Open Prioritization by Igalia
An experiment to crowdfund the implementation of web standards in browsers.
I’m not sure how I feel about this.
Link tags: fun
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Weird Wide Webring
More of the whimsical web!
The Whimsical Web
A collection of truly personal sites.
This site is meant to showcase how a more personal web could look like, and hopefully give you some inspiration to make your own corner of the web a bit weirder.
Of course Cassie’s site is included!
Robin Rendle ･ Notes about product design
Some good thought morsels from Robin on product design:
Bad product design is when folks talk more about the UI than what the UI is built on top of.
There’s a lot of talk about how great design is invisible—mostly boring conversations with little substance—but! I think that’s true when it comes to product design.
Bad product design is when your interface looks like your org chart.
Hobbies for the hell of it | Brad Frost
We should celebrate our hobbies for the joy-giving activities they are, and recognize that they don’t need to become anything bigger than that. And of course that’s not to say they those hobbies can’t turn into something bigger — it’s incredible when your passions and your occupation overlap — but it should be because you want to rather than that you feel pressured to. Not every activity you do needs to become a big official thing.
Is Me Cavechild Getting Too Much Pictogram-Time? - McSweeney’s Internet Tendency
Sometimes me think me should just tear bull pictogram down. Can bull pictogram really be worth it? Sure, pictogram help advance caveculture and foster writing system. But what good that stuff if whole cave society is just bunch of brainwashed bull-pictogram-watchers? You know what Aiden say yesterday? When he grow up, he want be bull-pictogram-painter! That not real job! Real job hunter! Or at least gatherer! How many bull-pictogram-painters world need?
N26 and lack of JavaScript | Hugo Giraudel
JavaScript is fickle. It can fail to load. It can be disabled. It can be blocked. It can fail to run. It probably is fine most of the time, but when it fails, everything tends to go bad. And having such a hard point of failure is not ideal.
This is a very important point:
It’s important not to try making the no-JS experience work like the full one. The interface has to be revisited. Some features might even have to be removed, or dramatically reduced in scope. That’s also okay. As long as the main features are there and things work nicely, it should be fine that the experience is not as polished.
alex-jeremy
Some photos from a lively discussion between Alex Russell and me at View Source in Amsterdam led Remy to create this meme generator.
You can see some results here and here.
This is not to be confused with a certain other photo which has led to its own memification here and here.
User Inyerface - A worst-practice UI experiment
It’s all fun and games until you realise that everything in here was inspired by actual interfaces out there on the web.
Making QR codes with cloud functions • tommorris.org
Tom makes an endpoint for generating QR codes so you don’t have to rely on the Google Charts API.
He also provides a good definition of “serverless”:
Now, serverless is a very silly buzzword dreamed up by someone from the consultant class who love coming up with terrible names, so I promise I won’t use it any further. Your code obviously run on a server. It just means it runs on a server someone else manages.
Amazon call it a ‘Lambda Function’. Google call it a ‘Cloud Function’. Microsoft Azure call it simply a ‘Function’. But none of those are very descriptive, because, well, anyone who writes any kind of programming language generally writes functions pretty much all the time in much the same way as anyone who writes English writes paragraphs, and we don’t call our blogging software “Cloud Paragraphs”. (Someone will now, I’m guessing.)
Playdate. A New Handheld Gaming System
Well, this is interesting. Panic, the little software company that could, are making a handheld gaming device. This is like the hardware equivalent of the indie web.
Making Future Interfaces: Custom Properties - YouTube
Heydon cracks me up—his Patterns Day is going to have you crying with laughter; guaranteed!
Here he is talking about custom properties in CSS as part of his Making Future Interfaces video series.
Sadly, this is not The Onion
It’s not funny, cause it’s true.
Let’s bring Fan Sites and webrings back! - bryanlrobinson.com
As the commercial viability of the web grew, we saw more and more users become consumers and not creators. Many consumers see websites as black boxes full of magic that they could never understand. Because of this, they would never think to try to create something.
This is a shame. We lost a little piece of the magic of the web when this culture came about.
A call to action to create a fan site about something you love. It would be an unmonetisable enthusiasm. But it’s still worth doing:
- The act of creation itself is fun!
- Sharing something you love with the world is worthwhile.
- You’ll learn something.
So here’s the challenge:
- Create a Fan Site.
- Help someone create a Fan Site.
- Create a webring.
Word Bubbles — The Man in Blue
Wheeee! Another fun experiment from Cameron.
Why isn’t the internet more fun and weird?
During the internet of 2006, consumer products let anyone edit CSS. It was a beautiful mess. As the internet grew up, consumer products stopped trusting their users, and the internet lost its soul.
The internet of 2019 is vital societal infrastructure. We depend on it to keep in touch with family, to pay for things, and so much more.
Just because it got serious doesn’t mean it can’t be fun and weird.
Building a Progressively-Enhanced Site | Jim Nielsen’s Blog
This is an excellent case study!
The technical details are there if you want them, but far more important is consideration that went into every interaction. Every technical decision has a well thought out justification.
The ‘Future Book’ Is Here, but It’s Not What We Expected | WIRED
Craig writes about reading and publishing, from the memex and the dynabook to the Kindle, the iPhone, and the iPad, all the way back around to plain ol’ email and good old-fashioned physical books.
We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place. It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve—I think we can agree that, in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice. Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution. Funding, printing, fulfillment, community-building—everything leading up to and supporting a book has shifted meaningfully, even if the containers haven’t. Perhaps the form and interactivity of what we consider a “standard book” will change in the future, as screens become as cheap and durable as paper. But the books made today, held in our hands, digital or print, are Future Books, unfuturistic and inert may they seem.
Puzzle Montage Art by Tim Klein
Jigsaw puzzle companies tend to use the same cut patterns for multiple puzzles. This makes the pieces interchangeable, and I sometimes find that I can combine portions from two or more puzzles to make a surreal picture that the publisher never imagined. I take great pleasure in “discovering” such bizarre images lying latent, sometimes for decades, within the pieces of ordinary mass-produced puzzles.
Programming Sucks
There’s a theory that you can cure this by following standards, except there are more “standards” than there are things computers can actually do, and these standards are all variously improved and maligned by the personal preferences of the people coding them, so no collection of code has ever made it into the real world without doing a few dozen identical things a few dozen not even remotely similar ways. The first few weeks of any job are just figuring out how a program works even if you’re familiar with every single language, framework, and standard that’s involved, because standards are unicorns.