I’m already a big fan of Chris Coyer over at CSS Tricks, but I think he outdid himself with his work on this article over at 24 Ways. It’s possibly the best completely from scratch introduction to the Grunt task manager (which is essential to my daily workflow) that I’ve seen. Now when I’ve got coworkers or friends that ask what the hell Grunt is, I point them to this article first.
Mark Harris writing for Grantland:
So, as a means of guesswork, right now it makes more sense to look at the voters than at the movies. The Academy is divided by branch — actors, writers, producers, sound people, composers, and so on — but thinking of Oscar voting as tribalism-by-profession often leads to fallacies like “Editors like movies with a lot of editing in them,” and it doesn’t tell you much about how Best Picture nominees emerge. Think of the Academy instead as a group of about half a dozen voting blocs divided by taste and predilection. This is who they are — and who’s targeting them.
There’s been countless articles on adapting a responsive design to make web sites mobile friendly. But what about in the opposite direction? What happens when you need to take a traditionally fixed width web site at 960px and make it look great on a 27 inch monitor. Designer Mike Pick goes through a few examples at A List Apart, both good and bad, to see what what works best.
I can’t say Scout Tafoya’s video essay defending Alien 3 won me over on that film based on memory; I found the tone and screenplay way too dark and nihilistic. But given what director David Fincher has done since, from Fight Club to The Social Network, makes me really want to rewatch this soon. It’s been over a decade since my last viewing.
There’s been a lot written regarding the PS4 post paunch, but a lot, especially the much hyped (and scored) review over at Polygon was far too premature. We’re just too early to know how these consoles will shake out. But Dan Solberg over at Kill Screen Daily has the right balance. There’s a few soft statements on what clearly stands out (e.g. the PS4’s focus on gaming, sharing, the inconspicuousness of the hardware) and a great analogy: buying a PS4 today is like “sitting in a waiting room”:
To purchase the console at launch is to subscribe to a patient stakeout with the promise of payout sometime down the line. A new Uncharted game has been announced, and both The Witness and the new Infamous game show tremendous potential, but you can’t play them this year. It’s no wonder that devotees are whipped up in a religious fervor about the new “console war” when they’ve chosen sides based mostly on faith.
I’m already a big fan of the Node based task manager Grunt for my day job; it makes minifying, and linting my code for errors a breeze. But this post by Google developer Addy Osmani caught me onto a new really cool Grunt task called grunt-responsive-images. It batch produces multiple, final resolution images for web deployment based on a list of original source images. Great for responsive web design and serving up basic HDPI imagery.
I enjoyed reading through this article where The Guardian web developers dive into how RWD can play semi-nice with a browser as old as IE8. Looks like a pretty slick methodology via a Sass mixin to deliver responsive friendly stylesheets to both modern and older browsers (via the Stuff and Nonsense design blog.)
Wonderful, true to life yet moving tribute to Walker over at Grantland, as written by Alex Pappademas:
Maybe it’s too big a leap to suggest that Walker’s death represents some larger symbolic dimming of the day for a certain kind of leading man — blue-eyed, surfy, fast-car-loving, born of the Newman/McQueen DNA line. So instead, let’s say Walker managed to occupy a space of diminished expectations with aplomb and even grace. He punched his weight. He’d started making serious-actor moves toward the end of his life — like coproducing the December 2013 release Hours, in which he plays a father struggling to keep his infant daughter alive on a ventilator during Hurricane Katrina — but wasn’t too good to endorse Davidoff Cool Water, a cologne that smells like a teenage boy who drives a cab.