Tags: bits

21

sparkline

Saturday, August 7th, 2021

Space Elevators: How a sci-fi dream could be built today

Surveying the current practical and theoretical factors for and against space elevators (including partial elevators—skyhooks!).

Sunday, January 17th, 2021

Eleanor Lutz - An Orbit Map of the Solar System

A lovely visualisation of asteroids in our solar system.

Wednesday, December 30th, 2020

2021 is when lockdown will stop mattering (Interconnected)

First you cope and then you adapt. The kicker: once you adapt, you may not want to go back.

Saturday, December 26th, 2020

How Claude Shannon’s Information Theory Invented the Future | Quanta Magazine

Shannon is not exactly a household name. He never won a Nobel Prize, and he wasn’t a celebrity like Albert Einstein or Richard Feynman, either before or after his death in 2001. But more than 70 years ago, in a single groundbreaking paper, he laid the foundation for the entire communication infrastructure underlying the modern information age.

Sunday, November 17th, 2019

A Web Developers New Working Week

I think these are great habit-forming ideas for any web designer or developer: a day without using your mouse; a day with your display set to grayscale; a day spent using a different web browser; a day with your internet connection throttled. I’m going to try these!

Thursday, June 27th, 2019

What I Learned Co-Founding Dribbble – SimpleBits

Twenty hard-won lessons from Dan from ten years of Dribbble.

We sent 50 shirts along with a card to friends and colleagues announcing Dribbble’s beta back in 2008. This first batch of members played a pivotal role in the foundation of the community and how it would develop. The shirt helped guilt them into actually checking out the site.

I think I still have my T-shirt somewhere!

Sunday, February 10th, 2019

CodePen - Solar System 3D Animation (Pure CSS)

This orrery is really quite wonderful! Not only is it a great demonstration of what CSS can do, it’s a really accurate visualisation of the solar system.

Sunday, December 9th, 2018

The Case Against Quantum Computing - IEEE Spectrum

This is the best explanation of quantum computing I’ve read. I mean, it’s not like I can judge its veracity, but I could actually understand it.

Tuesday, July 18th, 2017

SolarBeat

Luke just demoed this at Codebar. It’s a lovely audio/visualisation of the solar system—a sonic orrery that you can tweak and adjust.

Hypnotic.

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

The Great Discontent: Dan Cederholm

The lovely (and responsive) Great Discontent site has a lovely interview with Dan, who is lovely.

Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

littleBits

This is such a brilliant and empowering idea: an open-source object-oriented to electronics, like LEGO bricks for circuit-building.

Wednesday, April 28th, 2010

sketchy bunnies

Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008

Implementing Design: Bulletproof A-Z

Dan Cederholm is in the house at An Event Apart San Francisco. He’s all about the bulletproofing.

Simplebits describe what they do as hand crafted pixels and text. This idea of craft, building something with your hands, is what Dan wants to concentrate on. It isn’t always obvious in web design how well-crafted a web site is. Dan will run through a case study that focus on three aspects of web design: being bulletproof, being adaptable and focusing on the details. Like progressive enhancement for JavaScript, Dan will be using Progressive Enrichment for CSS which really means using cool stuff that doesn’t work in IE.

The case study will be a site all about coffee called Iced or Hot (it doesn’t actually work).

  • A is for anchor links with meta information. If you’re going to put data inside links, think ahead to links with really long text.
  • B is for border-radius. This is progressive enrichment. Rounded corners are usually a pain in the ass. But you can do them today with namespaced webkit- and moz- border-radius declarations. Dan puts these vendor-specific properties into a separate stylesheet called enriched.css to keep them quarantined like hacks. What about other browsers? Well, they don’t get rounded corners but so what? Rounded corners just degrade gracefully to rectangles.
  • C is for colour transparency with RGBa. You could use opacity but that sets the transparency for an element and all its children. Giving colour values with RGBa (background-color: rgba(0,0,0.7);) you only set the opacity of the background. A PNG would reach more users but like border-radius, RGBa is great for prototyping.
  • D is for Do Websites Need To Look Exactly The Same In Every Browser? No!
  • D is also for decision-makers who get that. The example of the semi-transparent menus on the Sundance Festival site (made by Airbag) demonstrates this. IE just gets flat colours and that’s fine. Dan himself used generated content on Foamee to add images to the headlines. Browsers that don’t support generated content don’t get the ornaments and that’s fine.
  • E is for easy clearing of floats. There’s the classic clearfix solution but man, that’s a crappy class name to put in your markup. The alternative of creating a list of wrappers that you want to clear is as bad. Dan uses a class name of group.
  • F is for frameworks. We all use our own frameworks: the code you start from for each project.
  • G is for gridlasticness. From the latin Gridius Lastius Emius which means working with em-based grids. Dan shows some grid-based designs: Mark Boulton, CNN, Erskine. Then he gives a refresher in elastic layout. Em-based layouts force you to ensure ultimate flexibility. You have to think about font sizes, layout, margins and padding in ems. Richard’s 62.5% rule helps make the calculations easier. Set a max-width on elastic layouts (of 100%) you can make sure that the layout won’t go outside the viewport. On Iced or Hot, has four columns of 16em with a 2em gutter between them. The XScope tool is handy for checking your grid lines.
  • H is for horizontal grid? Sure. Vertical grid? Sort of. Here, Dan is talking about that annoying habit that visual designers have of lining everything perfectly on the top and bottom of element. It looks great in Photoshop but it bears no relation to reality. It’s like those people who make the pillows look perfect on the bed. It’s a waste of time because they’re just going to get messed up. But we can uses classes for groups of content so that there are break-points in the vertical layout.
  • I is for IE8 beta still refuses to resize text sized in pixels. WTF? We still need to use relative units for text sizes. Does page zoom change things? Who knows.
  • J is for jQuery. Spontaneous applause from the audience. Dan hates JavaScript and he normally doesn’t talk about it in presentations but jQuery makes his life easier. It uses the familiar CSS selector syntax.
  • K is for Kitty.
  • L is for .last. Dan is constantly having to put a class of .last on the last item in a list (for style reasons). You can use jQuery to add the class programatically. jQuery('ul.lst li:last'),addClass('last');
  • M
  • N
  • O
  • P
  • Q
  • R
  • S is for shifting backgrounds. Heeeeere’s Silverback! Parallax scrolling is a great example of craftmanship. Not everyone is going to see it but it’s a lovely added extra.
  • T is for a testimonial for reset.css.
  • U is for ur stats. When can we…? Drop support for X. Start using Y. Answer: when your site shows the stats to support that decision.

The alphabet ends with U.

Friday, November 9th, 2007

Foamee

Here's Dan's latest project (and of course it looks gorgeous). I've been testing it for a while before the official launch and it's really sweet. Best of all, there is no sign up. All the interaction happens through Twitter. Clever.

Monday, September 10th, 2007

Morethanseven » Brighton Rock(s)

The slides from Gareth Rushgrove's presentation at BarCamp Brighton. It's all about Restful Rabbits.

Tuesday, February 13th, 2007

I’d twit that

Khoi writes about Twitter and its younger sibling, Twitterific. He makes some great points about the differences that the two interfaces confer on the experience of Twittering.

He’s not the only one with something to say about Twitter. At Web Directions North, the subject came up at least once every evening and usually resulted in an hour-long conversation/discussion/argument about its merits and failings. I can’t remember the last time that a service prompted such strong feelings.

Personally, I found my emotional connection to Twitter deepening while I was in Vancouver. I didn’t have much opportunity to Twitter myself because my phone didn’t want to play nice with Canadian networks but Jessica was twittering. Being able to catch up with the minutiae of her activity during the day was just wonderful. Of course there’s always emails, chats, phone calls, blog posts and Flickr pics but they all require a certain level of effort.

I must admit, not having a working phone did feel a little bit like going cold turkey. I’m sure that, like Dan, I would have been Twittering from on top of Whistler.

If you want to see some real Twitter addiction, Patrick Haney has it bad, man. He paid the price for his addiction when a Twitter drinking game was decreed at the Media Temple closing party. The rules are simple:

  • If you receive a Twitter, you must take a drink.
  • If you send a Twitter, you must take a drink.
  • If you say the word Twitter, you must take a drink.

I hadn’t seen Tantek in an inebriated state until that night.

Monday, December 4th, 2006

SimpleBits

Dan has redesigned his site and it looks gorgeous.

Sunday, June 11th, 2006

SimpleBits | Pairing Wine and Microformats

Dan documents the process of adding microformats to Cork'd.

Friday, May 19th, 2006

Cork'd

From Dan Cederholm and Dan Benjamin: a lovely looking piece of social software all about wine. I've been trying it in pre-release and it's really, really nice. This is my kind of website.

Friday, March 17th, 2006

SimpleBits

Dan has redesigned. Or maybe that should be realigned. Either way, it feels just perfect. Talented bastard.