My dear old friend, John Porter, has begun to collect his thoughts digitally at wine for the dreamers:
Bath Time.
Being in constant contact with objects can remove a certain amount of the surreal nature inherent in all. Thankfully a step back reveals it once more, and nowhere is this fluttered with such whimsy than in the beautiful eccentricities of the English countryside. Behold! The random placings of bathtubs as vessels from the ether.
—
“A Short Lesson in Perspective” by Linds Redding
Went walking through the Palo Alto foothills the other day and stumbled upon these five deer. Fuck yeah animals!
Thirty second panorama I took just the other day up in the foothills west of my house.
The great irony about growing up in Seattle is that I had to move to Palo Alto to get good rain. The haze that hangs around the Pacific Northwest is dreary and boring. It does not have the cleansing, cathartic effect of a heavy rainstorm sweeping in and pelting my rooftop through the night.
Enjoy listening to 50 seconds of rain falling outside my window.
— A footnote in The Digital↔Physical, by Craig Mod
As Google becomes an ever-prevalent part of our lives, we should consider elevating it to the form of God in our swears, or as a replacement for the ever-useful F word. Some examples to follow:
RELATED:
— Donald A. Norman, Design of Everyday Things
Tried my hand at creating a magnifying loupe similar to the one in iOS, and the one Apple is using in the new iPad marketing material.
Pretty happy with the how the bezel and shadows came out. Click through to see more detail and view it on Dribbble.
Via Slacktory
It’s always bothered me that I cannot effortlessly create proportional line height in Photoshop. The leading widget in the Character panel should use a multiplier of the font size—as in InDesign or CSS.
For example, I could set my text to 24px and the leading to a 1X, 1.5X, or whatever multiple of that. If I change the font size, the line height would adjust proportionally.
As of the latest Photoshop CS6 beta, this has not been implemented.
If you’d like to see this setting added to Photoshop, please head over to Photoshop.com and up vote my request!
Want.
The other night I decided to look into HTML compression for Sencha.com. The first Google result led me to HTML Compressor.
Our homepage weighs about 30KB. When using the most aggressive settings, I only saved 5KB. Once gzipped, this reduction in file size only nets a savings of 500 bytes.
In my test case, the savings was not significant enough to worry about. But if you have a very large page, and are particularly worried about mobile where every byte matters, the HTML Compressor might be for you.
| Original | 30,056 bytes (33 KB on disk) |
| Compressed (Aggressive) | 25,025 bytes (29 KB on disk) |
| Gzipped Original | 7,337 bytes ( 8 KB on disk) |
| Gzipped Compressed | 6,801 bytes ( 8 KB on disk) |
You can actually try gzipping on Mac OS X, using Terminal to modify your files, and confirm the difference in the Finder:
cd ~/Desktop then gzip myfile.html..gz extension. Use the Inspector, ⌘⌥I, to review the file size of your gzipped file and the copied original.Lately I’ve been doing a ton of reading on decreasing website load time, image optimization techniques, responsive loading for different devices, and every detail I can find in between. One quick takeaway is that I will always tick the “progressive” checkbox in Photoshop’s Save for Web dialog from now on when saving JPEGs larger than 10KB.
There is no downside that I can find: progressive JPEGs tend to be smaller on average. The progressive loading experience has actually been proven to “feel” faster to a user, because they have something to look at versus watching the image paint in.
And, as Duncan Davidson and Steve Streza found out as a result of their research this evening, they look way fucking better on iPad 3s.
Bonus trivia: I’ve also recently learned that you cannot shed bytes significantly if you gzip a JPEG. It’s already completely compressed.
