As much as I love Tweetbot, Twitterrific 5, the new Twitter client from Iconfactory, matches my Twitter needs more effectively. This blog post breaks down the app’s development organization. This is the most important sentence:
When you have a large project, be it a movie or a piece of software, you have to have someone calling the creative shots.
FF Meta and Myriad makes for a a pretty rare web pairing (for that matter, Myriad solo is pretty underutilized), but Ev Williams’ Medium does the job right.
As we delve more heavily into responsive imagery in my day job, production needs increase on an already overburdened staff. We needed a way to speed up PSD comp production work, and Mac app Slicy has been a great solution so far. Slicy is simple app that auto exports and slices out clean transparent pngs or jpgs of individual layers in a PSD file. Best of all, it auto exports 1x/2x images, essential for a responsive workflow. It’s developed by MacRabbit, the team behind CSSEdit and Espresso, so naturally the refinement is really high. Highly recommended for $29.
Substantial, excellent talk by Vimeo developer Jon Rohan on steps Github took to dramatically improve their CSS performance site wide. One thing Jon stresses that I’ve found has a huge impact is just the sheer number of HTML elements on screen. People spend so much time optimizing their Javascript and CSS selectors, when sometimes the root problem is just having way too many divs.
From Mac/iOS app developer Bjango’s blog, a solid primer on why sub-pixel antialiasing – still fairly common on Chrome and the PC world – is on its way out. This part really surprised me:
WebKit on OS X disables sub-pixel antialiasing when animating, often resulting in a visual glitch when it starts and stops, unless standard antialiasing is set using CSS. OS X disables sub-pixel antialiasing when using CoreAnimation’s layer backed views.
Now I know why some of my CSS3 font animations can run a bit off; turns out it was for good reason.
Developer Ross Hunter writes a good starting point for some Sublime basics you’ll want under your belt early when starting off with this powerful text editor. That Sublime ‘fuzzy finder’ kicked off with Cmd+T is a life saver.
This article compiles a great set of tips on what to avoid when writing solid CSS. His advice on absolute values is a must read. I haven’t read much from author Harry Roberts before, but after reading this excellent article, I’m following this guy closely.
Designer Jeremy Bell from Teehan + Lax:
Throughout my entire career, every company I’ve worked at has separated designers and developers into separate departments, each focused exclusively on their discipline…Technology is continuously reshaping the canvas on which we design, and yet these two disciplines continue to be treated as disparate.
Jeremy goes onto to map a new approach for their company, one where designers work in HTML, CSS, Git and a fully self contained development environment. If you thought “design in browser” was a fantasy, think again.
Cute idea. Be sure to stretch your browser from a narrow to wide position to get the big payoff.
Web developer John Albin Wilkins on rounding errors in fluid grids:
I put errors in quotes, because the issue actually has to do with the CSS spec. It doesn’t specify how browser vendors should deal with percentages that contain decimal place precision. For example, with a 6 column grid, each column is 100% ÷ 6 = 16.666667% wide. On a 1000 pixel wide viewport (which I’ve conveniently picked to make our math easier), that calculates to 166.66667 pixels per column. Since the spec gives no guidelines, browser vendors are free to make their own rules.
I’ve learned this problem the hard way several times. It’s a frustrating problem, but John goes on to list several great remedies: adaptive (break point)based design, the CSS border-box element and container-relative floats.