05.03.14 |
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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.
04.30.14 |
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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.
04.23.14 |
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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.
03.19.14 |
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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.
03.18.14 |
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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.
02.24.14 |
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Designer Brandon Kowitz:
It feels great to launch fast. But launching also makes future changes much harder. So if you can invest a little energy to learn early, and then fix problems before launch, it ends up saving you a tremendous amount of time later. It also reduces the risk that you’ll launch something truly bad and get stuck backpedaling for weeks.
So replace the startup dogma of “launch early and often” with “learn early and often.” For me, it opened my mind to all the different kinds of ways startups can learn, and how valuable user research can be to the core mission of any startup.
02.11.14 |
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Travis Miller writing on Medium:
You would think this goes without saying, but one of the stigmas designers and developers have in our industry, no matter how low they may be down the experience list, is that we tend to be full of ourselves. You don’t have to be a headline speaker to give some advice. If someone needs help, help them out. Don’t be a jerk.
01.31.14 |
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I have a habit of installing quirky screensavers on my Macs as a throwback to an earlier era. But with my latest Macbook Air I fell in line with the default settings sans screensaver, dissatisfied with what was out there. That all changed when I saw this screensaver by designer Robert Padbury, developed by Steve Streza. It’s a twist on the iOS7 lock screen with options for white on black or black on white typography. It’s minimal and extremely elegant.
01.28.14 |
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Tested’s Will Smith gave the Xbox One a second chance as a universal remote after a negative run last month:
As far as I can tell, Microsoft hasn’t changed anything with the way the TV functionality works since the Xbox One’s launch, but my behavior has changed. I use the TiVo remote to navigate to whatever I want to watch, but if I need to pause, play, or even fast forward whlie I’m watching something I use the basic voice commands. “Xbox Pause” and “Xbox Play” are reliable and work well, even though using the voice commands for more complex tasks remains maddening.
But it looks like there’s some serious power concerns that may keep him from using the setup over the long run.
01.27.14 |
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I find a surprising number of otherwise skilled web developers that still have trepidation around the command line. I’m no expert myself, but a few of the basics, especially pertaining to grep, can really do wonders when you’re in a pinch in the middle of a development session.
Mark Bates has written a excellent book on the subject; I’ve already read the first two chapters and like what I’ve read. It’s easy to follow along and comprehensive. You can read the entire book contents online or purchase an ebook, screencasts, or a physical copy.