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.
It’s all fun and games until you realise that everything in here was inspired by actual interfaces out there on the web.
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.)
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.
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.
It’s not funny, cause it’s true.
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.
Wheeee! Another fun experiment from Cameron.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’ll never catch on.
This is an excellent initiative by the Dutch Fronteers group to have professional web developers represented in W3C working groups. In this particular case, they’re funding Rachel for the CSS working group. This sets a great precedent—I really hope the W3C goes for it!
Take a perfectly useful standardised measurement of length, weight, speed or time, and convert to something far less useful (but much more fun).
Look, it’s Friday—were you really going to get any work done today anyway?
A bold proposal by Heydon to make the process of styling on the web less painful and more scalable. I think it’s got legs, but do we really need another three-letter initialism?
We waste far too much time writing and maintaining styles with JavaScript, and I think it’s time for a change. Which is why it’s my pleasure to announce an emerging web standard called CSS.
I have been to Brighton, and seen the summer here, and have concluded that Britons must never be permitted to have summer again. It was as hot and wet as God’s lungs, and there was a man playing the banjo on a beach with no sand. A seagull screamed at me with the voice of a human baby.
Is it a graphic design tool? Is it a text editor? Is it just good fun?