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Monday, March 20th, 2023

Thursday, March 16th, 2023

Reading The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier by Bruce Sterling.

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Wednesday, March 15th, 2023

print-color-adjust - CSS: Cascading Style Sheets | MDN

I love print stylesheets but I was today years old when I found out that print-color-adjust exists.

Friday, March 10th, 2023

Checked in at La Bombilla. Croqueta y cerveza 🍺 — with Jessica map

Checked in at La Bombilla. Croqueta y cerveza 🍺 — with Jessica

Sunday, March 5th, 2023

map

Checked in at The Bugle Inn. Fiddletastic Sunday session 🎻🎻🎶

Tuesday, February 28th, 2023

Reading Children Of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

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Thursday, February 23rd, 2023

Investing in RSS - Web Performance Consulting | TimKadlec.com

Same:

Opening up my RSS reader, a cup of coffee in hand, still feels calm and peaceful in a way that trying to keep up with happenings in other ways just never has.

Wednesday, February 22nd, 2023

Reading Understanding Privacy by Heather Burns.

Web Audio API update on iOS

I documented a weird bug with web audio on iOS a while back:

On some pages of The Session, as well as the audio player for tunes (using the Web Audio API) there are also embedded YouTube videos (using the video element). Press play on the audio player; no sound. Press play on the YouTube video; you get sound. Now go back to the audio player and suddenly you do get sound!

It’s almost like playing a video or audio element “kicks” the browser into realising it should be playing the sound from the Web Audio API too.

This was happening on iOS devices set to mute, but I was also getting reports of it happening on devices with the sound on. But it’s that annoyingly intermittent kind of bug that’s really hard to reproduce consistently. Sometimes the sound doesn’t play. Sometimes it does.

I found a workaround but it was really hacky. By playing a one-second long silent mp3 file using audio, you could “kick” the sound into behaving. Then you can use the Web Audio API and it would play consistently.

Well, that’s all changed with the latest release of Mobile Safari. Now what happens is that the Web Audio stuff plays …for one second. And then stops.

I removed the hacky workaround and the Web Audio API started behaving itself again …but your device can’t be set to silent.

The good news is that the Web Audio behaviour seems to be consistent now. It only plays if the device isn’t muted. This restriction doesn’t apply to video and audio elements; they will still play even if your device is set to silent.

This descrepancy between the two different ways of playing audio is kind of odd, but at least now the Web Audio behaviour is predictable.

You can hear the Web Audio API in action by going to any tune on The Session and pressing the “play audio” button.

Sunday, February 19th, 2023

Checked in at The Bugle Inn. Sunday afternoon session 🎻🎶🎻 map

Checked in at The Bugle Inn. Sunday afternoon session 🎻🎶🎻

Wednesday, February 15th, 2023

Brandolini’s blockchain

I’ve already written about how much I enjoyed hosting Leading Design San Francisco last week.

All the speakers were terrific. Lola’s talk was particularly …um, interesting:

In this talk, Lola will share her adventures in the world of blockchain, the hostility she experienced in her first go-round in 2018, and why she’s chosen to head back to a technology that is going through its largest reputational and social crisis to date.

Wait …I was supposed to stand on stage and introduce a talk that was (at least partly) about blockchain? I have opinions.

As it turned out, Lola warned me that I’d be making an appearance in her talk. She was going to quote that blog post. Before the talk, I asked her how obnoxious I could be about blockchain in her intro. She told me to bring it.

So in the introduction, I deployed all the sarcasm I had in me and said:

Listen, we designers have a tendency to be over-critical of things sometimes. There are all these ideas that we dismiss: phrenology, homeopathy, flat-earthism …blockchain. Haters gonna hate.

I remember somebody asking online a while back, “Why the hate for web3?” And someone I know responded by saying “We hate it because we understand it.” I think there’s a lot of truth to that.

But look, just because blockchains are powering crypto ponzi schemes and N F fucking Ts, it’s worth remembering that it’s also simply a technology. It’s a technological solution in search of a problem.

To be fair, it’s still early days. After all, it’s only been over a decade now.

It’s like the law of instrument says; when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Blockchain is like that. Except the hammer is also made of glass.

Anyway, Lola is going to defend the indefensible and talk about blockchain. One thing to keep in mind is this: remember when everyone was talking about “The Cloud”? And then it turned out that you could substitute the phrase “someone else’s server” for “The Cloud?” Well, every time you hear Lola say the word “blockchain”, I’d like you to mentally substitute the phrase “multiple copies of a spreadsheet.”

Please give an open mind and a warm welcome to Lola Oyelayo Pearson!

I got some laughs. I also got lots of gasps and pearl-clutching, as though I were saying something taboo. Welcome to San Francisco.

Lola gave as good as she got. I got a roasting in her talk.

And just to clarify, Lola and I are friends—this was a consensual smackdown.

There was a very serious point to Lola’s talk. Cryptobollocks and other blockchain-powered schemes have historically been very bro-y, and exploitative of non-bro communities. Lola wants to fight that trend.

I get it. But it reminds me a bit of the justifications you hear from people who go to work at Facebook claiming that they can do more good from the inside. Whatever helps you sleep at night.

The crux of Lola’s belief is this: blockchain technology is inevitable, therefore it is uncumbent on us as ethical designers to ensure that the technology is deployed in a way that empowers people instead of exploiting them.

But I take issue with the premise. Blockchain technology is not inevitable. That’s the worst kind of technological determinism. It’s defeatist. It’s a depressing view of “progress” driven not by people, but by technological forces beyond our control.

I refuse to accept that anti-humanist deterministic view.

In any case, for technological determinism to have any validity, there needs to be something to it. At least virtual reality and machine learning are based on some actual technologies. In the case of cryptobollocks, there is no there there. There is nothing except the hype, which is why you’ll see blockchain enthusiasts trying to ride the coattails of trending technologies in a logical fallacy that goes something like this:

  1. There are technologies that will be really big in the future,
  2. blockchain is a technology, therefore
  3. blockchain will be really big in the future.

Blockchain is bullshit. It isn’t even very clever bullshit. And it certainly isn’t inevitable.

Friday, February 10th, 2023

Change

I’ve spent the last few days in San Francisco where I was hosting Leading Design.

It was excellent. Rebecca did an absolutely amazing job with the curation, and the Clearleft delivered a terrific event, as always. I’m continually amazed by the way such a relatively small agency can punch above its weight when it comes to putting on world-class events and delivering client work.

I won’t go into much detail on what was shared at Leading Design. There’s an understanding that it’s a safe space for people to speak freely and share their experiences in an open and honest way. I can tell you that there were some tough topics. Given the recent rounds of layoffs in this neck of the woods, this was bound to happen.

I was chatting with Peter at breakfast on the second day and he was saying that maybe there was too much emphasis on the negative, like we were in danger of wallowing in our own misery. It’s a fair point, but I offered a counterpoint that I also heard other people express: when else do these people get a chance to let their guard down and have a good ol’ moan? These are design leaders who need to project an air of calm reassurance when they’re at work. Leading Design is a welcome opportunity to just let it all out.

When we did Leading Design in New York in March of 2022, it was an intimate gathering and the overwhelming theme was togetherness. After two years of screen-based interactions, it was cathartic to get together in the same location to swap stories and be reminded you are not alone.

Leading Design San Francisco was equally cathartic, but the theme this time was change. Change can be scary. But it can also be energising.

After two days of introducing and listening to fascinating talks on the topic of change, I closed out my duties by quoting the late great Octavia Butler. I spoke the mantra of the secular Earthseed religion founded in Parable Of The Sower:

All that you touch
You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change.

God
Is Change.

Stories on the Road - UK 23 | Storyblok

I’ll be speaking at this free early evening event with Arisa Fukusaki and Cassie in Brighton on Monday, February 27th. Grab a ticket and come along for some pizza and nerdiness.

Explore the In Our Time archive | Braggoscope

Matt made this lovely website for spelunking and hyperlinking through the thousand episodes of Radio 4’s excellent In Our Time programme.

He’s also written a little bit about how he made it using some AI (artificial insemination) for the categorisation code.

Sunday, January 29th, 2023

Reading The Rosewater Insurrection by Tade Thompson.

Buy this book

Wednesday, January 18th, 2023

Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Wednesday night session — with Jessica map

Checked in at Jolly Brewer. Wednesday night session — with Jessica

Tuesday, January 17th, 2023

Patrick / articles / Is the developer experience on the Web so terrible?

Over the past 10 years or so, we’ve slowly but very surely transitioned to a state where frameworks are the norm, and I think it’s a problem.

I concur.

Use the frameworks and libraries that make sense for you to deliver the best UX possible. But also learn the web platform from the ground up. Take time to understand how web browsers work and render webpages. Learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript. And keep an eye, if you can, on the new things.

Henry From Online | How To Make a Website

Write meaningful HTML that communicates the structure of your document before any style or additional interactivity has loaded. Write CSS carefully, reason your methodology and stick to it, and feel empowered to skip frameworks. When it comes time to write JavaScript, write not too much, make sure you know what it all does, and above all, make sure the website works without it.

The whole article is great, and really charmingly written, with some golden nuggets embedded within, like:

  • You’ll find that spending more time getting HTML right reveals or even anticipates and evades accessibility issues. It’s just easier to write accessible code if it’s got semantic foundations.
  • In my experience, you will almost always spend more time overriding frameworks or compromising your design to fit the opinions of a framework.
  • Always style from the absolute smallest screen your content will be rendered on first, and use @media (min-width) queries to break to layouts that allow for more real estate as it becomes available.
  • If your site doesn’t work without JavaScript, your site doesn’t work.
  • Always progressively enhance your apps, especially when you’re fucking with something as browser-critical as page routing.

Monday, January 16th, 2023

Checked in at Dover Castle. Monday night session map

Checked in at Dover Castle. Monday night session

Line heights in CSS work better with ratios | Andy Bell

There’s a broader point here about declarative design:

Setting very specific values may feel like you’re in more control, but you’re actually rescinding control by introducing fragility in the form of overly-specific CSS.