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Sunset from our balcony.
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My favorite feature of Sass
If you read my blog, or follow me on Twitter, you know that Sass is one of my favorite tools in my web stack. It makes writing CSS so much more efficient and painless, and I really can’t imagine living without it.
Sass has a lot of great features. Variables, mixins, nesting, color math, control directives…all incredibly useful. But there is one feature of Sass people don’t talk about much anymore — and frankly, a lot of people don’t even use — that I put above all the rest: the indented syntax.
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Current status…
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“Object Value Pricing,” by Dan Mall
“Here’s a system I use to help qualify my gut reaction. Ask yourself what object you would barter for this project.” Clever.
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Photos: If All of Earth’s Water was put into Single Sphere
Pretty facinating. Big as it is, i think its smaller than I might have expected. Also: that’s what she said.
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More-tini
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On top of Columbia.
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How we rolls.
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This is @katygarrison's iPhone case. This is not a joke.
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We are so mature.
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Space Needle orange paint progress: getting there.
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Why We Shouldn’t Make Separate Mobile Websites
Why does everyone assume a “seperate mobile website” means something stripped down, and something that doesnt give access to all the content?
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What's wrong with this picture?
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Current status…
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Facebook Introduces New Instagram Filters
Funny because it’s true.
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Responsive Design, Responsively Illustrated
Pretty cool (if not particularly useful).
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My amazing wife's handiwork.
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How Not To Sort By Average Rating
Sweet. Now someone implement this in Python. Oh, and as a Django ORM aggregation method.
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Lea Verou: In defense of reinventing wheels
I tend to agree with Lea, here. Assuming an existing library for something is right for your needs is just as asinine as assuming your own work will always be better. These things have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Also, another benefit of reinventing wheels: learning. You learn a helluva lot more when you write something yourself than when you grab an off-the-shelf library.
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Reading “Game of Thrones” in the Real World
Khoi talks about the sponteanous, happenstance encounters that occur when you read physical books, observing that the same generally doesn’t happen with ebooks. I bet those guys that used to carry a boombox on their shoulder had happenstance encournters, too.
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Ryan Funduk: Our Culture of Exclusion
Ryan has a lengthy rant about the culture in the tech community and how much of it seems to revolve around alcohol. Conferences have after-parties at bars, meetups are typically at bars, companies have beer in the fridge, etc. It’s a well-written piece with some thoughtful points, but for me it has two glaring and problematic issues. First, virtually all of the examples Ryan cites (tweets, etc) are clearly jokes. It’s obvious they were posted to get a laugh, not to brag about drinking, and certainly not to exclude anyone who doesn’t drink. Second, Ryan doesn’t seem to be aware that moderation, as a concept, exists. He constantly uses the word “binge,” suggesting that these conferences and such are encouraging drinking in excess. I’ve never seen that from any conference I’ve attended, and I’ve never seen people “wasted” at work, either. He turns one company’s “weekly happy hour” into “getting sloshed” with no evidence at all that’s what really happens, and certainly no evidence that the company in question encourages it. When conferences and companies start saying, “non-drinkers are not allowed,” then I’ll be outraged at the exclusion. But right now, Ryan is choosing to exclude himself because he doesn’t want to be in the presence of alcohol. That’s fine, and it’s his right, but it’s a very different thing than conferences and companies actively excluding non-drinkers.
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Trav.
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The Man Who Broke Atlantic City
If you enjoy gambling, and especially if you enjoy blackjack, you gotta read this story. Hell, even if you don’t, it’s an incredible tale.
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This does not seem accurate.
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Terrific photo of me, Nobu, Wilson Miner, Laura Brunow-Miner, Matt Brown, and Tiffani Jones-Brown, taken by Kirk Mastin of Mastin Studio (MastinStudio.com) at Tom and Jodie's wedding.
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One of the best photos of me in a long time, taken by Kirk Mastin of Mastin Studio (MastinStudio.com) at Tom and Jodie's wedding.
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Halftime power up. C'mon, dammit. #RCJH
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An Ajax-Include Pattern for Modular Content
Clever and useful pattern for brining in non-essential content to a page after its iniital load. i do a good bit of this on Lendle (although not with this particular technique). The intesting thing to me when this is discussed in regard to mobile, as it is here, is that the “loading…” aspect of web sites and apps is one of the thing that make people like native apps so much better. They always feel so much faster because once a view appears on screen, it’s all the—theres nothing more to load. Tradeoffs…
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Hand-written receipts FTW
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Responsive questions
Jeremy Keith answers a bunch of great questions about responsive web design. I agree with almost every word of it. The only thing that bugs me is when he says people were “angry” that RWD doesnt solve mobile context issues. It bugs me because I can’t help feeling like he’s talking about me. “Angry” isnt the right word at all. I can honestly say I’ve never been “angry” about anything related to the web. This is my job, not my life. If I’m “angry” you’ll know it. I’ll probably never be “angry” about any topic I’d write about on this blog, or on Twitter. Rather, I simply raised a concern with the growing idea that using RWD for a website was a “magic bullet” for making a great mobile website. It’s not. It’s a useful tool, but not a be all and end all (largely because, again, it doesn’t address context issues).
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HaiLey. <3
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Me and my amazing daughter @reckless_abandonment. <3
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Angry Birds in Space…Needle.
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Content Folding
Chris Coyier has some tips on using the new CSS Regions functionality with responsive layouts.
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I, Dog, am twice the size of my owner.
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Stamen map tiles for OpenStreetMap
These are really stunning, and free to use in your OSM applications. I especially love the Toner one.
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CSS preprocessors and “view source”: is output readability important?
Earlier today, I stumbled across a podcast interview with one of my early web design heroes, Dan Cederholm. You may know Dan as the founder of Dribbble, but it’s worth noting that he’s been on the cutting edge of CSS and web design since the early 2000s — Dribbble is just the latest in a long line of manifestations of his talents.
Anyway, the entire interview is worth listening to, but I was particularly interested in their conversation about Sass (starts around 56:20). I hadn’t realized Dan was using Sass, but I was excited to hear his thoughts on it, as it seems to me a lot of the old guard of CSS gurus have not taken to CSS preprocessors the way the younger up-and-comers have. As I was listening, I was surprised to hear my name was mentioned in reference to a recent post I wrote called How I’m Implementing Responsive Web Design. Turns out, they’d discussed my techniques for RWD with Sass in a previous episode with Chris Coyier (starts around 13:30), so I ended up listening to that, as well (The Industry seems like a great show…definitely check it out).
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Responsive Web Design: Missing the Point
Nice piece by Brad Frost on adaptive design. Although it hits on several topics as well, it addresses my key issue with the trend that is “Responsive Web Design:” the dogmatism that Ethan Marcotte has put around it by insisting that a layout only qualifies as “Responsive Web Design” if it consists of fluid grids, fluid images, and media queries. The result of him shunning other techniques (multiple fixed grids, using JavaScript instead of media queries, etc.) is a community that now cares more about fitting into some arbitrary ideal (mostly to impress Ethan and each other), rather than the user experience. Adaptive layout and device-agnostic design is an incredibly important issue for users, and will continue to be, going forward. But “Responsive Web Design” in the sense of Ethan’s dogmatic prescription is overblown. There are many ways to achieve great multi-device user experiences. RWD is one of them, but by shunning all the others, we are doing our users a disservice.
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Jeff Croft
I’m a digital product designer and developer in Seattle, WA. I currently work with nGen Works, and recently co-founded Lendle, a Kindle book sharing service.
Some of my clients include Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Copious, The New York Review of Books, The Lawrence Journal-World, and the University of Washington.
I’ve authored two books on web and interactive design and spoken at dozens of conferences around the world.
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