Link archive: March, 2012

Scott walks through the code and thinking behind the conditional loading pattern on The Boston Globe site. This is such a useful and valuable pattern!

Wednesday, March 28th, 2012

» 28 March 2012, baked by Cennydd Bowles @ The Pastry Box Project

I like Cennydd’s thoughts on the fundamental difference between skill and process:

Skilled people without a process will always find a way to get things done. Skill begets process. But process doesn’t beget skill.

Responsive News - Cutting the mustard

This seems like a sensible way of separating capable browsers from legacy browsers: if the browser supports querySelector, localStorage and addEventListener, you’re good to go.

Testing For Dummies | Testing

An in-depth look at the BBC News mobile testing process. I think it’s great that people are sharing this kind of information.

Localgram

I like this simple idea, nicely executed: see Instagram photos taken near you.

Tuesday, March 27th, 2012

Slow down Katniss by 25% and what do you get? Will… - Final Boss Form

Andy Baio pointed to this from Twitter a few hours ago and ever since, I’ve been playing it and giggling over and over.

BBC - BBC Internet Blog: BBC News on mobile: responsive design

BBC News are using the mobile subdomain to plant the seed of responsive design. It’s a smart move that’s been really nicely executed.

This time, more than any other time

A cautionary tale from Stuart. We, the makers of modern technology, are letting people down. Badly.

We’re in this to help users, remember: not just the ones who think as we do, but the ones who rely on us to build things for them because they don’t know what they’re doing. If your response is honestly “well, he should have spent more on a phone to get something better”, then I’m exceedingly disillusioned by you.

ESPI at work: The power of Keynote| Edenspiekermann

Using Keynote as a web design tool? Why not? It makes as much sense as Photoshop or Fireworks, perhaps more.

BrowserQuest

A fun little multiplayer game, all possible in the browser thanks to web sockets.

A List Apart: Articles: Style Tiles and How They Work

Samantha does an excellent job of explaining how useful style tiles can be for visual design and iteration.

ARC 2012: The future is on its way - New Scientist

A new publication from New Scientist dedicated to future thinking. The first issue has articles and stories from Bruce Sterling, Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, and Alastair Reynolds.

An oldie but a goodie: Clay Shirky looks at the design principles underlying HTML in order to figure out what made it so successful. Even though this is fourteen years old, there are plenty of still-relevant insights here.

What’s in a Name? | The Intercom Blog

The hitherto unnoticed connection between the names of Android phones and the names of condoms.

Nicholas Zakas: Progressive Enhancement 2.0 - YouTube

A great talk by Nicholas on what progressive enhancement means today. There’s some good ammunition in here.

2012 Shortlist | Arthur C. Clarke Award

Well, that’s my reading list sorted then.

Untitled ✿ dabblet.com

Here’s a handy little tip for CSS animations: instead of changing position properties, use translate instead.

Sunday, March 25th, 2012

Infovore » A Year of Links

I really like what Tom has done here, printing out his bookmarks.

They capture a changing style of writing. They capture changing interests – you can almost catalogue projects by what I was linking to when. They capture time – you can see the gaps when I went on holiday, or was busy delivering work. They remind me of the memories I have around those links – what was going on in my life at those points.

Chirp Clock

This serendipitous chronometer shows tweets that are mentioning the current time.

Saturday, March 24th, 2012

L’Eclaireur • subblue

Press play on each video, sit back, and relax.

Sci-Fi Airshow :: Home

I want to go to there!

This is what Photoshop is for. Be sure to watch the slideshow.

Friday, March 23rd, 2012

Content Folding | CSS-Tricks

An interesting idea from Chris: instead of linearising content on smaller screens, what if you could interweave it instead? Theoretically, CSS regions makes it possible, regardless of source order.

» Long Bets Bet – How Durable Are URLs? - Blog of the Long Now

The Long Now blog is featuring the bet between myself and Matt on URL longevity. Just being mentioned on that site gives me a warm glow.

scottjehl/Device-Bugs

Scott has created a one-stop-shop for documenting browser bugs in mobile devices. Feel free to add to it.

The Case Against Google

An in-depth look at where Google is going wrong.

Tom Morris - Oppression, identity and sexuality

Anger is an energy, especially when it’s coming from Tom …and for once, it’s not about the Semantic Web.

Seriously though, this is a great piece of writing. This is what blogs are for.

Pingdom Tools

A handy performance testing tool from Pingdom, similar to Google’s offering.

Screenshots of Despair

Existential ennui delivered through interface copy.

Content Parity | Brad Frost Web

Yet another great post from Brad:

Whenever I think of the concept of “One Web” and providing universal access to information on the web, I tend to break it down into something much simpler: give people what they ask for.

Thursday, March 22nd, 2012

Fashionably flexible responsive web design (full day workshop) // Speaker Deck

The slides from Andy’s one-day responsive design workshop are well worth a perusal.

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

Marginalized

Notes in manuscripts and colophons made by medieval scribes and copyists …in 140 characters or fewer.

Script Junkie | Flexibility: A Foundation for Responsive Design

Emily walks us through a responsive design case study, stressing the importance using percentages for layout.

ARCHIVE TEAM: A Distributed Preservation of Service Attack - YouTube

Jason’s rip-roaring presentation from Defcon last year.

Stop solving problems you don’t yet have | this is rachelandrew.co.uk

I completely agree with everything Rachel says here. I see far too many projects that start out with pre-emptive conditional comments, JavaScript libraries and polyfills, without knowing whether or not they’re actually going to be needed.

Style guide round-up

Anna goes through some of her favourite pattern libraries. It’s really, really great to see this stuff getting documented.

maps.stamen.com

Beautiful new map tiles from Stamen for use with OpenStreetMap data. The “watercolor” tiles are particularly pretty.

Kicksend/mailcheck · GitHub

A handy little script that attempts to check email inputs for misspelled domain names. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t need to be written as a jQuery pug-in, though: anyone want to fork it and create a non-jQuery version too?

Tuesday, March 20th, 2012

A Whole Lotta Nothing: My Webstock Talk: Lessons from a 40 year old (now with transcript)

Matt has transcribed the notes from his excellent Webstock talk. I highly recommend giving this a read.

The true fathers of computing | Technology | The Observer

An interview with George Dyson, whose next book—Turing’s Cathedral—sounds like it’ll be right up my alley.

Style Guide

I met one of the guys from the Starbucks team at South by Southwest and he mentioned that they had a markup pattern library. I encouraged them to make it public, and it here it is!

I really hope that more companies and agencies will start sharing stuff like this.

Monday, March 19th, 2012

Why I’m building Nilai by Colin Devroe

Now this is some prioritisation I can admire:

I’m going to build valuable, reliable, sustainable web services that will last forever.

Goldilocks and the Three Device Pixel Ratios [Legends of the Sun Pig - Martin Sutherland’s Blog]

A great examination of the default settings for pixel density and how it can effect reported device width values on mobile.

Red Scharlach Points At Interesting Things - Otters Who Look Like Benedict Cumberbatch: A Visual Examination.

Uncanny!

We need a standard show navigation icon for responsive web design | Stuff & Nonsense

Andy documents the kinds of symbols being used to represent revealable navigation on mobile.

Video, Mobile, and the Open Web | Brendan Eich

Mozilla will be supporting H.264 …but they’re not happy about it.

I won’t sugar-coat this pill. But we must swallow it if we are to succeed in our mobile initiatives. Failure on mobile is too likely to consign Mozilla to decline and irrelevance.

It’s a bookmark. But it’s also a magazine.

It’s a blog. It’s a bookmark. It’s a magazine.

Sunday, March 18th, 2012

Galaxy Zoo and the new dawn of citizen science | Science | The Observer

A lovely piece of mainstream news reporting on Galaxy Zoo and the other Zooniverse projects, and the broader role of Citizen Science.

Jordan Moore | Web Design, Northern Ireland, Bangor, Freelance

A sweet little meditation on the nature of the web and responsive design.

Saturday, March 17th, 2012

Webstock ‘12: Matt Haughey - Lessons for a 40 year old on Vimeo

I really enjoyed Matt’s talk from Webstock. I know some people thought it might be a bit of a downer but I actually found it very inspiring.

Thinking About Futurism | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine

A collection of articles on the tricksy art of Futurism from—amongst others—Bruce Sterling, Annalee Newitz, and Matt Novak, creator of the Paleofuture blog.

adactio : sxsw2012 on Huffduffer

I’ve been huffduffing some of the best talks from this year’s South by Southwest—some I saw, some I missed. Subscribe to the podcast feed if you want to catch up with them at your leisure.

dawdlr

A twitter for the Long Now from Russell Davies. You can submit an answer to the question “What are you doing, you know, more generally?” to:

Dawdlr, c/o RIG, 32-38 Scrutton Street, London, EC2A 4RQ

Off Canvas

Inspired by Luke’s documentation of layout patterns in responsive designs, Jason goes into more detail on the pattern of hiding navigation and extra content to the left and right of the viewport on small screens.

About HTML semantics and front-end architecture – Nicolas Gallagher

An in-depth look at naming patterns for classes to help streamline CSS.

Points mean Pixels - 8th May 2012 at The Skiff, Brighton

This looks like being a fun little local event ‘round at the Skiff in May.

Earth Station: The Afterlife of Technology at the End of the World - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

The wonderful story of an odd place:

The Jamesburg Earth Station is a massive satellite receiver in a remote valley in California. It played a central role in satellite communications for three decades, but had been forgotten until the current owner put it up for sale, promoting it as a great place to spend the apocalypse.

Friday, March 16th, 2012

Excessive Enhancement - SXSW2012 // Speaker Deck

The slides from Phil’s excellent South by Southwest presentation on URLs, JavaScript, and progressive enhancement.

Get Excited and Make Things with Science on Huffduffer

The audio from the panel I did at South by Southwest with Ariel and Matt all about science hacking.

Photo Booth - Annie Ray Photo

Pictures from the photo booth at Jeffrey’s Hall of Fame celebration party on the last night of South by Southwest.

Content Protection, fonts, and trolling « in progress

Chris defends himself from some inaccuracies I flung his way, regarding fonts and DRM.

Of Austin Fame and Marches | Dolls for Friends

I am the proud custodian of one of these cute Zeldolls …I may have even nabbed a second one.

What Goes Up, Doesn’t Have To Come Down

A thoughtful—and beautifully illustrated—piece by Geri on memory and digital preservation, prompted by the shut-down of Gowalla.

Style Tiles

Samantha put together this handy one-page site to explain Style Tiles as part of her South by Southwest presentation.

russell davies: SXSW, the new aesthetic and writing

Russell was the final panelist to speak at the New Aesthetic South by Southwest tour-de-force, taking a look at how our relationship to text is being changed.

[this is aaronland] god help us if all we’re doing is building an internet of explore

Aaron explains why there was a handcrafted predator drone at the New Aesthetic panel at South by Southwest.

SXSW, the new aesthetic and commercial visual culture (Noisy Decent Graphics)

Ben took an insightful and amusing at the New Aesthetic in advertising.

New Aesthetic at SXSW 2012 : Joanne Mcneil

Joanne Mcneil was the first to speak at the New Aesthetic panel, giving a great historical perspective.

#sxaesthetic | booktwo.org

James summarises the excellent New Aesthetic panel he put together for South by Southwest.

Thursday, March 15th, 2012

LukeW | Multi-Device Layout Patterns

Luke catalogues layout patterns in responsive designs.

First thing you should do to optimize your desktop site for mobile « Cloud Four

Jason reiterates Bruce’s rallying cry: Performance First!

If you could only do one thing to prepare your desktop site for mobile and had to choose between employing media queries to make it look good on a mobile device or optimizing the site for performance, you would be better served by making the desktop site blazingly fast.

Bruce Lawson’s personal site : What Users Want from Mobile, and what we can re-learn from them

Bruce hammers home the importance of speed and performance on mobile (and frankly, everywhere).

So perhaps some of the time and effort put into media queries, viewports, avoiding scrolling, line length would actually be better employed reducing HTTP requests and optimising so that websites are perceived to render faster.

LukeW | Vector Images for Mobile

Luke rounds up some of the alternatives to bitmap-based images—an increasingly important topic for “resolutionary” “retina’ displays (bleurgh!).

Abstract Sequential - Print Styles Are Responsive Design

An excellent piece by Stephanie on how to approach print stylesheets. I’ve always maintained that Print First can be as valid as Mobile First in getting you to focus on what content really matters.

Jeffrey Zeldman tribute video - on his induction into the SXSW Interactive Hall of Fame on Vimeo

The video that was played at Jeffrey’s inauguration into the South by Southwest Interactive Hall of Fame.

CSS for grown ups: maturing best practises // Speaker Deck

The slides from Andy’s tour-de-force presentation at South by Southwest on CSS best practices.

On South By Southwest 2012 « Evan Prodromou

Evan’s experiences of—and thoughts about—South by Southwest mirror my own to an uncanny degree.

Wednesday, March 14th, 2012

Get Excited and Make Things with Science // Speaker Deck

The slides from the South by Southwest panel I was on with Ariel and Matt. It was lots of fun.

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012

A Patent Lie: How Yahoo Weaponized My Work | Epicenter | Wired.com

A superb scathing piece by Andy, who has a personal perspective on Yahoo’s massively dick move in deploying the patent nuclear option against Facebook.

Sunday, March 11th, 2012

HTML5 nurse

Sometimes the good folk at HTML5doctor.com get asked questions that might be better suited for a real, medical doctor. These are those questions.

Webstock ‘12: Jeremy Keith - Of Time and the Network on Vimeo

The video of my talk from Webstock, all about wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff like networks and memory.

Saturday, March 10th, 2012

Lets Imagine Greater - Ariel “Spotlight” - YouTube

How awesome is this!? Ariel is on TV in a promo spot for the Syfy channel …all thanks to Spacehack.org.

Science!

Wednesday, March 7th, 2012

George R. R. Martin’s Fantasy Books and Fans : The New Yorker

A fascinating look at the work of George R.R. Martin and his relationship with his fans, who sometimes sound more like his enemies. There are strong overtones of Paul Ford’s “Why wasn’t I consulted?” syndrome here.

Adobe Shadow | preview mobile web - Adobe Labs

Adobe have launched their version of Weinre, the tool that allows you to refresh and debug iOS and Android browser views from your desktop computer.

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

Browser Support? Forget It! – David Bushell – Web Design

A great post that discusses exactly what we mean when we talk about “supporting” different browsers.

Monday, March 5th, 2012

Thieves Are Your Best Customers in Waiting – Stuntbox

A great article from David with some concrete proposals for media companies.

By the way, how nice is David’s new responsive design? Very nice. Very nice indeed.

Progressive enhancement is a barrier to progress | Opinion | .net magazine

I can’t remember the last time I read something I disagreed with so fundamentally. This sums up the tone of the article:

Accessibility is not a right; it’s a feature.

I do not agree. I do not agree at all.

(Also, the pre-emtive labelling of anyone who may disagree with your point of view as defending a “sacred cow” is as tired and misguided as labelling anyone who disagrees with your viewpoint as a “fanboy”.)