Archive: December, 2014

StyleStats

A node.js based library tool to collect CSS statistics on any web site. It’s also easy to install via npm locally to run against any stylesheet you have. There’s even grunt and gulp integration; I can see this hooking into some sort of regression testing for my work in the long run to get a wider picture of how the code is evolving.

Stop breaking the web

Developer Nicolas Bevacqua:

Meanwhile, we add tons of weight to our pages, levelling the field and making the experience in modern browsers worse as a result of attempting to make the experience in older browsers better. There’s a problem with this fallacy, though. People using older browsers are not expecting the newest features. They’re content with what they have. That’s the whole reason why they’re using an older browser in the first place. Instead of attempting to give those users a better experience (and usually failing miserably), you should enable features only if they’re currently available on the target browser, instead of creating hacks around those limitations.

Butterick’s practical typography: presentations

There’s many other aspects to recommend about Matthew Butterick’s wonderful book, but one of my favorites is this section, where Butterrick breaks down how to apply typographic principles to presentations. Given I teach courses part time, it really helped improve the quality of my work.

The Apple media distortion field

Journalistic site Krautreporter, writing a post on Medium:

Three years after the death of its charismatic founder, Apple is doing all it can to maintain this reality distortion field, mainly by exercising total control about anything that is reported about the company or its products. In contrast to Apple’s design philosophy this strategy does not manifest itself through clarity and elegance, but through a subtle and sometimes questionable toying with our, the reporting journalists’ vanities and dependencies. If you write positively you’ll be wined and dined, if you criticize, no matter how fairly, you’ll be penalized. Admittedly this is common practice with large corporations, but hardly any one of them will go as far as Apple does. And there is no other corporation that the media have allowed to get away with this kind of manipulation for such a long period of time.

As much as we all admire Apple in many ways, it’s interesting to get a much harsher perspective on its treatment of the media. I question if it’s quite as black and white as Krautreporter portrays here, but there’s been many times where I’ve questioned the relationship between the tech press and Apple.