Link archive: October, 2012

Base CSS | Pasteup | Guardian News

The Guardian’s front-end patterns library. The modules section contains their equivalent of a pattern primer. Very nice!

An alternate universe – Marco.org

There is an elephant in the Microsoft store.

NodeCopter Brighton

Let’s spend the day after Full Frontal programming flying robots with JavaScript. Clearleft is sponsoring a drone; want to play with it?

Just Solve the Problem Month 2012: Nitty Gritty « ASCII by Jason Scott

Jason goes into detail describing the File Format problem that he and others are going to tackle in the effort known as Just Solve The Problem.

Skinny Ties and responsive eCommerce » Blog » Gravity Department

Another responsive design case study. This one’s got numbers too.

A Responsive Design Case Study – David Bushell – Web Design & Front-end Development

I love seeing the process behind responsive projects. This one is particularly nice.

Retina revolution

You’ve probably seen this already, but it’s really worth bearing in mind: when you’re scaling up JPGs for retina display you can safely reduce the image quality by quite a lot—to the point of getting the exact same file size as a higher quality image that’s half the size.

Responsive IA: IA in the touchscreen era - Martin Belam at EuroIA

A really terrific piece about wireframing for responsive designs. Again, it’s all about the prototypes.

Paris and the Data Mind - The Morning News

Craig writes about the hologram of his quantified self.

Migrating from Kindle to iBooks - zacwe.st

A step-by-step guide to unDRMing your Kindle books—a prudent course of action given Amazon’s recent unilateral wiping of Kindles.

Why Instagram Works — Rainypixels

It’s all about the signalling.

The best interface is no interface | Cooper Journal

Interaction dissolving into the environment.

GIFCTRL: Next Level Gif Control

The state of the art in animated gifs: full-screen and scrubbable. Kiss your productivity goodbye.

Under Tomorrow’s Sky

Design Fiction at work, imagining a possible future city.

» 23 October 2012, baked by Leisa Reichelt @ The Pastry Box Project

Less wireframing, more prototyping.

—Leisa

Accessibility – what is it good for? | Marco’s accessibility blog

A worrying look at how modern web developers approach accessibility. In short, they don’t.

Easy Fixes to Common Accessibility Problems | Yahoo! Accessibility Library

The low-hanging fruit of accessibility fixes; it’s worth bearing these in mind.

Why George Lucas Is the Greatest Artist of Our Time - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Camille Paglia is apparently a Lucas apologist like me.

Adaptive Content Management | Journal | The Personal Disquiet of Mark Boulton

Mark gets to the heart of the issue with making responsive designs work with legacy Content Management Systems …or, more accurately, Web Publishing Tools. There’s a difference. A very important difference.

Single Podcast Episodes, Huffduffer, and Podcast Apps

A good overview of making Huffduffer play nicely with podcasting software on iOS.

Huffduffer is a niche tool that, for me, solves a recurring problem. I can now save episodes from any device without having to subscribe to an entire show if I’m just interested in a a single episode.

Dough Globe - Your little living world

My last shipment from the Quaterly contained everything I need to get a sourdough starter going (thanks to Alexis Madrigal). I think I might have to get me one of these cute sourdough globes: “It’s like a Tamagotchi, but actually alive.”

Be sure to check out the the blog documenting the design and development.

Data Visualization Reinterpreted by VISUALIZED on Vimeo

Peter Saville talks about the enduring appeal of his cover for Unknown Pleasures.

I like to think of all the variations and mashups as not just tributes to Joy Division, but tributes to Jocelyn Bell Burnell too.

Rhizome | Stories from the New Aesthetic

These three talks are worth your time.

Be Square, web conferences on your desktop.

A really nicely designed site to help you catch up on some good conference talks you might have missed.

Guardian Truncation Team

Celebrating the work of the tireless men and women who shorten headlines so they’ll fit on your iPhone.

This is what I like • 99 Life Hacks to make your life easier!

Some of these are pure chindogu but others are pure genius.

A List Apart: Articles: Responsive Comping: Obtaining Signoff with Mockups

A peak behind the scenes at the responsive design and development workflow at Bearded. It makes a lot of sense.

Civil Rights CAPTCHA

CAPTHCAs are a terrible, terrible solution to a technological problem. But at least these CAPTCHAs acknowledge that the person typing is not only not-a-bot, but a human being.

Stories from the New Aesthetic : Joanne Mcneil

A lovely piece from Joanne on storytelling, identity and the internet.

Programming, Motherfucker - Do you speak it?

Does Zed Shaw look like a bitch to you?

I said does Zed Shaw look like a bitch to you?

In mobile-centric Africa, Responsive Web Design just makes business sense!Moses Kemibaro | Moses Kemibaro

Therefore, from a business perspective, and my excitement in doing this blog post is that RWD is especially important for mobile-centric markets such as Africa.

The Guardian

Remember when I linked to the Github repository of The Guardian’s front-end team? Well, now—if you’ll pardon the mixing of metaphors—you can start to kick the tyres of the fruits of their labour. This beta site shows where their experiments with responsive design might lead.

Connections

This is quite an astounding piece of writing. Robert Lucky imagines the internet of things mashed up with online social networking …but this was published in 1999!

The Brand New Printed Smashing Book: “The Mobile Book” | Smashing Magazine

Smashing Magazine are publishing a book on mobile and the web. I’m writing the foreword. I should really get on that.

IE10 Snap Mode and Responsive Design - TimKadlec.com

Useful advice from Tim on preparing your responsive site for IE10’s new “snap mode”. Don’t worry: it doesn’t involve adding any proprietary crap …quite the opposite, in fact.

I taste words. | Chloe Weil

Chloe uses interactive text in an attempt to explain what lexical-gustatory synesthesia is like.

digitalBush » Masked Input Plugin

This looks like a handy way of enhancing forms to have input masks (Luke W. would approve). Right now it’s a jQuery plug-in but I’m sure someone as smart as you would be able to create a standalone version, right?

Jeremy Keith: Forbedringer gjennom responsiv design (Webdagene 2012) on Vimeo

This is the talk I gave at the Webdagene conference in Norway a few weeks back. I called it Responsive Enhancement but I think the Norwegian title translates as “Improvements Through Responsive Design.”

Announcing Newspaper Club Minis | Newspaper Club

Ooh, these look nice! Smaller, more manageable newspapers from Newspaper Club.

Chris Shiflett ▪ Lessons from Brooklyn Beta

Thoughtful points from Chris, delivered on the closing day of this year’s Brooklyn Beta.

So, the next time you feel like you’re missing out, stop it. Zoom out a little bit and give yourself some space and some perspective, so you can focus on what matters.

The Brooklyn Beta Theme Song: Year Three - YouTube

Song-a-day Mann closed out this year’s Brooklyn Beta by singing this song (number #1381 in his ongoing series). We all sang along. It was pretty damn great.

Game Console Browsers

This is an excellent resource from Anna. She’s documenting the browser capabilities of games consoles.

The Airfix Responsive Workflow by Jordan Moore — Web Designer

A nice look at some possible ways to approach workflow on a responsive project.

The Humble eBook Bundle (pay what you want and help charity)

This looks like an excellent deal: buy eight sci-fi books for as much money as you think is fair. Lauren Beukes, Paolo Bacigalupi, Cory Doctorow …all good stuff.

WebPlatform.org — Your Web, documented

A one-stop-shop for browser-compatibility information. This is MDN, HTML5 Rocks, and Quirksmode all rolled into one.

{ io: The Web Is Growing Up }

A lovely bit of hypertext.

Device Lab / Oktavilla

A communal device lab in Stockholm.

Sight on Vimeo

A well-executed sci-fi short film on augmented reality and gamification.

Blame the implementation, not the technique | TimKadlec.com

It might seem like an obvious point, but what Tim is talking about here happens over and over again: a technique is dismissed based on bad implementation.

Laying Down our Burdens: Steps towards simplifying the mobile Web

Amen, Lyza, Amen. Instead of treating web development for the multitude of devices out there as an overwhelming nigh-on-impossible task, let’s accept the fact that there are certain things that are beyond our control. And that’s okay.

Let’s build on the commonality core to the web where we can. To do this, I think we need to let go of a few things, to lay down our burdens.

Related: do websites need to look the same in every browser? NO!

The Charge of the Scan Brigade « ASCII by Jason Scott

Live in or near San Francisco? Interested in preserving computer history? Then you should meet up with Jason this Friday:

This Friday, October 5th, the Internet Archive has an open lunch where there’s tours of the place, including the scanning room, and people get up and talk about what they’re up to. The Internet Archive is at 300 Funston Street. I’m here all week and into next.

Social Login Buttons Aren’t Worth It | MailChimp Email Marketing Blog

A great in-depth explanation by Aarron on why Mailchimp dropped their Facebook and Twitter log-in options. Partly it was the NASCAR problem, but the data (provided by user testing with Silverback) also brought up some interesting issues.

The Story of the New Microsoft.com — Rainypixels

Nishant gives a great overview of the responsive redesign of the Microsoft home page, ably abetted by the Paravel gang.

CSSquirrel : The Savage Beatings Anti-Pattern

CSSquirrel shares my feelings on the email notification anti-pattern.