jQuery API documentation →
I’m late in noticing this one, but hooray, the API docs for jQuery got a big design refresh! Responsive! Better color palette! I approve.
I’m late in noticing this one, but hooray, the API docs for jQuery got a big design refresh! Responsive! Better color palette! I approve.
Dan McKinley, Etsy’s principal engineer, gives a really solid talk that supports small, incremental updates to test ideas before rolling out a massive new web feature. It’s not heavily technical and thus equally a good listen for web developers, designers, and project managers.
Robert Rath, writing for The Escapist, on Corvo, the protagonist of the stealth adventure Dishonored:
In the eyes of British honor culture, Corvo is a villain. His conduct is not that of a gentleman: he allows himself to be subjugated, he takes unfair advantage, and his vicious methods speak to his foreign origins. Interestingly, when we look at Dishonored from this perspective of honor culture, its themes appear very different.
This was a really fascinating read, and not just because I recently finished Dishonored. It’s primarily because there’s a lot of insights here on British vs. Italian honor culture that make solid contextual sense, both for history and this game.
Nick Bilton, writing for The New York Times:
The worship of design has also taken designers out of the back offices and into top executive jobs. Engineers are still in the mix, to be sure. But they don’t rule the roost in product development, which may also be why tech products are easier to use, more human.
As Bilton’s piece illustrates, this is a time where great web designers make or break websites. The collaboration level between designers and developers is key as well; without a great workflow, all the great design ideas in the world won’t be implemented.
Leave it to Reddit for someone to mashup the Swedish original with director David Fincher’s English remake. Nice side by side via animated gifs.
Valve CEO Gabe Newell:
We’ll come out with our own and we’ll sell it to consumers by ourselves. That’ll be a Linux box, [and] if you want to install Windows you can. We’re not going to make it hard. This is not some locked box by any stretch of the imagination. We also think that a controller that has higher precision and lower latency is another interesting thing to have.
I’m going to take a guess and say an ‘official’ Steam Box should make it ways out by the end of 2013, coinciding nicely with the launch of next-gen consoles by Sony and Microsoft. We could have a potential PC (Steam) vs. console (Sony, Microsoft) vs. mobile (iOS) race ahead of us, fighting for attention in the living room. I think iOS mobile gaming will inevitably stay strong and get stronger, but all bets are off in terms of how consoles and PCs will end up two years from now.
As a YouTube commenter points out, it’s pretty rare to get interviewers that can keep up with Tarantino’s rapidfire thoughts, but Furguson does a good job. Watch to get Tarantino’s thoughts on Prometheus, Hatfields & McCoys, kids movies and more.
I find myself in Photoshop pretty much every day in the office. As our web team moves increasingly to a responsive, grid based framework, design work has to match grid structures perfectly, hence the importance of grid guides or layers to keep things on track.
But Photoshop doesn’t make quick guide generation easy out of the box. Enter GuideGuide, a free tool by designer Cameron McEfee. Install it as a Photoshop extension, and with just a few clicks you’ve got simple horizontal or vertical grid guides based on percentages or pixels.
Mark Bowden writing for The Atlantic (warning, Zero Dark Thirty spoilers ahead):
The charge that the film is pro-torture is easy to debunk. I have already noted the dramatic failure depicted in the opening scenes with Ammar. The futility of the approach is part of the more general organizational failure depicted in the movie’s first half, culminating in a dramatization of the tragic 2009 bombing of Camp Chapman, in Khost, Afghanistan, where an al-Qaeda infiltrator wiped out an entire CIA field office. The agency is shown to be not only failing to find bin Laden and dismantle al-Qaeda, but on the losing end of the fight.
There’s been a huge flap in recent weeks over Zero Dark Thirty and its ‘pro-torture stance’. After viewing (and being blown away by) the movie last week, I just don’t buy it. Adding onto what Bowden writes above, the early torture heavy scenes made me feel queasy and very uncomfortable, and I think that’s exactly what director Kathryn Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal intended. It happened, and to skip over it or portray it anything else than what it was would be a whitewash.
I’ve been listening to the design/mobile/tech podcast Iterate for a while now. While it’s often pretty jargon dense and gets pretty deep in the weeds in terms of iOS and mobile design, as a full time web designer/developer, it’s a must listen each week. Episode 36 with designers Louis, Brad and Jessie of group Pacific Helm is one of my favorites to date. Very funny with plenty of little design tools and tips I didn’t know about.