All Posts, page 11

Henry Sung:

What’s remarkable about vertical drama is that it’s not just any scripted content cropped for a vertical aspect ratio. These shows are specifically imagined for the mobile screen from the ground up. This is evident in three features they all share.

I am fascinated by vertical video — it feels like a completely different medium. To me, horizontal video always represents a very deliberate choice to “make a video.” Vertical video is much more spontaneous, like a long photo that lives on your phone.

Seeing the vertical format used for more serious scripted stuff is still uncanny, but I suspect there’s a lot to explore there.

Quinn Keast:

The Possibility Gap is a dark pattern that arises when a product takes advantage of unknown unknowns on the part of their users, as it relates to their understanding of what is possible in digital products today.

I’m linking to this just so I can go on the record on this here blog and say: motion smoothing is an abomination.

Evan Minto:

min() accepts one or more values and returns the smallest value. The magic of the function is that, just like calc(), the arguments can use different units, which allows us to return values that change dynamically based on context.

min() is one of three new comparison functions introduced as part of the CSS Values and Units Module Level 4. There’s also max(), which naturally does the inverse of min(). Finally clamp() is a convenience function that applies both a minimum and a maximum to a single value.

This is brilliant and I can’t wait until I can change my @supports queries from display: grid to min().

Dave Rupert:

Upgrading legacy applications was one of the usecases Vue was designed around. It means that developers can piecemeal upgrade bits of an application as necessary.

In my experience Angular, React, and a lot of other frameworks ultimately require you to go all in early and establish a large toolchain around these frameworks. Angular prescribes a lot with its amazing CLI. React on the other hand doesn’t prescribe anything, but requires you to self-assemble and wield a somewhat complex toolchain. But as Evan put it in his JSConf Asia talk, Vue sits in the middle of the “Cathedral and the Bazaar”. Vue has useful tooling, but it’s all optional and you can use only what you need. In some ways, Vue’s grafting capabilities really does make it seem like a jQuery replacement you can drop in to give your components superpowers as needed.

Mike Sherov:

In order to understand how best to kill IE11, we need to look back to how 2 previous versions of IE met their fate: IE6 and IE8. By examining the strategies employed to kill browsers, we can look at current efforts to sunset IE11. We can predict and evangelize for what may ultimately do it in, finally freeing the JS community from the burden of ES5.

Interesting historical analysis but I think that attempting to “kill” browsers is a misguided goal. I think the right way to move forward here is Oliver Williams’ idea of applying the “mustard cut” technique to all versions of Internet Explorer and serving those users just barebones (but useful) HTML and CSS.

A repository of styled and “styled” form control elements and markup patterns, and how they are announced by screen readers.

Kyle Wiens makes a great point:

[Dieter] Rams loves durable products that are environmentally friendly. That’s one of his 10 principles for good design: “Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment.” But Ive has never publicly discussed the dissonance between his inspiration and Apple’s disposable, glued-together products.

When a single broken key requires replacing a laptop’s entire top case, there is no denying that Apple has given too little consideration to the durability of its products.

I’m extremely curious to find out how (if?) Apple’s design philosophy will change with Ive gone.

Adrian Roselli:

What we know is that native and custom calendar controls are often a problem for users and applied where they are not needed. Before dropping the code on a screen as a matter of habit, consider if it genuinely helps the user or just your workflow.

Thanks Todd Vaziri for tweeting about this great Roger Ebert quote that I had forgotten about:

Movies are the most powerful empathy machine in all the arts. When I go to a great movie I can live somebody else’s life for a while. I can walk in somebody else’s shoes. I can see what it feels like to be a member of a different gender, a different race, a different economic class, to live in a different time, to have a different belief.

An open-source community effort to map support for web accessibility features across different Assistive Technologies. It’s still early days, but I hope this flourishes — accessibility interop is a complex topic in dire need of de-mystification.

Zeynep Tufekci is worried about what ownership means for always-connected products:

Today, we may think we own things because we paid for them and brought them home, but as long as they run software or have digital connectivity, the sellers continue to have control over the product. We are renters of our own objects, there by the grace of the true owner.

I worry about this a lot, maybe too much. Unless I don’t have a choice, I avoid any device that superflously requires an internet connection (or worse, a smartphone app) like the plague.