Pocket review: Read It Later reinvents itself →
I’m not abandoning Instapaper anytime soon, but Pocket looks semi compelling. I could see it fitting into my workflow as slick tool for capturing non-textual media like video and imagery.
I’m not abandoning Instapaper anytime soon, but Pocket looks semi compelling. I could see it fitting into my workflow as slick tool for capturing non-textual media like video and imagery.
There’s a lot of proposed solutions to the problem of serving different resolution images for different sized devices: small for mobile, big for widescreen and iPad Retina displays, and everywhere else somewhere in between. Unlike many other CSS or JS based solutions, Matt Stow’s doesn’t feel hacky and is widely compatible with a wide variety of browsers (IE8 and older excluded.)
As a mostly front end web developer that dabbles heavily in design, I’ve stayed away from node.js. It’s just been something that’s I’ve associated as too server side and back end intensive; I roll with it myself to check my Javascript via JSHint, but little else. That opinion may be changing though with programmer Randall Degges essay here.
An extended interview with Al Lowe, the funny, profane, and quirky creator of the cult 80s adventure game Leisure Suit Larry. Reading it made me nostalgic for Sierra, a powerhouse gaming studio in the late 80s and early 90s best known for the Kings Quest and Space Quest series.
Developer Dan Shipper:
When a non-technical person attempts to estimate software development time they come armed with their two basic heuristics: complexity based on size and complexity based on speed. But what they don’t realize is that software is different. Software is by nature not physical. It exists in the ether. A tiny portion of it shows up on our computer screens from time to time. Because of this when it comes to building web apps (or any type of software for that matter) our basic heuristics break down.
So many tech articles include a throwaway sentence on how developers aren’t good estimators of their work time. Rarely do they go further into the why behind that statement, but Dan’s does, and does so effectively. (via Watts Martin)
Interesting Times article yesterday detailing the two Instagram founders during the initial stages of their startup:
The two men began working out of Dogpatch Labs, housed in an old pier, with fishing nets on the walls and long tables that functioned as shared office space for aspiring tech companies. Julian Green, who briefly worked out of Dogpatch, recalled that the two men were unusually obsessed with design detail. Once, he said, they spent two hours perfecting the rounded corners of the app’s icons.
And two years and a billion dollars later, look where it got them. Engaging your users through great design matters. Small details, like the rounded corners of an icon, are part of this.
Like many other bloggers, I'm wedded to Google for my analytics. That poses a problem on the go; Google Analytics isn't mobile friendly, requiring Flash for their graphs and a lot of extraneous zooming to navigate the core UI.
Enter Analytics, a new app by Wizamin. It gives you just the basics: visitors, page views, average pages viewed per user. Swipe left and right to switch accounts. Swipe up and down to jump to different time periods. Simple, fast, really pretty and colorful for a buck. For at a glance analytics tracking it's great.
I’m not the biggest graphic t-shirt and hoodie fan but these are really cool. The heavy use of typography and abstract graphic art just clicks. (via Tools & Toys)
I'm a big advocate of responsive design, yet it's often hard to convey visuals on multiple devices by just resizing a single browser back and forth. Developer Jaime Reynolds' solution makes a responsive demo a hell of a lot more straightforward: Iframes are dropped in shells of different widths, each of which represents a different device.
Now that I’ve been increasingly using FiftyThree’s Paper app for sketches and UI ideas, investing in a solid stylus is important. The Verge has a really slick roundup here. (Spoiler: The Wacom Bamboo, my current stylus of choice, ends up as one of the finalists.)