Link tags: fun

Open UI and implicit parent/child relationships in HTML – Eric Bailey

I remember discussing this with Tantek years ago:

There are a few elements who need to be placed inside of another specific element in order to function properly.

If I recall, he was considering writing “HTML: The Good Parts”.

Anyway, I can relate to what Eric is saying here about web components. My take is that web components give developers a power that previous only browser makers had. That’s very liberating, but it should come with a commensurate weight of responsibility. I fear that we will see this power wielded without sufficient responsibility.

Adam Curtis’s Seaside Dream (Phil Gyford’s website)

chef’s kiss!

(you know my opinion of Adam Curtis’s documentaries)

Our Last-Minute, Extremely Online Gift Guide - The New York Times

Chindogu gone wild.

Webbed Briefs

Heydon is back on his bullshit, making extremely entertaining and occassionally inappropriate short videos about web stuff.

WEBBED BRIEFS are brief videos about the web, its technologies, and how to make the most of them. They’re packed with information, fun times™, and actual goats. Yes, it’s a vlog, but it isn’t on Youtube. Unthinkable!

The pilot episode is entitled “What Is ARIA Even For?”

So Many Food Trucks!

Puntastic!

Same Energy Snap

Match up images that have been posted in pairs to Twitter with the caption “same energy”. This is more fun and addictive than it has any right to be.

When you browse Instagram and find former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s passport number

This was an absolute delight to read! Usually when you read security-related write-ups, the fun comes from the cleverness of the techniques …but this involved nothing cleverer than dev tools. In this instance, the fun is in the telling of the tale.

Kissa. Book. Launch. — Roden Explorers Archive

Own. Your. Nook. There’s power in owning your nook of the ‘net — your domain name, your design, your archives — and it’s easier than ever to do so, and run a crowdfunding campaign at the same time.

Open Prioritization by Igalia

An experiment to crowdfund the implementation of web standards in browsers.

I’m not sure how I feel about this.

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 | Kitty 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.