Another great find that I heard from a speaker at Sass Summit. It’s a really ingenious methodology to write a running style guide for your work in your source Sass or CSS directory. Basically by writing souped up comments direct in your CSS with a mixture of HTML and Markdown, you can run a ruby process and autogenerate a great looking style guide to the destination of your choice.
For Gulp fans, there’s a simple plugin as well as an alternative to the Ruby gem.
Writer Shawn Blanc on smart custom perspectives in Omnifocus:
In short, you should create your own custom perspective for “Today”. And let that list show you all the tasks which are either Due today or which are Flagged. When you are doing your daily review and scrubbing your list, don’t think about what’s due — because it should already be given a proper due date — instead, just flag the tasks you want to get done that day. Then, go to your Today perspective and now you’ve got a list of items which are both urgent (i.e. due today) and important (i.e. flagged).
Bingo. When I started using Omnifocus, virtually everything had a strict due date, which became maddening after time. When everything is “due”, it’s hard to manage what is really important. Overall, be less aggressive with real due dates unless it’s really due.
A node.js based library tool to collect CSS statistics on any web site. It’s also easy to install via npm locally to run against any stylesheet you have. There’s even grunt and gulp integration; I can see this hooking into some sort of regression testing for my work in the long run to get a wider picture of how the code is evolving.
Developer Nicolas Bevacqua:
Meanwhile, we add tons of weight to our pages, levelling the field and making the experience in modern browsers worse as a result of attempting to make the experience in older browsers better. There’s a problem with this fallacy, though. People using older browsers are not expecting the newest features. They’re content with what they have. That’s the whole reason why they’re using an older browser in the first place. Instead of attempting to give those users a better experience (and usually failing miserably), you should enable features only if they’re currently available on the target browser, instead of creating hacks around those limitations.
There’s many other aspects to recommend about Matthew Butterick’s wonderful book, but one of my favorites is this section, where Butterrick breaks down how to apply typographic principles to presentations. Given I teach courses part time, it really helped improve the quality of my work.
Journalistic site Krautreporter, writing a post on Medium:
Three years after the death of its charismatic founder, Apple is doing all it can to maintain this reality distortion field, mainly by exercising total control about anything that is reported about the company or its products. In contrast to Apple’s design philosophy this strategy does not manifest itself through clarity and elegance, but through a subtle and sometimes questionable toying with our, the reporting journalists’ vanities and dependencies. If you write positively you’ll be wined and dined, if you criticize, no matter how fairly, you’ll be penalized. Admittedly this is common practice with large corporations, but hardly any one of them will go as far as Apple does. And there is no other corporation that the media have allowed to get away with this kind of manipulation for such a long period of time.
As much as we all admire Apple in many ways, it’s interesting to get a much harsher perspective on its treatment of the media. I question if it’s quite as black and white as Krautreporter portrays here, but there’s been many times where I’ve questioned the relationship between the tech press and Apple.
Every Frame a Painting strikes again with a great three minute clip dissecting how Snowpiercer uses cinematography to convey a character’s choices and propel the narrative forward.
GamerGate stories have significantly died down in recent weeks, but it’s worth revisiting the topic with tech writer Watts Martin on why the movement is so troubling:
GamerGate’s proponents believe they’re somehow saving video games, as if one too many positive mentions of Depression Quest will cause the next Call of Duty game to spontaneously transform itself into a My Little Pony MMO. This is roughly akin to believing that Michael Bay will start making Jane Austen adaptations instead of three-hour Dolby Atmos test reels if his Rotten Tomatoes average drops another five points.
The real risk to gaming isn’t that GamerGate will fail, but that it won’t fail. No matter what happens, the gaming world will stay safe for the next Grand Theft Auto installment, and it will be as thrilling and wild and morally questionable as ever. But it might not be so safe for the next Gone Home or Revolution 60. Maybe not even for the next Journey or Braid or Papers Please.
I’ll let Google developer Andy Osmani’s description speak for itself:
A tweet-sized debugger for visualizing your CSS layouts. Outlines every DOM element on your page a random (valid) CSS hex color.
Nice!
Wonderful mini tips roundup from teacher Paul Scrivens (Makers Cabin) on a tool I find myself turning to more and more. I’m doubt I’ll ever fully leave Photoshop entirely given the web’s remaining reliance on raster graphics, but it’s exciting to see a focused tool like Sketch gain so much momentum.