I share code snippets all the time with both coworkers and students in my classes. The main Gist page on Github makes it easy, but there’s no substitute for the raw speed of this Alfred extension. I just copy the code block in question, type my Alfred shortcut, and a moment later a link to the Gist is copied to my clipboard. Very useful.
Craig Mod:
When we explore new ground (or re-explore old ground, forgotten ground) in new mediums, we often find it necessary to swing the design and interaction pendulum to the baroque side of the scale. We do this to see what “too much” feels like in order to understand the edges of “enough.” We saw this happen with iPad “magazines.” We saw this happen with “Snow Fall.” “Snow Fall” was less about what felt natural in a web browser or what was best for the story, and more about what was maximally possible in a web browser. The experiment just happened to be attached to an article.
Great storytelling is not about maximizing technical possibility.
Spot on.
Engineer Jeff Miller put together a simple but well thought out Python bot that tweets Hacker News stories:
Here’s a robust cure for Hacker News overload: use score thresholds. This solves the problem of too many stories by cutting out low-scoring noise while still leaving behind those links interesting enough to have been upvoted by the HN community.
I’ve created a handful of Twitter and RSS feeds that apply score thresholds to Hacker News. Stories enter the feeds in near real-time as soon as they reach X points on the main HN site.
Vulture’s Matt Zoller Seitz writes on TV series that are breaking away from the traditional 13 to 26 episodes per season format. It’s a concept often mentioned on social media and the occasional blog post, but Seitz constructs the best argument to date. He cites influences like the BBC and Netflix, along with our changing viewing habits and mediums (e.g. TVs, computers, tablets) to help shape the “anything goes” approach that defines a lot of TV today.
Really fascinating music research by Music Machinery on how often we actually end up skipping through songs on streaming music services. The blog ran through extensive data provided by Spotify; turns out on average we skip 24% of songs in the first five seconds and skip before the song finishes almost half the time. That’s way higher than I first anticipated.
As the blog explores, it’s a big incentive why many convert to paying accounts to streaming services – not being able to skip is a large hindrance. (via MacStories)
As much can be written about the content of this long form Pitchfork piece as its distinctive design. I’d recommend the former though over the latter; while the scroll-heavy design is often eye catching, it’s busy to a fault. Exploded bits of text that morph back to its original form is cool the first time you view it, but are increasingly annoying when you see it’s used commonly to split up sections. Radio waves fade in and out of view as you scroll, but become distracting when you’re deep into the read.
It’s still well worth your time. Writer Eric Harvey has compiled an exhaustive look at streaming media, from 1930s jukeboxes through to Spotify and beyond.
Fascinating rebuttal to my linked post from designer Mills Baker yesterday, this time from Goran Peuc:
He exposed a good question and a good topic, but exposed it from the wrong angle and with the wrong starting thought, wrong premise to the whole thing.
A premise that designers had a seat at the table to begin with.
Spoiler alert: they didn’t.
Tech student Tim Green put together a pretty slick set of features and shortcuts for GitHub and Git I’ve rarely seen elsewhere. Some of the command line Git tricks were my favorites; I had no idea you could style git status with the ‘-sb’ modifier or trivially jump to the previous Git branch with a wildcard symbol.
A lot of design and development insights in this Gigaom post by Janko Roettgers. Fascinating to see the Netflix team debate image weight so heavily:
However, the team ran into a significant issue when it began to build out the final UI for consumers in the third quarter of 2013, just months before it was scheduled to launch. It discovered that lower-end Blu-ray players and streaming boxes couldn’t handle WebP decoding on the fly, or at least not as smoothly as Netflix would like them to. That’s why the team decided to still serve JPEGs to cheap consumer electronics devices by default, but send WebP images to game consoles and other more powerful machines…
…The goal was to find that sweet spot where images look great but still load quickly, and transitions are smooth — something Netflix internally calls a “recipe” for image encoding. It was a time of constant fine-tuning, a time when even something as minuscule as a 150ms delay during an image transition warranted further tweaks. “You will feel that,” insisted McCarthy.
Chasing down page weight and experimenting with multiple platforms? There’s a lot in common here with web development workflows.
The Verge’s Nilay Patel writes a compelling editorial on why the internet needs stronger government oversight in the lack of virtually zero meaningful competition among internet providers. Essential tech reading.