07.03.14 |
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Nice, short but sweet article by Google web development advocate Paul Lewis on some simple, essential rules to maximize performance on your web pages. The best part is midway down, labeled “avoid performance bottlenecks”:
A while back I wrote an article with Paul Irish on HTML5 Rocks explaining how you can get high performance animations, or in this case, how you can exploit the pipeline to make sure you hit 60fps. What it boils down to is only changing properties that trigger compositing rather than layout or paint.
07.01.14 |
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I rarely make a direct pitch for game downloads, but this one deserves an exception. Towerfall Ascension is a competitive platformer with up to four archers taking shots at each other. Its simple gameplay makes it a near perfect couch multiplayer game. And if you’re someone who games mostly solo (e.g. me) the Quest and Trials modes are still a blast. More than anything, there’s a level of polish to this title, from the great music to the incredibly tight controls. It’s one of my favorite titles released on the PS4 so far, and for PS Plus members it’s free for the month of July.
06.30.14 |
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I’m far from a data engineer, but every so often I’m curious about what’s going on in the web-based charting world for simple data plotting. Since late 2013 developer Nick Downie has been coding away on this framework, and I’m particularly impressed with the documentation and straightforward usage. It probably won’t be as in depth for hard core scientists, but for many organizations this could be all they need for simple analytics and stat dashboards.
06.26.14 |
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Yesterday’s Google I/O keynote had it share of ups and downs but for me one clear highlight was their new “Material design” language for UX and the aesthetic look across web and Android. There’s a lot of interesting ideas here for the web, from well thought out typographic guidelines to a set of punchy color palettes to match the aesthetic.
06.24.14 |
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Susan Robertson over at A List Apart wrote an excellent post detailing why style guides are important for web projects and how they can help maintain consistency for a project over the long run. It’s a solid intro for those new to the topic.
06.23.14 |
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Web developer Paul Lewis:
The majority of the time a user spends on your site is not waiting for it to load, but rather, using it. Therefore, user frustration can come from poor UI responsiveness, slow scrolling and jerky animations…
…With that in mind I want to highlight seven runtime performance problems that I see most often, and that your projects may suffer from.
06.18.14 |
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Developer Razvan Onofrei:
Setting a vertical rhythm shouldn’t be very hard. There are many tools out there that can even generate the CSS for setting your vertical rhythm on the scale you choose.
The baseline is the imaginary line upon which a line of text rests.
There is one problem with most of these tools: they bring the baseline concept into discussion without really tackling the problem.
In typography, the baseline is the imaginary line upon which a line of text rests. And it has to be aligned with the grid we use for establishing our vertical rhythm. That’s it.
But here comes the tricky part. We all know how line-height works and that the text will always be vertically aligned to its middle, NOT to the baseline.
Really enjoyed reading through the wonky breakdown between cap height, line-height and overall alignment on the web. I expect to play around with his alignment gist at some point.
06.17.14 |
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Designer Elliot Jay Stocks talks about typographic rules on the web:
To summarize: we can hyphenate pretty well, but justification still has a way to go, so I’m afraid to say that we’re not going to be using them together the way we do in print any time soon.
06.13.14 |
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If there’s one trusted source for hard-core analysis of game performance, it’s Eurogamer’s Digital Foundry unit. This post breaks down the pros and cons of locked 30 frames per second versus an unlocked, variable frame rate. If that sounds technical, it is, but writer John Linneman does a solid job of introducing the basics:
So the question is, should console titles be allowed to operate at their absolute fastest? Or should performance be capped in order to enforce the kind of consistency that [Driveclub producer] Paul Rustchynsky talks about?
The short response is that there is no definitive answer. Different games target different experiences with different priorities, and gamers themselves have their own personal opinions on what works best. However, by looking at key titles, we can build up a picture of what works for us, which perhaps puts some of our tech analysis pieces on specific games into context.
06.12.14 |
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I’ve said it before and will say it again here: Giant Bomb knocks out some of the smartest, funniest, and well edited coverage of E3 around. If you’re interested in the expo and have a half hour to spare (especially if you haven’t been heavily following news coverage like I have) it’s a wonderful recap on what’s happened so far. I’d expect a few more recap videos to hit the site later as well.