All Posts, page 13

Casey Johnston’s butterfly keyboard saga continues:

I dread the Overton window shift that Apple now appears to be attempting to push, which is that its customers and their crumbs and dust and bad habits are to blame, and should bend themselves around the “sensitive” keyboard, keep canned air (not supplied by Apple itself) on hand at all times, as if this is a problem we’ve always had, and not one Apple singlehandedly created with a nearsighted design.

My 2014 MacBook Pro is still going strong, thankfully. (Knock on wood.)

Craig Mod:

At 23 I was obsessed with minimizing recurring costs of living. They felt like poison to me.

Obsessing over minimized cost of living has a light-touch hint of Thoreau to it: the calculating, the measuring, the valuing of time.

“House: $28.12 ½; Farm one year: $14.72 ½ …” and on and on Thoreau wrote in Walden. “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediate or in the long run.”

Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism devotes a chapter to Thoreau. My favorite quote though is from Frédéric Gros on Thoreau’s processes: “[Thoreau] says: keep calculating, keep weighing. What exactly do I gain or lose?”

Brian Crecente talks to Rami Ismail about why traditional game development is broken on iOS:

“I’m here to make video games,” he said. “I’m not here to fix somebody else’s problems. Our users? Absolutely. If they have a bug and it’s our fault, we’ll fix it. But having made a game in 2013 and then the platform going, ‘It’s broken now,’ That would be like if somebody went and updated like the internet and now all text is right to left. That’s how it feels to me. It’s like we made a game, so now we’re getting punished for it.”

Apple has created a very inviting — but ultimately hostile — platform for games. There’s no malice there, they just don’t care about legacy software as much as they care about pushing things forward.

Video games have historically been extremely well preserved, yet some older iOS games seem to be gone forever. This ephemerality is unprecedented; it’s not just bad for game developers, it really feels like a big part of gaming history is being erased.

Patrick Thornton:

The Galaxy Fold is the kind of device that a random user might think is interesting in the abstract. It’s a phone. It’s a tablet. It folds in half!

But good product design is not about letting your users design your products for you — it’s about solving users problems and making their lives better.

Robin Rendle:

Anyway, I asked Lindsay that question: what is it about web design that makes it so difficult to understand? She posited that the issue is that most people believe web design is like designing a book. Heck, we still call these things web pages. But Lindsay argued that building a modern website is nothing like designing a book; it’s more like designing a car.

Tobias Ahlin:

On the surface it seems fairly easy to create a masonry layout with flexbox; all you need to do is set flex-flow to column wrap` and voilà, you have a masonry layout. Sort of. The problem with this approach is that it produces a grid with a seemingly shuffled and obscure order. Items will be (unbeknownst to the user) rendered from top to bottom and someone parsing the grid from left to right will read the boxes in a somewhat arbitrary order, for example 1, 3, 6, 2, 4, 7, 8, 5, and so on so forth.

Flexbox has no easy way of rendering items with a column layout while using a row order, but we can build a masonry layout with CSS only—no JavaScript needed—by using :nth-child() and the order property.

This is very clever — an actually helpful use of order that helps visual order more accurately follow source order.

But there’s a catch: it requires a fixed height for the container — and it needs to be a magic number that’s taller than the tallest column. That unfortunately makes it not super resilient to content changes, limiting its usefulness.

Richard Rutter:

There is more to setting hyphenation than just turning on the hyphens. The CSS Text Module Level 4 has introduced the same kind of hyphenation controls provided in layout software (eg. InDesign) and some word processors (including Word). These controls provide different ways to define how much hyphenation occurs through your text.

This is great news. I’ve always avoided CSS hyphenation because of how aggressive the algorithms are. Using these new properties in concert with @supports we can get well-controlled hyphenation as a progressive enhancement while avoiding the half-baked hyper-hyphenated middle ground we’ve had so far.

Mat Marquis:

It could seem like an enticing option for our users, at first glance: an enhanced, fully-featured website, on the one hand, a fully accessible alternative experience on the other. That unravels with even the slightest examination, though: if the fully-featured website isn’t accessible, the accessible website won’t be fully featured. By choosing to have the “accessible experience” deviate from the “real website,” we end up drawing a sharper line between those two definitions, and we nudge the “accessible experience” closer to an afterthought—limited and frustratingly out-of-sync with the “real” website, like so many dedicated mobile sites quickly became.

Jeremy Keith:

Where it gets interesting is when a technology that’s designed for developer convenience is made out of the very materials being delivered to users. For example, a CSS framework like Bootstrap is made of CSS. That’s different to a tool like Sass which outputs CSS. Whether or not a developer chooses to use Sass is irrelevant to the user—the final output will be CSS either way. But if a developer chooses to use a CSS framework, that decision has a direct impact on the user experience. The user must download the framework in order for the developer to get the benefit.

So whereas Sass sits at the back of the front end—where I don’t care what you use—Bootstrap sits at the front of the front end. For tools like that, I don’t think saying “use whatever works for you” is good enough. It’s got to be weighed against the cost to the user.

Some great pointers from Dave Rupert:

If you feel the need to write, write.

An interesting comparison from Danny Moerkerke:

Remember when document.querySelector first got wide browser support and started to end jQuery’s ubiquity? It finally gave us a way to do natively what jQuery had been providing for years: easy selection of DOM elements. I believe the same is about to happen to frontend frameworks like Angular and React.

Veritasium:

This is a video I’ve long wanted to make, about what makes video look like video and, up until 10 years ago or so, not as appealing as film. I grew up with the two technologies (film and video) in parallel and to me they always seemed like two ways of achieving the same ends: recording and replaying moving images. But their histories are quite distinct. Film was always a way to capture moving images for later replaying. Video started out as a way to transfer images from one place to another instantaneously.

Andy Bell:

The majority of the web community are probably building—y’know—modest websites. There’s a reason why WordPress powers 33.5% of the web: because most of the web isn’t big applications or design systems—it’s straight-up websites. We would all do well to remember that.

Kevin Marks:

There’s a widespread movement in design circles to reduce the contrast between text and background, making type harder to read. Apple is guilty. Google is, too. So is Twitter.

My plea to designers and software engineers: Ignore the fads and go back to the typographic principles of print — keep your type black, and vary weight and font instead of grayness. You’ll be making things better for people who read on smaller, dimmer screens, even if their eyes aren’t aging like mine. It may not be trendy, but it’s time to consider who is being left out by the web’s aesthetic.