Preventing too-short final lines of blocks | Clagnut by Richard Rutter
Check out the demo that Rich has put together to go with Amelia’s proposed syntax.
Check out the demo that Rich has put together to go with Amelia’s proposed syntax.
At Clarity last week, I had the great pleasure of introducing and interviewing Linda Dong who spoke about Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines. I loved the way she looked at the history of the HIG from 1977 onwards. This collection of videos is just what I need to keep spelunking into the interfaces of the past:
A curated collection of HCI demo videos produced during the golden age from 1983-2002.
Spot-on analysis by Max:
Generally speaking: The more independence a technology gives you, the higher its barrier for adoption.
I really hope that this when smart folks start putting their skills towards making the ideas of the indie web more widely available:
I think we’re at a special moment right now. People have been fed up with social media and its various problems (surveillance capitalism, erosion of mental health, active destruction of democracy, bla bla bla) for quite a while now. But it needs a special bang to get a critical mass of users to actually pack up their stuff and move.
Folk creations fill a gap. They solve problems for individuals and small communities in a way that that centralised, top-down, industrial creations never can. They are informal, distributed practices that emerge from real world contexts. Contexts where individuals have little or no control over the “official” means of production – of furniture, urban architecture, crockery, artwork, media stories, or taxonomies. In response people develop their own unpolished, unofficial, and deeply practical creations.
Now apply that to software:
Only professional programmers and designers get to decide what buttons go on the interface, what features get prioritised, and what affordances users have access to. Subverting that dynamic is the only way people can get their needs met with the computational tools they have at hand.
An account of the mother of all demos, written by Steven Johnson.
I’m 100% convinced that working demo-to-demo is the secret formula to making successful creative products.
Now you can play a demo of Townscaper right in your browser.
There goes your productivity.
Here’s the thing: we need politics in the workplace. Politics—that is, the act of negotiating our relationships and obligations to each other—is critical to the work of building and sustaining democracy. And the workplace isn’t separate from democracy—it is democracy. It is as much a part of the democratic system as a neighborhood association or a town council, as a library or youth center or food bank. By the very nature of the outsized role that work plays in our lives, it’s where most of us have the potential to make the biggest impact on how we—and our families and communities—live.
Mandy, as always, hits the nail on the head.
When we talk about politics belonging outside the workplace, we reduce democracy to an extracurricular instead of a core part of our lives. Democracy cannot be sustained by annual visits to the ballot box—it isn’t something we have, it’s something we practice. Like all things that require practice, if you don’t practice it often, you lose it.
Container queries are like buses: you’re waiting for ages and then two come along at once.
This switch()
syntax looks interesting.
I’m usually building one of three things: a demo, a prototype, or a minimum viable product (MVP).
I’ve seen some confusion over these terms — some people seem to use them somewhat interchangeable. But they’re not the same thing, and building one when you need another can cause problems.
This is a very useful distinction!
Here’s the talk that Remy and I gave at Fronteers in Amsterdam, all about our hack week at CERN. We’re both really pleased with how this turned out and we’d love to give it again!
A showcase of fun experiments with variable fonts, courtesy of Mandy.
James describes an ancient Greek machine called the kleroterian:
The method of governance embodied in the kleroterion, which dates back to the very establishment of democracy, is called sortition, meaning selection by lot, as opposed to election by vote.
Remember when I wrote about using push without notifications? Sebastiaan has written up the details of the experiment he conducted at Indie Web Camp Berlin.
Every single font-feature-settings
value demonstrated in one single page.
A nifty little responsive demo from Nick, recreating a 1948 Coca-Cola ad that was designed to be responsive to different wall spaces.
Push notifications explained using astrology. But don’t worry, there’s also some code, just in case you prefer your explanations to also include models that actually work.
Marcin built this lovely little in-browser tool to demonstrate how segmented type displays work at different sizes.
A demo of page transition animations by Sarah—she’s written about how she did it. I really like it as an example of progressive enhancement: you can navigate around the site just fine, but with JavaScript you get the smooth transitions as a bonus.
All of this reminds me of Jake’s proposal for navigation transitions in the browser. I honestly think this would solve 80% of the use-cases for single page apps.
Accessible star ratings (progressively enhanced from radio buttons) with lots of animation options. The code is on Github.