This responds to your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, which was received by this office on 5 February 2016 for “A digital/electronic copy of the NSA old security posters from the 1950s and 1960s.”
The graphic design is …um, mixed.
Checked in at Racehill. Out for a stroll — with Jessica
Checked in at Queen’s Park. with Jessica
Checked in at Queen’s Park. The pond in the park — with Jessica
The second episode of the second season of the Clearleft podcast is out. It’s all about employee experience design.
This topic came out of conversations with Katie. She really enjoys getting stuck into to the design challenges of the “backstage” tools that are often neglected. This is an area that Chris has been working in recently too, so I quized him on this topic.
They’re both super smart people which makes for a thoroughly enjoyable podcast episode. I usually have more guests on a single episode but it was fun to do a two-hander for once.
The whole thing comes in at just under seventeen minutes and there are some great stories and ideas in there. Have a listen.
And if you’re enjoying listening to the Clearleft podcast as much as I’m enjoying making it, be sure to spread the word wherever you share your recommnedations: Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack, your own website, the rooftop.
League tables for the game of probe-throwing currently underway in our solar system.
The league covers expensive hardware lob matches held between planets in the Solar System. Two dwarf planets have recently been admitted to the league and lost their first matches against league champions Team Earth.
The right coding language, system architecture, or interface design will vary wildly from project to project. But there are characteristics particular to software that consistently cause traditional management practices to fail, while allowing small startups to succeed with a shoestring budget:
- Reusing good software is easy; it is what allows you to build good things quickly;
- Software is limited not by the amount of resources put into building it, but by how complex it can get before it breaks down; and
- The main value in software is not the code produced, but the knowledge accumulated by the people who produced it.
Understanding these characteristics may not guarantee good outcomes, but it does help clarify why so many projects produce bad outcomes. Furthermore, these lead to some core operating principles that can dramatically improve the chances of success:
- Start as simple as possible;
- Seek out problems and iterate; and
- Hire the best engineers you can.
I love the story that Terence relates here. It reminds me of all the fantastic work that Anna did documenting game console browsers.
Are you developing public services? Or a system that people might access when they’re in desperate need of help? Plain HTML works. A small bit of simple CSS will make look decent. JavaScript is probably unnecessary – but can be used to progressively enhance stuff.
Checked in at Queen’s Park. Parklife! — with Jessica
Checked in at Baker Street Coffee. with Jessica
This is a great talk by Nadia Eghbal on software, open source, maintenance, and of course, long-term thinking.
I like the way that Simon is liberating his data from silos and making it work for him.
I’ve been watching The Right Stuff on Disney Plus. It’s a modern remake of the ’80s film of the ’70s Tom Wolfe book of ’60s events.
It’s okay. The main challenge, as a viewer, is keeping track of which of the seven homogenous white guys is which. It’s like Merry, Pippin, Ant, Dec, and then some.
It’s kind of fun watching it after watching For All Mankind which has some of the same characters following a different counterfactual history.
The story being told is interesting enough (although Tom has pointed out that removing the Chuck Yeager angle really diminishes the narrative). But ultimately the tension is manufactured around a single event—the launch of Freedom 7—that was very much in the shadow of Gargarin’s historic Vostok 1 flight.
There are juicier stories to be told, but those stories come from Russia.
Some of these stories have been told in film. The Spacewalker told the amazing story of Alexei Leonov’s mission, though it messes with the truth about what happened with the landing and recovery—a real shame, considering that the true story is remarkable enough.
Imagine an alternative to The Right Stuff that relayed the drama of Soyuz 1—it’s got everything: friendship, rivalries, politics, tragedy…
I’d watch the heck out of that.
I started getting some emails recently from people having issues using The Session. The issues sounded similar—an interactive component that wasn’t, well …interacting.
When I asked what device or browser they were using, the answer came back the same: Safari on iPad. But not a new iPad. These were older iPads running older operating systems.
Now, remember, even if I wanted to recommend that they use a different browser, that’s not an option:
Safari is the only browser on iOS devices.
I don’t mean it’s the only browser that ships with iOS devices. I mean it’s the only browser that can be installed on iOS devices.
You can install something called Chrome. You can install something called Firefox. Those aren’t different web browsers. Under the hood they’re using Safari’s rendering engine. They have to.
It gets worse. Not only is there no choice when it comes to rendering engines on iOS, but the rendering engine is also tied to the operating system.
If you’re on an old Apple laptop, you can at least install an up-to-date version of Firefox or Chrome. But you can’t install an up-to-date version of Safari. An up-to-date version of Safari requires an up-to-date version of the operating system.
It’s the same on iOS devices—you can’t install a newer version of Safari without installing a newer version of iOS. But unlike the laptop scenario, you can’t install any version of Firefox of Chrome.
It’s disgraceful.
It’s particularly frustrating when an older device can’t upgrade its operating system. Upgrades for Operating system generally have some hardware requirements. If your device doesn’t meet those requirements, you can’t upgrade your operating system. That wouldn’t matter so much except for the Safari issue. Without an upgraded operating system, your web browsing experience stagnates unnecessarily.
Apple doesn’t allow other browsers to be installed on iOS devices so people have to buy new devices if they want to use the web. Handy for Apple. Bad for users. Really bad for the planet.
It’s particularly galling when it comes to iPads. Those are exactly the kind of casual-use devices that shouldn’t need to be caught in the wasteful cycle of being used for a while before getting thrown away. I mean, I get why you might want to have a relatively modern phone—a device that’s constantly with you that you use all the time—but an iPad is the perfect device to just have lying around. You shouldn’t feel pressured to have the latest model if the older version still does the job:
An older tablet makes a great tableside companion in your living room, an effective e-book reader, or a light-duty device for reading mail or checking your favorite websites.
Hang on, though. There’s another angle to this. Why should a website demand an up-to-date browser? If the website has been built using the tried and tested approach of progressive enhancement, then everyone should be able to achieve their goals regardless of what browser or device or operating system they’re using.
On The Session, I’m using progressive enhancement and feature detection everywhere I can. If, for example, I’ve got some JavaScript that’s going to use querySelectorAll and addEventListener, I’ll first test that those methods are available.
if (!document.querySelectorAll || !window.addEventListener) {
// doesn't cut the mustard.
return;
}
I try not to assume that anything is supported. So why was I getting emails from people with older iPads describing an interaction that wasn’t working? A JavaScript error was being thrown somewhere and—because of JavaScript’s brittle error-handling—that was causing all the subsequent JavaScript to fail.
I tracked the problem down to a function that was using some DOM methods—matches and closest—as well as the relatively recent JavaScript forEach method. But I had polyfills in place for all of those. Here’s the polyfill I’m using for matches and closest. And here’s the polyfill I’m using for forEach.
Then I spotted the problem. I was using forEach to loop through the results of querySelectorAll. But the polyfill works on arrays. Technically, the output of querySelectorAll isn’t an array. It looks like an array, it quacks like an array, but it’s actually a node list.
So I added this polyfill from Chris Ferdinandi.
That did the trick. I checked with the people with those older iPads and everything is now working just fine.
For the record, here’s the small collection of polyfills I’m using. Polyfills are supposed to be temporary. At some stage, as everyone upgrades their browsers, I should be able to remove them. But as long as some people are stuck with using an older browser, I have to keep those polyfills around.
I wish that Apple would allow other rendering engines to be installed on iOS devices. But if that’s a hell-freezing-over prospect, I wish that Safari updates weren’t tied to operating system updates.
Apple may argue that their browser rendering engine and their operating system are deeply intertwingled. That line of defence worked out great for Microsoft in the ‘90s.
A people’s history of copying, from art to software.
Designers copy. We steal like great artists. But when we see a copy of our work, we’re livid.
Checked in at Baker Street Coffee. Flat whites outdoors — with Jessica
Safari is the only browser on iOS devices.
I don’t mean it’s the only browser that ships with iOS devices. I mean it’s the only browser that can be installed on iOS devices.
You can install something called Chrome. You can install something called Firefox. Those aren’t different web browsers. Under the hood they’re using Safari’s rendering engine. They have to. The app store doesn’t allow other browsers to be listed. The apps called Chrome and Firefox are little more than skinned versions of Safari.
If you’re a web developer, there are two possible reactions to hearing this. One is “Duh! Everyone knows that!”. The other is “What‽ I never knew that!”
If you fall into the first category, I’m guessing you’ve been a web developer for a while. The fact that Safari is the only browser on iOS devices is something you’ve known for years, and something you assume everyone else knows. It’s common knowledge, right?
But if you’re relatively new to web development—heck, if you’ve been doing web development for half a decade—you might fall into the second category. After all, why would anyone tell you that Safari is the only browser on iOS? It’s common knowledge, right?
So that’s the situation. Safari is the only browser that can run on iOS. The obvious follow-on question is: why?
Apple at this point will respond with something about safety and security, which are certainly important priorities. So let me rephrase the question: why on iOS?
Why can I install Chrome or Firefox or Edge on my Macbook running macOS? If there are safety or security reasons for preventing me from installing those browsers on my iOS device, why don’t those same concerns apply to my macOS device?
At one time, the mobile operating system—iOS—was quite different to the desktop operating system—OS X. Over time the gap has narrowed. At this point, the operating systems are converging. That makes sense. An iPhone, an iPad, and a Macbook aren’t all that different apart from the form factor. It makes sense that computing devices from the same company would share an underlying operating system.
As this convergence continues, the browser question is going to have to be decided in one direction or the other. As it is, Apple’s laptops and desktops strongly encourage you to install software from their app store, though it is still possible to install software by other means. Perhaps they’ll decide that their laptops and desktops should only be able to install software from their app store—a decision they could justify with safety and security concerns.
Imagine that situation. You buy a computer. It comes with one web browser pre-installed. You can’t install a different web browser on your computer.
You wouldn’t stand for it! I mean, Microsoft got fined for anti-competitive behaviour when they pre-bundled their web browser with Windows back in the 90s. You could still install other browsers, but just the act of pre-bundling was seen as an abuse of power. Imagine if Windows never allowed you to install Netscape Navigator?
And yet that’s exactly the situation in 2020.
You buy a computing device from Apple. It might be a Macbook. It might be an iPad. It might be an iPhone. But you can only install your choice of web browser on one of those devices. For now.
It is contradictory. It is hypocritical. It is indefensible.
Checked in at St George’s Inn. Beer in the sun 🍺 ☀️
Checked in at Blakers Park. Tunes 🎶 — with Jessica