Adactio: Links

Colour Wheels, Charts, and Tables Through History – The Public Domain Review

These are beautiful!

Featured below is a chronology of various attempts through the last four centuries to visually organise and make sense of colour.

Cancelling Requests with Abortable Fetch

This is a really good use-case for cancelling fetch requests: making API calls while autocompleting in search.

Why Suffolk Libraries chose to build their own self-service app.

It’s so great to see the initial UX work that James and I prototyped in a design sprint come to fruition in the form of a progressive web app!

In the case of this web-app, if the tablets go offline, they will still store all the transactions that are made by customers. Once the tablet comes back online, it will sync it back up to the server. That is, essentially, what a Progressive Web App is — a kind of a website with a few more security and, most importantly, offline features.

Twenty Eighteen Preparation: Becoming an Endless Newbie - Airbag Industries

In the past, when I brushed off new advances or updates to technology and processes I preferred to stick with a simple path of “it still works fine,” but in doing so I realize now that I have l lost a lot beginning with the ability to function with current best practices in certain areas of my skill sets and the degradation a few projects, especially Airbag.

A Responsive Accessible Table | Adrian Roselli

Following on from Richard’s article, here’s a deep dive into making HTML tables that are accessible and responsive.

Web Typography: Designing Tables to be Read, Not Looked At · An A List Apart Article

An extract from Richard’s excellent book, this is a deep dive into styling tables for the web (featuring some CSS I had never even heard of).

Tables can be beautiful but they are not works of art. Instead of painting and decorating them, design tables for your reader.

(It also contains a splendid use of the term “crawl bar.”)

The Uncomfortable - a collection of deliberately inconvenient objects

These are ingenious. I think the chain fork is my favourite, but the uncomfortable broom is pretty great too.

Then there’s the inflatable doorknob.

Simple, semantic and responsive tables (part II) – Design Today – Wouter Hillen

This uses generated content in CSS to make the aria-label attributes visible on small screens—clever!

Psiu Puxa Wallpapers

Yummy wallpapers for your desktop, tablet, and phone, from NASA and ESA.

Research with blind users on mobile devices | Accessibility

Some interesting outcomes from testing gov.uk with blind users of touchscreen devices:

Rather than reading out the hierarchy of the page, some of the users navigated by moving their finger around to ‘discover’ content.

This was really interesting - traditionally good structure for screen readers is about order and hierarchy. But for these users, the physical placement on the screen was also really important (just as it is for sighted users).

Responsive Product Comparison Tables - daverupert.com

Dave explains the thinking behind his responsive table pattern I linked to a while back. He’s at pains to point out that you should always make sure a pre-made pattern is right for you instead of just deploying it no-questions-asked:

Using prefabricated, road tested solutions from Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, Google’s Material Design, Twitter’s Bootstrap, and Brad Frost’s Responsive Patterns is always a good place to start, but don’t settle there. My biggest advice would be to turn off the 27” display and use your sites and projects on your phone, there’s lots of low hanging fruit that could give way to new patterns, tailor-suited to your content.

Responsive Product Comparison Table

Here’s a nice little pattern from Dave—showing data tables one column at a time on smaller screens.

The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens | New Republic

A fascinating insight into some of Tumblr’s most popular accounts:

Some posts get more than a million notes—imagine a joke whispered in biology class getting a laugh from a city the size of San Francisco.

It’ll be a real shame when Tumblr disappears.

That’s “when”, not “if”. Remember:

In 2013, Yahoo bought Tumblr.

Dumb Cuneiform. We’ll take your tweets and make them permanent clay tablets.

There’s something about this that I really like: a message transmitted via a modern communications medium converted into the oldest form of writing.

Periodic Table of Storytelling

Combining the molecules of narrative tropes to create stories.

Making the case for Progressive Javascript — The Millstone — Medium

I think we can all agree that “isomorphic JavaScript” is a terrible name for a good idea. I quite like calling it “portable JavaScript”, but here’s a good case for calling it “progressive JavaScript.”

(Right up until the end when the author says “But mainly, it’s pretty safe to assume JavaScript will just work. Everywhere.” …which is precisely the kind of unfounded assumption that leads to the very problems that isomorphic/portable/progressive JavaScript can help fix.)

Tags: table

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