Link archive: April, 2012

tubalmartin/riloadr

This responsive image technique has a lot of moving parts but it seems pretty solid.

The Daily Torygraph

There’s two years(!) of doctored headlines here. Yes, it’s puerile but it’s also very funny (to my puerile sensibilities).

Myself, quantified | Extenuating Circumstances

Dan writes about how data saved his life. That is not an exaggeration.

He describes how, after receiving some very bad news from his doctor, he dived into the whole “quantified self” thing with his health data. Looking back on it, he concludes:

If I were still in the startup game, I have a pretty good idea of which industry I’d want to disrupt.

GATHER. A Graphic Novel by Anton Peck — Kickstarter

Anton is a fantastic artist. Therefore, this graphic novel will be fantastic. Therefore, you should back the hell out of it.

Scalable Navigation Patterns in Responsive Web Design | Palantir.net

An case study that tackles complex navigation in a responsive site.

Resizable Displays | Fluid Interfaces

See now, this is why liquid layouts are the way to go.

Deciding what Responsive Breakpoints to use | Tangled in Design

Another call for design-based (rather than device-based) breakpoints in responsive sites.

Privacy Patterns

Cataloguing patterns (best practices, really) for privacy-concious site owners.

Descriptive Camera

Oh, this is just wonderful: a camera that outputs a text description instead of an image (complete with instructions on how to build one yourself). I love it!

The state of responsive images | Feature | .net magazine

Wilto gives a thorough explanation of the state of things with responsive images, particularly the work being done at the Responsive Images Community Group at the W3C.

Creating a Mobile-First Responsive Web Design - HTML5 Rocks

A great step-by-step tutorial from Brad on developing a responsive site with a Content First mindset.

Mobile Battery Performance

This is my short explanation of Remy’s explanation of a BBC news article which is an explanation of an academic paper about battery performance of mobile devices when accessing websites.

Breakpoint Checking in Javascript with CSS User Values | Sparkbox

A smart response to the little conundrum I posted on my blog yesterday about detecting media-query quarantined CSS properties from JavaScript.

Modern Web Development Part 1 – The Webkit Inspector

This is a very in-depth look at how to become a power user of the Web Inspector in Webkit browsers. I’m sitting down with a nice cup of tea to go through all of this.

What’s the Deal With Display: Inline-Block? | Design Shack

When I linked to the Toast framework the other day, I mentioned that I was intrigued by its use of inline-block for layout. Here’s a more detailed analysis of how display: inline-block works, along with some caveats.

Mocking Up Is Hard To Do

This seems like an eminently sensible thing to do when building responsive sites: ditch mock-ups entirely. The reasons and the workflow outlined here make a lot of sense.

Clearleft Launches New Shopify Theme – Shopify Ecommerce Blog

Josh and Michelle have been hard at work making this responsive theme for Shopify. It’s quite lovely.

Toast | A simple CSS framework

This is interesting, not because it’s yet another grid framework (which I never use anyway) but because of the way it’s doing layout: with border-box and inline-block, rather than floats. If you’re only serving up your layout styles to browsers that support media queries (which would discount older versions of IE anyway), this could make a lot of sense.

CreativeJS for non-coders on Vimeo

A fantastic taste of what you can expect in Seb’s Creative Coding workshop.

A List Apart: Articles: Creating Intrinsic Ratios for Video

This really is a ridiculously smart way of keeping third-party videos scalable in responsive layouts. I’ve just implemented it on this year’s dConstruct site.

“Authenticity,” an article by Dan Mall

Cute. I gave Dan some advice. He made it look all pretty.

Sex differences in intimate relationships : Scientific Reports : Nature Publishing Group

Albert-László Barabási and Robin Dunbar are among the authors of this paper — it’s the scale-free network equivalent of the Avengers.

timoni.org - I love the internet.

This is a beautifully heartfelt post from Timoni:

Every day, I feel things because of the internet, and that’s amazing. Humans have been using abstracted communication for thousands of years, but it’s never been so instantaneous, never so capable of bringing folks of completely different backgrounds together in conversation. This is a huge step. Good job us.

The Jig Is Up: Time to Get Past Facebook and Invent a New Future - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic

An excellent longish-zoom article by Alexis Madrigal with an eerily accurate summation of the current state of the web. Although I think that a lack of any fundamentally new paradigms could be seen as a sign of stabilisation as much as stagnation.

From Print to iPad: Designing a Reading Experience

Harry’s 15 minute case-study presentation at UX London was excellent. He says the lesson is that we shouldn’t be afraid to make mistakes, but there’s another lesson here too: testing with users will save your ass.

Code Club

This is an excellent idea: get a whole bunch of after-school code clubs going to teach kids how to code in Scratch.

A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 - by Isao Hashimoto - YouTube

A beautiful and disturbing piece of data visualisation. The numbers are quite astonishing.

Nielsen is wrong on mobile | Opinion | .net magazine

Josh responds to Jakob Nielsen’s audaciously ignorant advice on siloing mobile devices. Josh is right.

Nielsen says his research is based on studies of hundreds of mobile experiences, and I don’t doubt it. But because he’s finding tons of poor mobile websites doesn’t mean we should punt on creating great, full-featured mobile experiences.

Lighthouse Monthly Talk — James Bridle

James is giving a talk here in Brighton next month. I’ll be there with robot-actuated bells on.

10 questions about web performance – Jeremy Keith at Clearleft

I had a chat with the guys from Pingdom about performance’n’stuff. If I sound incoherent, that’s because this is a direct transcription of a Skype call, where, like, apparently I don’t, y’know, talk in complete sentences and yeah.

A Furniture Manifesto | Roseology

Taking apps out of phones and embedding them in the world around us …there’s a lot of crossover with what Scott Jenson has been writing about here. Good stuff.

The Future Friendly Campus // Speaker Deck

It’s great to see the Future Friendly call-to-arms being expanded on. Here it’s university sites that are being looked at through a future-friendly lens.

Pentametron: With algorithms subtle and discrete / I seek iambic writings to retweet.

Algorithmically-generated combinations of tweets in iambic pentameter. Some of the results are really quite lovely. I’m imagining a poetry reading of this stuff in a hip café …it would be fun.

Media Query & Asset Downloading Results | TimKadlec.com

Tim has published the results of a whole bunch of testing he did on how different browsers deal with hidden or replaced images.

THE MEW AESTHETIC

You can’t have a zeitgeisty internet meme without cats.

Maureen Johnson, THE ADVENTURE OF THE RANDOM HOUSE

There’s a chain of hotels, one of which is in Brighton, called “My Hotel.” I bet they have stories like this one.

Caine’s Arcade | A cardboard arcade made by a 9-year old boy.

No, you’re tearing up watching a video about a boy who built his own arcade out of cardboard. I’ve just got something in my eye.

Paying attention to content hierarchy across screen sizes | Stuff & Nonsense

Andy points one of the potential pitfalls in linearising your content for small screens.

The next generation bends over - (37signals)

This post by Jason Fried is three years old but it’s more relevant than ever.

What a loss. Is that the best the next generation can do? Become part of the old generation? How about kicking the shit out of the old guys? What ever happened to that?

Form letter template for acquired startups — Gist

Just copy and paste.

Dear soon-to-be-former user…

MachineDrawing DrawingMachines : Pablo Garcia

In which twelve drawings of historical drawing machines are drawn by a computer numerical controlled machine.

Climbing a Shard of Glass | Place Hacking

Sneaking in to climb the Shard at night.

The Truth About the East Wind

This is a terrific piece of writing from Robin Sloan, entertaining and cheeky. Plug in headphones, and start reading and scrolling.

The East Wind was about to get a call from an angry star.

What Would Molydeux? • Articles • Eurogamer.net

A blow-by-blow account of last weekend’s MolyJam in Brighton.

Mobile Device Testing: The Gear | Bagcheck

An oldie but a goodie: this Bagcheck blog post contains a whole bunch of useful links to lists of mobile device testing suites.

GDS design principles

A great set of design principles for gov.uk — I’ve added them to http://principles.adactio.com/

Prontotype :: Data-driven interactive prototyping framework

Mark has put together this rather excellent prototyping tool. It’s basically the V from an MVC system. You can easily move stuff around, change data …all the good stuff you want to do quickly and easily when you’re prototyping in the browser.

Things Real People Don’t Say About Advertising

Yeah, it’s an easy target …but the cumulative effect is very funny.

Holy sh!t. Did you see that interstitial? That was dope. Refresh, refresh!!

How Not To Sort By Average Rating

I don’t understand the maths, but the logic is fascinating.

Google are about to murder a good friend of mine — Glenn Jones

Glenn gives a rational thoughtful explanation of why he’s as pissed off as I am about Google’s destruction of the Social Graph API.

Obscura Day 2012 on April 28th | An International Celebration of Unusual Places

A day devoted to exploring unusual places all over the world. I couldn’t find anything for Brighton but it looks like there will be some stuff happening in London.

littleBits

This is such a brilliant and empowering idea: an open-source object-oriented to electronics, like LEGO bricks for circuit-building.

0x10 ͨ

The premise of the next game from the creator of Minecraft sounds insane and great: a far-future Elite where everything you do is powered by a 16-bit computer.

The computer in the game is a fully functioning emulated 16 bit CPU that can be used to control your entire ship, or just to play games on while waiting for a large mining operation to finish.

In defense of reinventing wheels | Lea Verou

Maybe it’s because I’m a bit of a control freak, but I can really empathise with what Lea is saying here: sometimes the developer convenience you get from using someone else’s code can result in quite a bit of redundant code. I feel that this is particularly a problem on the front end.

Coding Horror: Preserving The Internet… and Everything Else

A love letter to the Internet Archive.

The inadmissible assumptions - Charlie’s Diary

Yes! Charles Stross speaks the unspeakable: that advertising is fundamentally “wrong”.

He’s right, y’know.

An Essay on the New Aesthetic | Beyond The Beyond | Wired.com

Bruce Sterling writes about the New Aesthetic in an article that’s half manifesto and half critique.

Grab a cup of tea or hit your “read it later” bookmarklet of choice for this one—it’s a lengthy but worthwhile read.

ADrink.at

A genuinely useful service for people in different parts of London who want to meet up for a pint.

Paperfold CSS | Demo Studio | Mozilla Developer Network

In amongst all the shiny demos on this site, this one could actually be useful.

flux machine

Beautiful, funny, and disturbing Gilliamesque animated .gifs.