May 2012
36 posts
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Learning to Love Humans: Emotional Interface... →
It’s not often you can get very much out of a solitary deck of slides. Much of the magic is meant to be delivered by the (hopefully engaging) speaker.
However, Aaron Walter’s slide deck, Learning to Love Humans: Emotional Interface Design, was so good it inspired me to buy his book “Designing for Emotion”. This was the only A Book Apart I wasn’t convinced about when I...
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“Google’s big pitch video for Glass is all about utility, with just a dollop of...”
– Robin Sloan hypothesizes how Google is going after Facebook in the battle for eyeballs.
Go read Pictures and Vision »
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Coda 2 Vendor-Specific CSS Properties
Coda 2 provides autocomplete for 204 CSS properties. Of these, 21 are for Mozilla-compatible browsers. The other 183 are for WebKit.
Here’s a complete...
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Here you go: “Sleeping Bag” by Heavy Hawaii
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“Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs...”
– Ray Bradbury, describing the Internet by proxy in Fahrenheit 451.
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“Put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down there to write, remind...”
– Stephen King, On Writing
This is my new favorite quote.
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“There is no harm in charging oneself up with delusions between moments of...”
– Steve Martin, Born Standing Up
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Listening to the new Beach House album on Spotify...
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“Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks...”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self Reliance
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“Well I gotta keep it going, keep it going full steam /
Too sweet to be sour, too...”
– My favorite MCA verse, from Beastie Boy’s “Intergalactic”.
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“We see culture and selfhood as shaped by market forces, technology constraints,...”
– Mills Baker on Forgotten Leisure. This quote is much the flip-side of this Craig Mod quote I posted today, which I also believe is true and good, in its own way.
As online life takes over for real life, Google, Facebook, and other companies are fighting to turn every aspect of your existing...
“We blink into a sunset, search for our phone’s camera, and imagine how the photo...”
– Mills Baker, on leisure as “non-activity”
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How to stop iTunes from opening every time your... →
This was driving me crazy. I had the “Prevent devices from syncing automatically” checked in the preferences, yet every single time I docked or _un_docked my iPhone, iTunes would jump to the front of my screen.
The answer is rather unintuitive:
Go to iTunes > Preferences > Devices > and uncheck “Prevent iPods, iPhones, and iPads from syncing automatic”.
Now...
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Font or Typeface? →
I wasn’t completely clear on their usage, so I googled it, and this was the best result:
the physical embodiment of a collection of letters, numbers, symbols, etc. (whether it’s a case of metal pieces or a computer file) is a font. When referring to the design of the collection (the way it looks) you call it a typeface.
…
When you talk about how much you like a tune, you...
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Simurai: “We’re in an icon-sharpness limbo” →
Simurai explains why there is not one “silver bullet” image format when it comes to serving images for normal resolution and high-density displays:
With the rise of Retina displays people are looking for resolution independent alternatives to PNG icons. Some fell in love with font-icons, some are shouting “SVG”. But I’m sorry, if you’re looking for a silver bullet, I’m afraid it...
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Always Specify Image Dimensions to Avoid CSS...
I took an hour the other day and dove into helpful documentation to avoid CSS Reflows and Repaint, but I came up pretty short; in modern browsers, most of these things don’t add to perceived page load in any significant way.
Except one thing that always irks me:
Always specify a width and height for all images. This allows the browser to render the page even before images are downloaded....
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“If a text isn’t online and publicly pointable, then it doesn’t exist.”
– Craig Mod, “A Pointable We”
This is my ideal understanding of the web, and I loved reading Craig’s thoughts on it. And I believe content providers are starting to understand this, too. Over the next year we’ll start to see the smart guys create experiences that blur the line between...
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Steve Jobs channels FDR in 1984 Apple sales video →
This is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen from Apple. Fucking Steve, what a guy.
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WebKitBits: Thoughts on Opera's Implementation of... →
My favorite bit from David Kaneda’s latest opinion piece on WebKitBits:
… Create demos that rock our faces — Except, on Mobile WebKit, create an interstitial: “We noticed you’re visiting on a WebKit browser.”
Bam — immediately, this will bring up strong emotions from the dark days in most developers. “While this demo also work in your browser, it looks equally fantastic in Opera Mobile,...
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Google HTML/CSS Style Guide →
Telling a chick you’re a front-end developer won’t get you laid, but it couldn’t hurt to try. You could always use the phrase “front-end engineer” to make yourself sound smarter.
Anyway, HTML and CSS dorkery isn’t for everyone, but this collection of best practices from Google is right up my alley. This is, definitively, the way you should be writing your...
April 2012
29 posts
“We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and...”
– “Solitude and Leadership” by William Deresiewicz
Realising the Full Potential of the Web →
This Tim Berners-Lee piece will definitely be included as one of my personal canon articles, whenever I get around to making one of those.
“But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing...”
– “Politics and the English Language”, written in 1946 by George Orwell.
“Tracking nearly anything you do is alarming and humbling. The aggregates of our...”
– Tom MacWright (Quantified Self)
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Download Safari Extension: Maximize Flash Videos... →
I made a stupid browser extension to maximize Flash videos on YouTube and Vimeo pages.
It’s stupid because I tried for an hour or more to get it to only inject the stylesheet when you click the toolbar button, but it’s just too stupid to work. The result is that when this extension is turned on, the Flash video will take up the entire page, and the only way to interact with the...
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Photoshop Tip: Disable Hyphenation in New...
Webpage Photoshop comps look silly with paragraphs auto-hyphenated. This is almost never what a web designer wants. In order to turn off hyphenation for all new documents, proceed with the following steps:
Open Photoshop.
Close all open documents.
Select the Paragraph panel.
Uncheck “Hyphenate” checkbox.
Result: All new documents have “Hyphenate” unchecked, solving...
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WatchCreated this CSS3 animation for the Sencha Architect launch, but I didn’t end up using it.
Made with Sencha Animator, natch.
“I want to attain to a greater degree of proficiency all the time. My education...”
– Napoleon Hill, In His Own Voice
New Sencha Architect Page
This page used to look like this:
Now it looks like this:
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WatchSencha Architect 2 Launch Video
Congratulations to the Sencha Architect team for a fantastic release. I had fun putting this video of you guys together.
