A big step in the right direction for catering to indie developers. Microsoft still isn’t out of the weeds: their decision to not make the Kinect required is baffling, and there’s many other moves that suggest a platform without a strong vision. But adding an indie friendly publishing platform is a uniformly great decision.
Designer Dmitry Fadeyev covers the basics of UI design. One of his last paragraphs really stands out:
The order the three parts are satisfied is important. A beautiful work that is not usable is worth less than an ugly one that does its function well (unless, of course, if its function is to be beautiful). Thus, we must first of all ensure that every element of the interface is clear, then ensure that their relationships are well defined, and then ensure the work has aesthetic unity.
Fundamentally, core functionality comes before aesthetic beauty. It’s a principle that’s missing from so many UI mockups I see on Dribbble, blogs and other sources.
Andy Greenwald nails the big confrontation that ended Breaking Bad’s latest episode (Spoilers ahead):
Forget the delicate dance of cat and mouse a generation of TV built on coy delay had prepped us to expect. Here, the cat punched the mouse in the nose and called him a monster. The mouse then stood up, casually brushed himself off, and transformed into Satan. It’s awfully rare to see television so unafraid of delivering on what it has promised. And it’s quite possible that no show has ever promised more than Breaking Bad.
The A.V. Club’s Todd VanDerWerff, writing a great companion piece to the Grantland article I linked to earlier this week:
In a way, this is the show simply taking the greatest weakness of clockwork plotting—a tendency to make everything all about one thing and the emptiness of character and theme that can provoke—and turning it into a strength through sheer relentlessness. With rare exceptions…every element of this story is about what happens after Walter makes his choice in the pilot. This isn’t a new thing to say about the show, by any means, but it’s often hard to appreciate just how thoroughly this kept the series from the kinds of goofiness that other clockwork-serialized shows have collapsed into.
The combination of PhantomJS and CasperJS make for a fairly straightforward yet vigorous form of unit testing. The only problem I’ve had from before is just knowing exactly where to start; Google searches and YouTube tutorials can pull you in many directions. That’s why developer Danny Croft’s little mini tutorial (far from comprehensive, it just starts you off) was helpful – as long as you can install from Homebrew you should be in good shape.
Yes, this technique written by web developer Stephen Shaw has gotten linked by almost every tech source online: Smashing Magazine, Sidebar, Hacker News, it’s all here. But it’s worth the hype. Comes down to this: as long as you set the height of an element, you can easily center it vertically with just a few simple CSS rules. Heavily cross browser compatible too.
Andy Greenwald, writing for Grantland, explains why Breaking Bad’s finale has the chance to end the show on a better note than some previous critically acclaimed shows (e.g. The Sopranos, Lost):
Breaking Bad, to its enormous credit, isn’t about everything. It’s about one thing and always has been: Walter White’s calamitous path not from Mr. Chips to Scarface but from homeroom to the gates of hell. This framework has provided creator Vince Gilligan with a relentless, furious focus usually only possible after a few hits of the blue…every step he [Walter] has taken — from half-measures to full-on slaughter — we’ve taken right alongside him. We know exactly where we’re going because we’ve never lost sight of where we’ve been.
Andy Greenwald, writing for Grantland, explains why Breaking Bad’s finale has the chance to end the show on a better note than some previous critically acclaimed shows (e.g. The Sopranos, Lost):
Breaking Bad, to its enormous credit, isn’t about everything. It’s about one thing and always has been: Walter White’s calamitous path not from Mr. Chips to Scarface but from homeroom to the gates of hell. This framework has provided creator Vince Gilligan with a relentless, furious focus usually only possible after a few hits of the blue…every step he [Walter] has taken — from half-measures to full-on slaughter — we’ve taken right alongside him. We know exactly where we’re going because we’ve never lost sight of where we’ve been.
Web agency Barrel suggests some good ideas for taming image heavy sites. As a small caveat, I’m not crazy about some of the author’s example CSS (selectors that combine two classes in one level like ‘img_wrapper.loaded’ should be avoided) and I disagree that writing inline onloads are the way to go – there are cleaner, JS solutions to detect a reliable image load. That said, it’s an excellent primer, especially for newer front end web developers.
David Auerbach writing for Slate on Microsoft’s obsession with making Windows an essential part of the internet:
There was no room for a Stringer Bell–style dove to strike out and make a deal with an ambitious youngster like Marlo Stanfield (Google) or a wily long-standing rival like Proposition Joe (Apple) for a share of profits and a shot of innovation. (“It’s not even a thought, man,” Avon chided Stringer.) Why should they cut deals with the riff-raff? They had crushed Lotus, Novell, and Netscape. Office and Windows were stable, profitable behemoths. Sure, Linus Tovalds—aka Omar Little—was a perennial annoyance, robbing Microsoft of server profits by giving away Linux for free, but he didn’t threaten the main business.
Admittedly almost any piece that mixes in The Wire has my attention, but my mind’s a bit blown with this one.