04.16.12 |
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Interesting Times article yesterday detailing the two Instagram founders during the initial stages of their startup:
The two men began working out of Dogpatch Labs, housed in an old pier, with fishing nets on the walls and long tables that functioned as shared office space for aspiring tech companies. Julian Green, who briefly worked out of Dogpatch, recalled that the two men were unusually obsessed with design detail. Once, he said, they spent two hours perfecting the rounded corners of the app’s icons.
And two years and a billion dollars later, look where it got them. Engaging your users through great design matters. Small details, like the rounded corners of an icon, are part of this.
04.14.12 |
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Like many other bloggers, I'm wedded to Google for my analytics. That poses a problem on the go; Google Analytics isn't mobile friendly, requiring Flash for their graphs and a lot of extraneous zooming to navigate the core UI.
Enter Analytics, a new app by Wizamin. It gives you just the basics: visitors, page views, average pages viewed per user. Swipe left and right to switch accounts. Swipe up and down to jump to different time periods. Simple, fast, really pretty and colorful for a buck. For at a glance analytics tracking it's great.
04.14.12 |
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I’m not the biggest graphic t-shirt and hoodie fan but these are really cool. The heavy use of typography and abstract graphic art just clicks. (via Tools & Toys)
04.13.12 |
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I'm a big advocate of responsive design, yet it's often hard to convey visuals on multiple devices by just resizing a single browser back and forth. Developer Jaime Reynolds' solution makes a responsive demo a hell of a lot more straightforward: Iframes are dropped in shells of different widths, each of which represents a different device.
04.13.12 |
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Now that I’ve been increasingly using FiftyThree’s Paper app for sketches and UI ideas, investing in a solid stylus is important. The Verge has a really slick roundup here. (Spoiler: The Wacom Bamboo, my current stylus of choice, ends up as one of the finalists.)
04.13.12 |
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If you love films and got a few hours to spare, the latest podcast episode of Battleship Pretension is a must listen. It’s a chronological review of the 90s independent film movement, from Sex, Lies and Videotape to Bottle Rocket and The Virgin Suicides. Hosts Tyler and David discuss each film’s influence, lasting quality, and how many of the movement’s “it” directors (Tarantino, Smith, Rodriguez, Anderson) evolved in later years.
04.13.12 |
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David Hansson, 37signals:
Every line of code you write has a cost. It takes time to write it, it takes time to update it, and it takes time to read and understand it. Thus it follows that the benefit derived must be greater than the cost to make it. In the case of over-testing, that’s by definition not the case.
Think of it like this: What’s the cost to prevent a bug? If it takes you 1,000 lines of validation testing to catch the one time Bob accidentally removed the validates_presence_of :name declaration, was it worth it? Of course not.
I see a huge amount of admonishments online for developers who don’t test enough. David approaches the problem from the other side; when does testing get out of control?
04.12.12 |
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JavaScript engineer Rebecca Murphey:
Once upon a time, editing files, testing them locally (as best as we could, anyway), and then FTPing them to the server was the essential workflow of a front-end dev. We measured our mettle based on our ability to wrangle IE6 into submission or achieve pixel perfection across browsers. Many members of the community – myself included – lacked traditional programming experience. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript – usually in the form of jQuery – were self-taught skills.
Something has changed in the last couple of years. Maybe it’s the result of people starting to take front-end dev seriously, maybe it’s browser vendors mostly getting their shit together, or maybe it’s front-end devs – again, myself included – coming to see some well-established light about the process of software development.
Whatever it is, I think we’re seeing the emphasis shift from valuing trivia to valuing tools.
Impressive compilation of JavaScript tools, tutorials and more. Complete newbies should make a beeline for the in-browser developer tools section. If you aren’t debugging in the Chrome Developer Tools or Firebug, as far as I’m concerned, you’re not breathing as a front end developer.
04.12.12 |
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Tech writer Garnett Murray:
When I browse the Tumblr Dashboard I feel overwhelmed by the amount of great content—as most people probably do—and it’s very hard to focus on longer entries people post. I still use an RSS reader for those kind of blogs, but I have a feeling most Tumblr users do not. So I often feel my longer posts get easily lost in followers’ Dashboards. That’s not a problem with Tumblr, it’s just the way people digest content here.
This is exactly the reason I’ve stopped blogging on Tumblr and consolidated everything under WordPress. Tumblr is awesome, but I just wasn’t posting the quick bites of media content that flow so well there.
04.12.12 |
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Like the author suggests, when deadlines are tight I can get lax on proper CSS sprite usage. Author Niels Matthijs helps remedy this problem with some best practices. I’m not entirely onboard with this article, as there’s heavy usage of LESS and Sass, two CSS preprocessing languages I have decidedly mixed feelings about. Nevertheless, I really liked the first section of this article which deals with splitting out the sprite in Photoshop, and the LESS/Sass material later on at least gets one thinking about sprites more programmatically.