I had fun listening to hosts Tyler and David run through Nolan’s entire career. Look for some solid insights into the generally overlooked Insomnia and plenty of rants that pit the three Batman films against each other.
Social news site Hacker News has come a long way from its modest roots in 2007. It has diversified its subject matter (though tech and startups still dominate) and in the process has become essential reading for developers, designers and entrepreneurs. I scan HN headlines regularly, at least once every day. Unfortunately, the site’s design is a total eyesore. There’s inadequate line spacing, poor use of typographic hierarchy, little contrast, and comments that stretch out too much – it’s better on the eyes to read on narrower columns.
A simple Chrome or Safari extension that restyles HN’s look is an obvious choice and there are many popular options out there. Yet few address how I tackle HN so I decided to create my own: You can download the Chrome variant at the Chrome Web Store and the Safari extension is available as a direct download on Cloud. You can find downloads and source code for both at my GitHub.
I like to make Hacker News as scannable as possible; I usually ignore comments, point totals and other article stats. To emphasize this I adjusted typography; headlines are bumped up to 24px Helvetica. All other text is secondary and set to 14px or smaller.
Many other extensions are minimal to a fault; there’s little contrast or division between headlines. That cuts down on scan speed as you scroll down a web page. So instead I went in the opposite direction: I added extra white space between articles along with soft gradients to emphasize splits between headlines. I also shifted HN’s color palette away from sepia and oranges to neutral, soft whites. Branding aside, neutrals are just more comfortable to browse through for longer periods.
Note that while I’m not so much into HN article stats, they do help measure “hotness” and article popularity. It’s a lot easier to scan these stats visually instead of deciphering HN’s default view with several tiny numbers crammed next to a headline. To achieve this I swapped out the numbers and replaced them with multi-colored, CSS3 based bar graphs. They automatically appear when mousing over an article and display points (red), comments (yellow) and article age (green). To get a quick snapshot of what’s hot you can tap ‘s’ to turn all article graphs on at once.
Overall, my extension is a slightly different slant on Hacker News than what’s already out there. It’s not for everyone, but if you read HN I encourage you to check it out.
File this under the “why didn’t I discover this earlier?” department. Instacss is a very straightforward, super quick CSS documentation repo. Up till now when I had to cross reference a CSS property, I usually ended up running a Google search with the term and ultimately navigating over to W3 Schools. W3 is still a sold resource, but Instacss is far more useful. It’s super fast with live examples and clear browser compatibility charts.
If you’re looking for a good intro to front end semantic fundamentals, especially for non technical people, look no further. I dig the layout, the organization and its structure. There’s no fluff here – just the basic syntax with a few examples.
Gamer Pete Davison argues PC gaming is strong:
There is no other platform on which you can have such diverse experiences as the PC. iOS certainly has a good go, but as days go on it’s abundantly clear that the mobile market is shifting very much in favour of “freemium” social games rather than truly inventive experiences. On the PC, meanwhile, the fact that it is such a free market out there — and easy to develop for (relatively speaking) — means that if you can imagine an experience you want to have, you can probably do so on PC.
Pete’s makes a strong point here against consoles. As I pointed out on last week’s post on Mass Effect 3, there’s a void in terms of indie releases and originality in current-gen consoles; just compare what’s out on Steam versus the XBox Live Marketplace or PSN. Yet I think he short changes the iOS and mobile market. There’s a lot of crap, but there are some great ideas out there, and its price and distribution constitute a threat to the PC market.
Don’t count consoles out either; we’ve got a good year before Microsoft and Sony unveil their next generation devices. With the right approach, they could really bounce back against mobile and PC competition.
I’ve never attempted iced coffee at home. But I am a huge AeroPress fan – I deploy the inverted brew technique almost every morning – and Instapaper developer Marco Arment has what looks like a really cool recipe. I plan on giving this a try before summer ends.
(Yes, this is a bit off topic from what’s normally covered here, but many great developers and designers I know love coffee.)
Jordan Koschei, writing for The Industry on Dropbox’s “get free space” push to have the user complete extra steps after first signing up:
This solution is much more elegant than simply forcing users to sit through instructions. For one thing, it offers them a choice; nobody is forced to go through the steps, but most people will anyway in order to gain the reward. Furthermore, the reward is intrinsically linked to the product — it isn’t a tangential incentive like a badge, but rather more of the product itself. Rewarding appropriate use of a product with more of the same product is simple and elegant.
Dropbox’s approach is novel. I know many non technical people who still rely on Dropbox everyday for syncing critical files between multiple computers. I never would have guessed that such a hard to explain, engineering focused product would have such an elegant setup process, but they do.
Quip isn’t your average Twitter client. While you can just read your timeline, the focus here is on alternative modes: check out extended conversations, read the most retweeted tweets, and lay out all Twitter friendly embedded images in a simple grid. It’s really cool as a ‘lean back’ experience to run through on my iPad at the end of the day.
If you’re anyone that dives into CSS on a regular basis you’ve had to fish for extra colors for use on gradients, hovers, border edges, and other HTML elements. For tonally consistent options I’ve relied on colllor in the past. Yet often I just want to slightly lighten or darker a specific hex color, but don’t want to open up Photoshop just to slightly adjust a HSL curve.
That’s exactly why 0 to 255 works so well. No more Photoshop or big third party tools. Just head here, enter a hex color, and you get a full spectrum of colors from light to dark.
Essential reading for technology fans who want to avoid crushing, poorly managed corporate culture. The “curve” rating system that required ranking of team members, struck me as especially damming. Yet overall I was a bit disappointed by Kurt Eichenwald’s writing. It felt overwhelmingly one sided and at times a bit superficial. If poor practices like the curve ranking system weren’t liked by almost anyone interviewed, why did they exist? Was it Ballmer? High amounts of red tape? I wanted a bit of a deeper dive here.