08.16.13 |
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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.
08.14.13 |
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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.
08.14.13 |
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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.
08.13.13 |
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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.
08.13.13 |
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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.
08.12.13 |
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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.
08.09.13 |
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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.
08.08.13 |
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Tested’s Norman Chan:
At the point where your goal is to have a review out as soon as possible, you are absolutely compromising the quality of the review and your editorial credibility–those things are absolutely mutually exclusive. Those reviewers may as well camp out in a Best Buy and use a product on the shelf for a few hours and call it a review. The sad thing is, I don’t think we’re too far away from that.
Reviews serve to give purchasing advice to readers who want to know if something is worth their money. Tests, benchmarks, and the sharing of a reviewers’ personal use experience are the means to that end–but they are not the review. A review is a conclusive statement: buy this product or don’t, and why.
Completely agree with Norm here. As much as I enjoy The Verge overall for tech coverage, this notion that after only a day or 48 hours with a device you’re able to form a comprehensive, definitive review is ridiculous. I really felt this come through in the Verge recent reviews for the Nexus 7 and Chromecast. Both felt underdeveloped; I would have happily waited at least a few more days to get a more comprehensive take on the device.
08.07.13 |
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A terrific first person account from The A.V. Club’s TV editor Todd VanDerWerff, writing here for Grantland:
Through the rest of the evening, when people find out I was in Hall H, they ask me how it was, in terms you might usually reserve for a theme-park ride, and I have to admit that it was a lot of fun. But it doesn’t really last for me. It’s a series of carefully constructed moments, designed less to be long-lasting memories than in-the-moment staccato bursts of emotion. The reason to go to Hall H isn’t for the proximity to stars or the exclusivity of the footage — it’s to go to Hall H itself, to add this experience to the memory bank. For me, the day already begins to fog over, turning into a muggy haze.
08.06.13 |
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Nifty jsFiddle example originally tweeted by developer Lea Verou. If you want to animate a block level element from a fixed height to height: auto, rely on max-height.