Author David Bushell’s work tutorial here for Smashing Magazine is notable, not for hitting the usual responsive design notes but his restraint. There’s a legitimate smaller scope with his example: the emphasis is on progressive enhancement and heavy lifting on CSS3 where possible, not flashy jQuery plugins. That’s a good thing.
This article by The Verge‘s Laura June has gotten a lot of buzz online, and deservedly so. There’s so many bits of information I had no idea about (pinball was banned in NYC until 1974?!). The page layout is stellar as well, with pull quotes in big typography against a parallax-style background.
Web developer Philip Walton:
The key to avoid getting tripped up is being able to spot when new stacking contexts are formed. If you’re setting a z-index of a billion on an element and it’s not moving forward in the stacking order, take a look up its ancestor tree and see if any of its parents form stacking contexts. If they do, your z-index of a billion isn’t going to do you any good.
Great advice. Read the rest of the article for a more through breakdown, with a simple example, of why this is the case.
Really solid, deep analysis of PT Anderson by Kevin B. Lee over at BFI. You can see a steady change in Anderson’s direction: early works (e.g. Hard Eight, Boogie Nights) tend to be far more kinetic and Scorcese-like, while later films (There Will Be Blood) use the Steadicam in a more restrained fashion.
Every few episodes the Iterate podcast team add an extended roundtable discussion to the mix with generally great results. No exception here: host Rene Ritchie gathers a mix of mobile app developers to predict where the iOS and Android app economy will shift in the long run.
I’d argue Pumping Iron is ranked too high, but I can’t fight much with film critic Matt Singer; dude has his Schwarzenegger knowledge down cold.
Now, more than ever, good communication between designers and developers on a tech team is essential. But I have run into a lot of really smart web developers that either have no interest in or are intimidated by web design. That’s what makes this new (free) online web course so interesting: it’s a design course targeted at developers. Impressive from what I’ve seen so far.
Cool breakdown at BoxOfficeQuant by stat major Edmund Helmer on what colors dominate modern film trailers.
Legendary photographer Steve McCurry (probably best known for his National Geographic ‘Afghan Girl’ shot) was given the last roll of Kodachrome film ever produced. He took a trip around the world to shoot those last 36 frames.
If there’s any sign of technology’s rapid progress, it’s in the switch in photography (and now film) from analog to digital. But McCurry’s shots highlighted here – from New York to India – are powerful, and still illustrate the warmth of ‘real’ film that will be gone forever.
Git is an endlessly powerful version control system, by far the strongest I’ve ever used in my career. Yet that said, I stick pretty much to basic command line (pull, push, diff) commands on a daily basis. Developer Nicola Paolucci’s post on Git tips I think will change this. Major hat tip to him for two actions I’d invoke commonly: listing all deleted files in a respository and searching for a string in all revisions of git history.