There’s been countless articles on adapting a responsive design to make web sites mobile friendly. But what about in the opposite direction? What happens when you need to take a traditionally fixed width web site at 960px and make it look great on a 27 inch monitor. Designer Mike Pick goes through a few examples at A List Apart, both good and bad, to see what what works best.
I can’t say Scout Tafoya’s video essay defending Alien 3 won me over on that film based on memory; I found the tone and screenplay way too dark and nihilistic. But given what director David Fincher has done since, from Fight Club to The Social Network, makes me really want to rewatch this soon. It’s been over a decade since my last viewing.
There’s been a lot written regarding the PS4 post paunch, but a lot, especially the much hyped (and scored) review over at Polygon was far too premature. We’re just too early to know how these consoles will shake out. But Dan Solberg over at Kill Screen Daily has the right balance. There’s a few soft statements on what clearly stands out (e.g. the PS4’s focus on gaming, sharing, the inconspicuousness of the hardware) and a great analogy: buying a PS4 today is like “sitting in a waiting room”:
To purchase the console at launch is to subscribe to a patient stakeout with the promise of payout sometime down the line. A new Uncharted game has been announced, and both The Witness and the new Infamous game show tremendous potential, but you can’t play them this year. It’s no wonder that devotees are whipped up in a religious fervor about the new “console war” when they’ve chosen sides based mostly on faith.
I’m already a big fan of the Node based task manager Grunt for my day job; it makes minifying, and linting my code for errors a breeze. But this post by Google developer Addy Osmani caught me onto a new really cool Grunt task called grunt-responsive-images. It batch produces multiple, final resolution images for web deployment based on a list of original source images. Great for responsive web design and serving up basic HDPI imagery.
I enjoyed reading through this article where The Guardian web developers dive into how RWD can play semi-nice with a browser as old as IE8. Looks like a pretty slick methodology via a Sass mixin to deliver responsive friendly stylesheets to both modern and older browsers (via the Stuff and Nonsense design blog.)
Wonderful, true to life yet moving tribute to Walker over at Grantland, as written by Alex Pappademas:
Maybe it’s too big a leap to suggest that Walker’s death represents some larger symbolic dimming of the day for a certain kind of leading man — blue-eyed, surfy, fast-car-loving, born of the Newman/McQueen DNA line. So instead, let’s say Walker managed to occupy a space of diminished expectations with aplomb and even grace. He punched his weight. He’d started making serious-actor moves toward the end of his life — like coproducing the December 2013 release Hours, in which he plays a father struggling to keep his infant daughter alive on a ventilator during Hurricane Katrina — but wasn’t too good to endorse Davidoff Cool Water, a cologne that smells like a teenage boy who drives a cab.
Really cool to see The A.V. Club’s Todd VanDerWerff go way back and review the pilot episode of this great show. He’s following up with reviews of the whole first season in coming weeks.
The Dissolve’s Matt Singer:
We live in a world where immediacy and instantaneous access is the fundamental driver of commerce. Convenience certainly has its place, but expertise should still have one too.
Agreed; and up to now, as Matt points out, Netflix’s automated algorithm is no match for a smart video clerk.
Really enjoyed listening to Martinez talk about his thought process behind the Only God Forgives soundtrack in this interview with Slashfilm:
So what ended up happening is kind of this hybrid of several different ideas, one of which was The Day the Earth Stood Still. My favorite score of all time, but even as well as I know it, I can’t imitate it, nor would it have been appropriate. But the idea of something fantastic and something that was otherworldly was the quality we wanted to take from that score. I think at one point we liked the idea of the retro and fifties, but I couldn’t really nail that. So once again I failed in an interesting way.
I put a lot of stock in work by the Filament group with their past work on the Picturefill polyfill; this small extension they recently created looks especially cool. It’s basically a super quick, jQuery based method to kill off the annoying delay you get by default when tapping links on a mobile device. Faster interactions make for a better user experience.