Days Since Incident
I love this list of ever-increasing timelines. All that’s missing is the time since the Carrington Event, just to remind us what could happen when the next one hits.
Tags: zoom
15
Tuesday, October 4th, 2022
Monday, December 7th, 2020
Quantum to Cosmos
Well, this is rather wonderful! It’s like an interactive version of the Eames’s Powers Of Ten.
Tuesday, March 24th, 2020
Quarantine Book Club
Join your favorite authors on Zoom where you can have spirited discussions from the privacy of our own quarantined space!
A great initiative from the folks at Mule Design. As well as chatting to talented authors, you can also chat to me: this Thursday at 4pm UTC I’ll be discussing Resilient Web Design.
Monday, March 12th, 2018
Swapping Images with the Sizes Attribute | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA
The hits just keep on coming from the Filament Group. Here Scott shares a really clever technique for creating an image magnifier using the sizes attribute of the img element.
Friday, September 29th, 2017
Trees of deep time are a portal to the past – and the future | Aeon Essays
From the library of Alexandria to the imagined canals of mars to the spots on the sun, this is a beautifully written examination of the chronology contained within the bristlecone pine.
The oldest of the living bristlecones were just saplings when the pyramids were raised. The most ancient, called Methuselah, is estimated to be more than 4,800 years old; with luck, it will soon enter its sixth millennium as a living, reproducing organism. Because we conceive of time in terms of experience, a life spanning millennia can seem alien or even eternal to the human mind. It is hard to grasp what it would be like to see hundreds of generations flow out from under you in the stream of time, hard to imagine how rich and varied the mind might become if seasoned by five thousand years of experience and culture.
There is only the briefest passing mention of the sad story of Don Currey.
Friday, February 3rd, 2017
“Is This Helpful?” » Mike Industries
I like Mike’s “long zoom” view here where the glass is half full and half empty:
Several years from now, I want to be able to look back on this time the same way people look at other natural disasters. Without that terrible earthquake, we would have never improved our building codes. Without that terrible flood, we would have never built those levees. Without that terrible hurricane, we would have never rebuilt this amazing city. Without that terrible disease, we would have never developed antibodies against it.
It doesn’t require giving any credit to the disaster. The disaster will always be a complete fucking disaster. But it does involve using the disaster as an opportunity to take a hard look at what got us here and rededicate our energy towards things that will get us out.
Tuesday, January 3rd, 2017
The triumph of the small » Nieman Journalism Lab
I really like Liz’s long-zoom perspective in this look ahead to journalism in 2017.
Saturday, April 25th, 2015
Future Library – Framtidsbiblioteket
Here’s a lovely project with an eye on the Long Now. Trees that were planted last year will be used to make paper to print an anthology in 2114.
Margaret Atwood is one of the contributors.
Friday, March 27th, 2015
Natasha Lampard, Friday, 27 March 2015
A long-zoom look at life, work, and success.
I’m not usually a fan of portmanteau neologisms, but I really like Tash’s coining of the word longtrepreneur.
Thursday, August 22nd, 2013
Double tap delay
Even though my encounter with Tess yesterday was brief, we still managed to turn the conversation to browsers, standards, and all things web in our brief chat.
Specifically, we talked about this proposal in Blink related to the 300 millisecond delay that mobile browsers introduce after a tap event.
Why do browsers have this 300 millisecond delay? Well, you know when you’re looking at fixed-width desktop-based website on a mobile phone, and everything is zoomed out, and one of the ways that you can zoom in to a specific portion of the page is to double tap on that content? A double tap is defined as two taps less than 300 milliseconds apart. So whenever you tap on something in a touch-based browser, it needs to wait for that length of time to see if you’re going to turn that single tap into a double tap.
The overall effect is that tap actions feel a little bit laggy on the web compared to native apps. You can fix this by using the fastclick code from FT Labs, but I always feel weird solving a problem on mobile by throwing more front-end code at it.
Hence the Blink proposal: if the author has used a meta viewport declaration to set width=device-width (effectively saying “hey, I know what I’m doing: this content doesn’t need to be zoomed”), then the 300 millisecond delay could be removed from tap events. Note: this only affects double taps—pinch zoom is unaffected.
This sounds like a sensible idea to me, but Tess says that she sometimes still likes to double tap to zoom even in responsive designs. She’d prefer a per-element solution rather than a per-document meta element. An attribute? Or maybe a CSS declaration similar to pointer events?
I thought for a minute, and then I spitballed this idea: what if the 300 millisecond delay only applied to non-focusable elements?
After all, the tap delay is only noticeable when you’re trying to tap on a focusable element: links, buttons, form fields. Double tapping tends to happen on text content: divs, paragraphs, sections. That’s assuming you are actually using buttons and links for buttons and links—not spans or divs a-la Google.
And if the author decides they want to remove the tap delay on a non-focusable element, they can always make it focusable by adding tabindex=-1 (if that still works …does that still work? I don’t even know any more).
Anyway, that was my not-very-considered idea, but on first pass, it doesn’t strike me as being obviously stupid or crazy.
So, how about it, browser makers? Does removing the 300 millisecond delay on focusable elements—possibly in combination with the meta viewport declaration—make sense?
Monday, April 29th, 2013
Here is today
A long-zoom data visualisation.
Friday, January 6th, 2012
A Fix for the iOS Orientationchange Zoom Bug | Filament Group, Inc., Boston, MA
That Scott is one smart cookie. He has come up with a workaround (using the accelerometer) for that annoying Mobile Safari orientation/zoom bug that I blogged about recently.
I still want Apple to fix this bug as soon as possible—the fact that such smart people are spending so much effort on ingenious hacks shows just how much of a pain-point this is.
Saturday, March 19th, 2011
Brian Eno - The Big Here and the Long Now | DIGITALSOULS.COM | New Media Art | Philosophy | Culture
Brian Eno’s original essay on the origins of The Long Now Foundation. It is ten years old—a long time on the web and 1% of a millennium.
Humans are capable of a unique trick: creating realities by first imagining them, by experiencing them in their minds. When Martin Luther King said “I have a dream…” , he was inviting others to dream it with him. Once a dream becomes shared in that way, current reality gets measured against it and then modified towards it. As soon as we sense the possibility of a more desirable world, we begin behaving differently – as though that world is starting to come into existence, as though, in our minds at least, we’re already there. The dream becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward. By this process it starts to come true. The act of imagining something makes it real.
Friday, June 18th, 2010
Rise and Fall
Mike Stenhouse has graphed civilisation longevity: a nice bit of long zoom perspective.
Wednesday, June 29th, 2005
Auto Zoom Greasemonkey script
A Greasemonkey version of my zoom layout bookmarklet. Great stuff!