Keeping to a reasonable line width adds significantly to a web page’s readability. But it’s easy when building a site to forget about this and hand counting characters on a screen is a drag. That’s why Chris Coyier’s simple bookmarklet here works great. Run it on any site and determine immediately how your lines are shaping up.
Kris Naudus, writing for gdgt:
Granted, if Nintendo started making games for mobile it’d still be making games, which isn’t a huge momentous change. But it does mean giving up on their commitment to hardware. And that leads us to the other reason it doesn’t make the switch:
Control.
From Randomwire, one reason why native Japanese sites often feel so cluttered, at least to more of a traditionally U.S. centric eye:
Logographic-based languages can contain a lot of meaning in just few characters. While these characters can look cluttered and confusing to the western eye, they actually allow Japanese speakers to become comfortable with processing a lot of information in short period of time / space (the same goes for Chinese).
Scott Fennessey and Chris Ryan, writing for Grantland:
As a fine-arts student who got his start in the vulgar world of commercial directing and slick TV shows, he has always subverted expectations…Looking for the quintessential interstellar extraterrestrial adventure? Instead, take the most grotesque body-horror movie ever made. Scott’s movies are delivery systems for ideas, but they’re also Trojan horses — hulking, beautiful objects, meant to distract audiences while those ideas creep in, one soldier at a time, to take over your mind. It’s been an effective, unlikely strategy for the British-born filmmaker.
We’ve making progress on the responsive image front in modern browsers, but alas, we’re at an impasse. As noted by Opera rep Bruce Lawson:
The outcome of the meeting was that
isn’t a viable option. Browser makers don’t like the fact that it’s a new element that does the same as (or what
should do if we were speccing it today), and that it depends on multiple nested children…
…The Paris meetup’s most immediate outcome was agreement that srcset + DPR-switching is the right initial step forward (i.e., the 2x, 3x, etc. syntax).
Bottom line, the consensus is moving toward srcset over a new picture element but no modern browsers are yet shipping with it.
Designer Trent Walton is a responsive web design veteran; he’s part of the three man web agency Paravel who’s done many cutting edge responsive projects. That’s exactly why reading this post, highlighting some smart steps to get a team on board with RWD, is so awesome.
(Bonus points for the FF Meta Serif usage, one of my favorite web fonts.)
Some really great behind the scenes photos from Stanley Kubrick’s classic, courtesy The Overlook Hotel. Images discovered via David Chen.
iOS App designer/developer Jared Sinclair:
What makes something touchable?
For things that scroll or zoom, touchability means that the content under your finger moves with your touch, without any lag or jitters…
…For buttons, touchability requires something different. Touchable buttons need borders. By “borders” I don’t mean outlines, (although outlines are included in my usage of the word). I mean borders in a broader sense. A button is a tappable area, clearly delineated from the un-tappable content around it by an obvious border.
Native app design isn’t my background, but the switch in iOS 7 from clearly defined buttons with borders and gradients to raw text labels always rubbed me the wrong way. Jared makes a strong argument why. (via Jeffrey Zeldman).
Screenshots can be a tricky thing; in my day job I take a lot for sharing with coworkers. The default Mac OS X behavior of dropping screenshots on the desktop is poor and leads to a lot of unnecessary cruft. I’m not super crazy about Dropbox’s implementation either, as their default file references include a Dropbox web UI around the image itself (I prefer the image raw.)
Naturally, this workflow for keyboard launcher Alfred fit my particular screenshot needs very well. I currently have two keyboard shortcuts set up; one allows me to select part of the screen, which then copies to a Dropbox folder and pastes the link to the raw image in my clipboard, the other just copies the image direct to clipboard for screenshots I know I won’t have to reference later.
Podcasts are a big part of my daily workflow; they are always a part of my outdoor runs and often part of my workday, running in the background. I’ve got my favorites (e.g. Giant Bombcast, The Slashfilmcast, ShopTalk), but I’ve always found the discoverability of new podcasts pretty limited. That’s why Podcast Thing works so well; you get short interviews with various personalities where they talk about their favorite podcasts. Highly recommended, especially for podcast newbies.