whole Lotta Nothing: Webstock: best conference ever

I’m genuinely touched by Matt’s kind words on my Webstock talk. It really means a lot to me, coming from him.

LukeW | Which One: Responsive Design, Device Experiences, or RESS?

Luke outlines three different solutions to delivering a site to multiple devices.

Minimal Mac | TV Is Broken

A fascinating insight into the reaction of an internet-savvy child upon being exposed to “regular” television.

Wilson Miner

Wilson has turned his site into a single-serving page that’s doing some interesting things with media queries (using height as well as width).

Time to Kill Off Captchas: Scientific American

Yes, yes, yes! This article does an excellent job of explaining what Captchas are attempting to do and why, therefore, they are so utterly shit.

Responsive Summit » Blog » Elliot Jay Stocks

Elliot jots down some of the issues discussed at the responsive summit.

The world’s undersea internet cables - interactive | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Explore the shape of the underwater world of internet backbones.

CSS3 Pseudo-Classes and HTML5 Forms | HTML5 Doctor

A look at the new pseudo-classes in CSS3 that go hand-in-hand with the form enhancements introduced in HTML5.

Progress Bar

A nice little bit of CSS for a page-loading animation. View source.

The Star Wars Saga: Suggested Viewing Order » Absolutely No Machete Juggling

This is an intriguing suggestion: watch the Star Wars saga in the order IV, V, II, III, VI (notice that Episode I is missing entirely). The reasoning is very sound and well worth a read.

Frank Chimero — Blog

Frank has redesigned his site and it’s quite wonderful: a real reflection of his personality and outlook.

Oh, and it is, of course, responsive.

A List Apart: Articles: Future-Ready Content

A great article from Sara Wachter-Boettcher on crafting future-friendly content. The content prioritisation described here mirrors what I’ve been doing in workshops.

Prometheus Fusion Perfection

Now this is what I call science hacking: building an open source fusion reactor.

Science!

CERN | booktwo.org

James geeks out about visiting CERN. His enthusiasm is infectious.

Science!

The Lively Morgue

Photographs from the archive of the New York Times.

Thoughts on Responsive Navigation

Prompted by Brad’s recent post, here are some musings on three methods of handling navigation in responsive sites.

A Responsive Design Approach for Navigation, Part 1 | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA

A detailed overview by Filament Group on progressively enhancing navigation for responsive sites.

Albatros - The bookmark following any journey

Well, this looks clever: a self-updating bookmark (that’s an actual bookmark for books, not browsers).

Ringmark

An acid test for mobile browsers. Point your device at rng.io and it will report on how much or little mobile shininess is available.

Responsive Summit: The One Tool | Mark Boulton

Mark talks about the tools web designers use and the tools web designers want. The upshot: use whatever you’re most comfortable with.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Responsive Images — Paul Robert Lloyd

Here’s a great braindump from Paul following the Responsive Summit, detailing multiple ways of potentially tackling the issue of responsive images.

JoshEmerson.co.uk · Blog · The Responsive Process

Josh goes through the talking points from the recent Responsive Summit he attended. Sounds like it was a great get-together.

A better responsive image format - Stuff in my head

Here’s a new angle on tackling the responsive image problem: what if the file format itself could specify multiple image sizes?

» 24 February 2012, baked by Ben Ward @ The Pastry Box Project

A beautiful reminder from Ben of the scale-free nature of the web.

We must recover our sanity where 100 million users does not represent the goal criteria of every new service. We must recover the mindset where a service used by 10,000 users, or 1,000 users, or 100 users is admired, respected, and praised for its actual success. All of those could be sustainable, profitable ventures. If TechCrunch doesn’t care to write about you, all the better.

If you are fortunate enough to work on your own product, with your own idea, and build it, and ship it, and reach enough people willing to sustain you financially for that immense amount of work, you should be applauded. You have poured in inordinate effort, and succeeded in making something that improved lives.

Responsive Design: Why You’re Doing It Wrong | Design Shack

A rallying cry for a content-focused—rather than device-focused—approach to responsive design. Despite the awful title and occasionally adversarial tone, this article is making a very good point about being future friendly.

Webstock: Jeremy Keith | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

I love these sketchnotes from my presentation at Webstock.

Responsive Navigation Patterns | Brad Frost Web

Brad does a great job of rounding up various design patterns used for navigation in responsive sites.

Koalas to the Max dot Com

Pretty!

What We Don’t Know // Speaker Deck

The slides from Chris’s presentation on the known unknowns of the web.

ishida >> blog » HTML5 adds new translate attribute

Richard gives the lowdown on the new translate attribute in HTML.

MATTER by Matter — Kickstarter

Bobbie’s new journalism project is up and running on Kickstarter. Get in there!

Dress Responsively, LTD

The site’s a mockup but if you want it badly enough, these responsive-themed T-shirts could be real.

Responsive Summit • London 23rd Feb 2012

Typical! I leave the country and this excellent gathering gets organised while I’m away. I wish I could be there.

Let them know in advance if you have any responsive-related questions they should tackle.

IMG_8191 - 2012-02-15 at 02-39-26 | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

I can’t fave this picture enough. One moment of Webstock captured by Michael B. Johnson.

SXSW speakers: Promote your panel with free MOO MiniCards! | The Lanyrd Blog

Moo and Lanyrd sitting in a tree, helping promote my SXSW panel. Excellent!

Responsive Images Community Group

There’s a W3C community group now for looking at the responsive images question.

Official Google Blog: Renewing old resolutions for the new year

Google are shutting down the Social Graph API. Twunts.

BibliOdyssey: Channelling Martian Maps

Beautiful 19th century maps of Mars.

Camping at Kiwifoo | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

The Kiwi Foo Space Program (a weather balloon with an Android device attached) captured some beautiful images.

The Perpetual, Invisible Window Into Your Gmail Inbox - Waxy.org

Andy sounds a cautionary note: the password anti-pattern may be dying, but OAuth permission-granting shouldn’t be blasé. This is why granular permissions are so important.

Structure First. Content Always. | Mark Boulton

Some clarifying thoughts from Mark: “content first” doesn’t have to literally mean having the final content first …but it does mean knowing the structure of the content.

Pears

A great pattern library from Dan.

BLDGBLOG: Object Cancers

You think that Digital Rights Management is bad? What about Physible Rights Management?

The Inceptionator: For all your Inception Trailer Horn Sound needs

BWWAAAMP!

Redefined | Trent Walton

Man, I love Trent’s honesty! This had me nodding my head vigorously — yes, responsive design means fundamentally approaching the way we build for the web …that’s what makes it so exciting!

I suspect that some naysayers of responsive design, were they to do some soul-searching, would find themselves relating to Trent’s initial scepticism.

The CSS3 Test

A really handy test site from Lea that reports your browser’s recognition of CSS properties.

» Of Grids, Class Names, Responsiveness, and Lifecycles Bits Pushed Around

The thought process behind trying to abstract class names that are used for layout in responsive designs (and can therefore refer to different widths depending on the context). Here, the author settles on letters. In the past, I’ve approached the same kind of abstraction by using latinised names.

Science Hack Day Chicago

What a fantastic location for a Science Hack Day: the Adler planetarium in Chicago! Get there if you can.

GREY GOOSE® Vodka | The World’s Best Tasting Vodka

This beautiful site not only features the oh-so-trendy vertical parallax, but it’s responsive too. Impressive!

* { box-sizing: border-box } FTW « Paul Irish

Paul quite rightly sings the praises of box-sizing: border-box — this is something that Microsoft got right and the spec got wrong. I never thought of making it part of a universal reset though.

Science Hackday Dublin | Yay! Science

Dublin is hosting a Science Hack Day on the weekend of March 3rd-4th. Put your name down now.