Published
Weekend Reading – Remove to Improve
Design Objective
§ Did you know you can make graphs look more attractive and impactive by removing unnecessary decorations? Remove to Improve shows you how.
§ Normalising Designs For Better Quality CSS. This presentation talks about making your designs easier to express in CSS, the obvious benefit being easier to maintain, so you can ship more. Doesn't deal with the drawbacks, though – often [the design is in the variation] (http://glog.glennf.com/blog/2013/9/6/yahoos-logo-reveals-the-worst-aspects-of-engineering-mindset).
§ Absolutely. The Dribbblisation of Design:
The worst applicants sent in flat PNGs. PDFs full of wireframes. No articulation of the problem being solved, nor the business and technical constraints. No context. These pixel perfect, retina ready PNGs might look great on Dribbble, but they will have decreasing value as a primary design tool in a real product building environment.
Unfortunately, just about any design blog/resource I turn to suffers from that problem: all veneer and no context.
Lines of Code
§ JavaScript for Designers. This presentation is exactly what you'd expect it to be: fun, creative, quick and gentle introduction to the language. Also, unicorns!
PS there's a couple more sections after what looks like the closing slide.
§ As a Web developer, here's everything you need to know about Safari on iOS 7 and HTML5: problems, changes and new APIs.
- UI Changes: toolbar tint, problems with new full-screen navigation, new home screen icon sizes; no
<title>usage on iPhone; possible conflicts with new gestures.- New devices: nothing new about them for web developers, same as iPhone 5.
- HTML5 markup: video tracks,
<progress>, REMOVED support for inputtype=datetime.- HTML5 APIs: Page Visibility, AirPlay API, canvas enhancements, REMOVED support for Shared Workers, Web Speech Synthesis API, unprefixed Web Audio and Animation Timing, Mutation Observer and other minor additions. BIG PROBLEM with WebSQL using more than 5Mb.
- CSS: Regions, Sticky position, FlexBox, ClipPath, unprefixed Transitions and other enhancements
- Home Screen webapps: SEVERAL SEVERE PROBLEMS (for example, no alert support!)
- Native webapps: Web View Pagination, JavaScript runtime for native apps and video playing new abilities
§ fun.sh: functional bash, because you always wanted to map/foldl on the command line.
§ @russolsen:
A mock is a stub with an attitude.
Productized
§ You’re Not Finished Selling Until You Change Your Customers Habits:
The best products combine a strong point of view with the marketing and sales efforts to change the way users live and work. The sales process starts with education but has to finish with behavior change.
§ 14 Essential Elements of a Flawless Product Launch.
§ The Beginner’s Guide to CRO.
None Of The Above
§ The 7 Worst Things About Wearing Glasses, on YouTube.
§ For those of you using Gmail (the app) and their inbox as a to do list, check out Signal. It lets you edit emails in your inbox, so you can turn that 10 pargraph missive from your boss into a single actionable line.
§ Another take on longer (double) spaces after period:
I just have to say to typographers: you’ve been had. The publishers wanted to make you cost less and be less relevant, and you fell into that trap. And now you want to go around and kick everyone until they conform to your simplistic, lazy standard? Wow. Just wow.
§ Companies spying on their past self, in Institutional memory and reverse smuggling:
We hear a lot about the spy-movie kind of corporate espionage. I'd love to read a study of reverse corporate espionage, where companies forget their own secrets and employees have to unofficially get them back. I'm convinced it happens more than you'd think.
§ Why some cryptographic keys are much smaller than others?
§ Busting the myth that hard drugs are irressitable (hint: it's a social issue): The Rational Choices of Crack Addicts.