March 2012
1 post
What’s the waiter doing with the computer screen? →
“The headwaiter then picked up what Richard first thought must be some kind of new, electronic touch-pen, and moved it toward the screen. Richard is a tech savvy Internet entrepreneur, and therefore quite curious about what kind of new gadget they used at this restaurant. So he leaned in and looked a little closer …… and suddenly realized that it was a perfectly ordinary whiteboard felt-tip...
February 2012
9 posts
Assessing Your Team's UX Skills →
“Part of the role of today’s UX manager is to ensure the UX team has all the necessary skills, at the best level possible. To do this, they need an easy way to assess the current skills of the team. Once they’ve got their assessment in hand, it’s fairly straightforward to design a coaching and training curriculum to fill in the gaps.
To help managers with the assessment,...
Hiring a designer: hunting the unicorn →
“So one of the topics we’re planning to cover on Design Staff is how to hire great designers. We can talk about how to review portfolios, how to interview candidates, and how to persuade a designer that your team is worth joining. But before all that, there’s a fundamental question you need to answer: What kind of designer are you looking for?”
Gmail: What was the purpose of the recent Gmail... →
“The redesign is part of a massive UI facelift across all Google properties. While some have suggested that the goal was to apply the Google+ style to other properties, this is not the case at all.”
Path uploads your entire iPhone address book to... →
How to do this at home
This has been tried out on Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2.
Download the mitmproxy tool and set it up by going to the folder of mitmproxy and running sudo python setup.py install. If all goes well, mitmproxy must be available in your $PATH.
Start mitmproxy by running mitmproxy.
Obtain the IP address of your computer by running ifconfig en1 (or whatever is the interface that you are...
node_modules in git →
“But this isn’t Ruby or Python anymore, this is node.js, and we did modules much better. If you have an application, that you deploy, check in all your dependencies in to node_modules. If you use npm do deploy, only define bundleDependencies for those modules. If you have dependencies that need to be compiled you should still check in the code and just run $ npm rebuild on deploy.
Everyone...
Bootstrap, from Twitter →
“Simple and flexible HTML, CSS, and Javascript for popular user interface components and interactions.”
January 2012
7 posts
High Performance HTML5 →
“Steve Souders discusses the impact of website speed on users providing advice on creating high performance HTML5 applications.”
The Paste Wasteland →
“When you work on the bleeding-edge, sometimes you’re going to get cut. The tech isn’t stable, things are buggy and may not conform to [a/the] standard—but the onPaste event isn’t a bleeding-edge technology. In fact, it’s been around since IE5. So why is it such a mess?
I spent a lot of time working with the paste event, recently, as I’ve been working on Hopper. What I found was a stunning...
How to interview a designer with the perfect... →
“It’s simple in concept: You’re going to set up a well-scoped design problem and ask a candidate to solve it on the spot. It can take anywhere from 15-40 minutes depending on depth and complexity. It’s such a good technique because there’s no faking (like showing portfolio work from a big team effort) and when moderated well, it can simulate working together.”
Android Design →
“Welcome to Android Design, your place for learning how to design exceptional Android apps.”
Color Thief →
“Ever wanted to grab the dominant color or color palette from an image?… Probably not. But now you can! Take a look at the Color Thief Demo Page to see it in action.”
Angry Birds on HTML5 →
“Joel Webber explains what it took for Google to port Angry Birds to Chrome/HTML5, the challenges and technical solutions used. “
December 2011
4 posts
Asynchronous UIs - the future of web user... →
“I’ve been working on this problem, specifically with a MVC JavaScript framework called Spine, and implementing what I’ve dubbed asynchronous user interfaces, or AUIs. The key to this is that interfaces should be completely non-blocking. Interactions should be resolved instantly; there should be no loading messages or spinners. Requests to the server should be decoupled from ...
Diving deep into javascript logical operators →
“I have lots of fun finding shortcuts in javascript, and logical operators can make for some interesting ways to act on a condition. In this article we’ll look at the logical operators &&(read: AND) and || (read: OR).”
Style profiler preview →
“CSS selector matching is often neglected when it comes to performance of web documents and applications. For small documents, the performance impact is negligible, but for documents with a large DOM (like the Opera Dragonfly application itself), a single “bad” selector can have a serious impact.
CSS selector matching refers to the process where a browser tries to match a...
November 2011
9 posts
SMACSS - Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS →
‘SMACSS (pronounced “smacks”) is more style guide than rigid framework. There’s no library within here for you to download or install. SMACSS is a way to examine your design process and as a way to fit those rigid frameworks into a flexible thought process. It’s an attempt to document a consistent approach to site development when using CSS. And really, who...
50 Performance Tricks to Make Your HTML5 Web Sites... →
“Learn how you can make your sites faster directly from the Internet Explorer Performance Team. These are the same guys who brought you GPU accelerated graphics and compiled JavaScript with Internet Explorer 9, and they’re going to share their favorite 50 best practices for web developers. This session will provide an inside look into browser performance, discuss why common web best...
The Complete List of Objective-C 2.0 @ Compiler... →
“I haven’t been able to find a list of all Objective-C @ compiler directives in one place. We all know the keywords like @interface and @implementation but others like @dynamic and @encode are lesser known, and possibly even much less understood.
Although I know most of them already, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I may be missing a hidden gem. So I made an effort to document all the...
Netflix Webkit-Based UI for TV Devices →
JavaScriptCore, the WebKit JS implementation →
“My readers will know that I have recently had the pleasure of looking into the V8 JavaScript implementation, from Google. I’m part of a small group in Igalia doing compiler work, and it’s clear that in addition to being lots of fun, JavaScript implementations are an important part of the compiler market today.
But V8 is not the only JS implementation in town. Besides...
animatable - One property, two values, endless... →
Compass is an open-source CSS Authoring Framework. →
Experience cleaner markup without presentational classes.
It’s chock full of the web’s best reusable patterns.
Developing a personal framework is simple.
Compass mixins make CSS3 easy.
Download and create extensions with ease.
Dieter Rams: ten principles for good design →
“Back in the early 1980s, Dieter Rams was becoming increasingly concerned by the state of the world around him – “an impenetrable confusion of forms, colours and noises.” Aware that he was a significant contributor to that world, he asked himself an important question: is my design good design?
As good design cannot be measured in a finite way he set about expressing the ten most...
October 2011
8 posts
Up and Down the Ladder of Abstraction →
“…the most powerful way to gain insight into a system is bymoving between levels of abstraction. Many designers do this instinctively. But it’s easy to get stuck on the ground, experiencing concrete systems with no higher-level view. It’s also easy to get stuck in the clouds, working entirely with abstract equations or aggregate statistics.
This interactive essay presents...
How to build for armv6 and armv7 architectures... →
“I just built something today specifying a deployment target of iOS 4.0. With only armv7 specified in Architectures, Xcode warned me that to support anything below iOS4.2 I had to include armv6 in Architectures. Just edit that field, click the “+” button when the dialog pops up and enter the literal “armv6”.”
HTML5 Techniques for Optimizing Mobile Performance →
“In this article, we will discuss the bare minimum of what it takes to create a mobile HTML5 web app. The main point is to unmask the hidden complexities which today’s mobile frameworks try to hide. You will see a minimalistic approach (using core HTML5 APIs) and basic fundamentals that will empower you to write your own framework or contribute to the one you currently use.”
Browserscope: Reflow Tests →
“Reflow in a web browser refers to the process whereby the render engine calculates positions and geometries of elements in the document for purpose of drawing, or re-drawing, the visual presentation. Every browser has its own logic for doing, and sometimes not doing, these calculations. Dynamic changes to the document’s styles and contents will cause reflow to occur - being...
Measuring Page Load Speed with Navigation Timing →
“Navigation Timing is a JavaScript API for accurately measuring performance on the web. The API provides a simple way to get accurate and detailed timing statistics—natively—for page navigation and load events. It’s available now inInternet Explorer 9, Google Chrome and in Firefox nightly builds.”
List of Chromium Command Line Switches →
“There are lots of command lines which can be used with the Chromium browser. Some change behavior of features, others are for debugging or experimenting. This page lists the available switches including their conditions and descriptions. Last automated update occurred on 2011-10-03.”
September 2011
13 posts
Casey Jones The Movie →
A Farewell to CSS3 Gradients (Using SVG instead) →
“In 2011, SVG is actually well-supported by all the current mainstream browsers — even on mobile. What if we started with SVG and patched around the edges? “
svg-edit - A complete vector graphics editor in... →
“SVG-edit is an online vector graphics editor that uses only JS, HTML5, CSS and SVG (i.e. no server-side functionality)”
Mercury - Inpage HTML 5 Editor →
“Mercury is a full featured HTML5 editor. It was built from the ground up to help your team get the most out of content editing in modern browsers.”
http://www.fubiz.net/2010/11/10/moustaches-make-a-d... →
