Links from 2015

As many of us move away from designing pages toward designing systems, one concept keeps cropping up: modularity. We often hear about the benefits of a modular…

<blockquote>The secret key combination to drag a pane back to a window or to the tab bar is: command + shift + option, while dragging the pane body (not its header!).</blockquote>

<blockquote>According to Tara Swart, a neuroscientist and senior lecturer at MIT, your “terrible twos” and those turbulent teen years are when the brain’s wiring is most malleable. As a result, traumatic experiences that occur during these time periods can alter brain activity and ultimately change gene expressions—sometimes for good.</blockquote>

In 2003, the CSS Zen Garden went live, and it spearheaded a revolution. At the time, many web designers were still using tables for layouts, and the battle for…

COMPUTING has always been a youngster’s game. The founders of Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft were in their teens or 20s when they started the businesses…

Transistor is a sci-fi themed action RPG that invites you to wield an extraordinary weapon of unknown origin as you fight through a stunning futuristic city.…

Shadowrun: Dragonfall – Director’s Cut is Harebrained Schemes’ biggest Shadowrun game to date, and the definitive Shadowrun RPG experience available on PC. Now…

In 1992, I thought I was the best programmer in the world. In my defense, I had just graduated from college, this was pre-Internet, and I lived in Boulder,…

I recently offered to talk at the local primary school, about my job (or at least part of my job). I expected to be speaking to the older kids, and be able to…

<blockquote>For such a young, supposedly-innovative industry, I’m often amazed at what people choose to treat as immovable, unchangeable, carved-in-stone issues. Bloated, invasive ad tracking isn’t a law of nature. It’s a choice. We can choose to change.</blockquote>

<blockquote>npm has a great subset of functionality decidated to running tasks to facilitate in a packages lifecycle - in other words, it is a great tool for build scripts.</blockquote>

There are some fancy tools for doing build automation on javascript projects that I've never felt the appeal of because the lesser-known npm run command has…

<blockquote>Summary: Even as more sites mimic swiping gestures and incorporate horizontal scrolling in desktop designs, users remain reluctant to move sideways through content.</blockquote>

<blockquote>The relevant difference there is the "implied minimum size of flex items", a new feature in the flexbox spec. (or rather, a feature that was removed and re-introduced) [...] set `min-height:0` on specific elements.</blockquote>

<blockquote>TL;DR: Did you know that The Verge delivers you to around 20 companies for advertising & tracking purposes? I didn't. That might foul up your web experience a little bit. Maybe we should try something different.</blockquote>

Idle Words > Talks > Web Design: The First 100 Years This is the expanded version of a talk I gave on September 9, 2014, at the HOW Interactive Design…

When the robin was voted the UK’s national bird last month, we chose to celebrate half of a broken relationship. The robin evolved to make use of wild boar,…

<blockquote>A scholarly commons to connect the entire research cycle</blockquote>

However I don’t think that it’s about the code it generates or boilerplate it proposedly saves you from writing. It’s way more about the instant feedback and…

Like the cow above, I also heard React.js was good and spent some time playing with it. Now that I'm pretty comfortable with React, I decided to write yet…

Geckoboard London United Kingdom Jul 1, 2015 London, United Kingdom - Geckoboard - http://geckoboard.com - ONSITE (but some working from home is no problem)…

<blockquote>A UK-based entrepreneur, they hope, will decide to open her business in Estonia, use an Estonian bank and pay for some Estonian services, even if the company was only going to be trading in the UK, because she would find Estonia's national infrastructure far easier to deal with than the UK's. In other words, a nation is now competing with its neighbours on the basis of the quality of its user interface. Just as you might switch your bank to one with a better mobile app, the Estonians hope you'll switch your business to a country with an infrastructure that is easier to use.</blockquote>

The soon to be held staff Christmas party is not the only thing that end-users throw which unsettles independent, self-employed IT contractors, keen to keep…

by Luke Wroblewski August 25, 2014 In his presentation at the An Event Apart in Chicago IL, Jared Spool walked through the importance of content and user…

<blockquote>The “surveillance business model” of building up detailed electronic dossiers on internet users in order to predict what they want to buy and how to sell it to them produced some genuinely impressive results in its early years. The serendipity of seeing an ad for something you had been thinking about proved very powerful in the early days of Facebook and the first generation of “retargeting” services.

But a look at Facebook’s ad-card rates shows that the novelty of this technique wears off fast. Facebook was founded on the premise that it could use its mounting dossier on your behavior to figure out how to sell you things faster than your natural defenses would repel its pitches. If that ideology was borne out, you’d expect to see the company’s cost-per-thousand ad rates climbing into the stratosphere. Instead, they’re damned close to the rate you’ll pay for regular, minimally targeted display advertising elsewhere.</blockquote>

A CSS standard for the Loader Age CSS is a lot of things. Frustrating to newcomers, essential (even admirable) to those of us who use it day-to-day. It’s so…

Kyoto’s Kamo River, in English, translates as Duck River. Modern bridges cross the wide, somewhat shallow stream, but a child or intrepid adult can also use a…

Tweet A few days ago, the incredibly talented Roman Komarov posted an experiment of his with pure CSS “scrolling shadows” . If you’re using Google Reader, you…