As much as I love Tweetbot, Twitterrific 5, the new Twitter client from Iconfactory, matches my Twitter needs more effectively. This blog post breaks down the app’s development organization. This is the most important sentence:
When you have a large project, be it a movie or a piece of software, you have to have someone calling the creative shots.
User interface designer Maykel:
If you want to create something, you should learn the basic level of actually implementing it. This goes for handcrafting physical products as well as interactive ones. Sure, it’s scary. Yes, it starts out being confusing. And there is more than a 99% chance that you will fail at your first try.
Substantial, excellent talk by Vimeo developer Jon Rohan on steps Github took to dramatically improve their CSS performance site wide. One thing Jon stresses that I’ve found has a huge impact is just the sheer number of HTML elements on screen. People spend so much time optimizing their Javascript and CSS selectors, when sometimes the root problem is just having way too many divs.
Developer Ross Hunter writes a good starting point for some Sublime basics you’ll want under your belt early when starting off with this powerful text editor. That Sublime ‘fuzzy finder’ kicked off with Cmd+T is a life saver.
This article compiles a great set of tips on what to avoid when writing solid CSS. His advice on absolute values is a must read. I haven’t read much from author Harry Roberts before, but after reading this excellent article, I’m following this guy closely.
Designer Jeremy Bell from Teehan + Lax:
Throughout my entire career, every company I’ve worked at has separated designers and developers into separate departments, each focused exclusively on their discipline…Technology is continuously reshaping the canvas on which we design, and yet these two disciplines continue to be treated as disparate.
Jeremy goes onto to map a new approach for their company, one where designers work in HTML, CSS, Git and a fully self contained development environment. If you thought “design in browser” was a fantasy, think again.
Web developer John Albin Wilkins on rounding errors in fluid grids:
I put errors in quotes, because the issue actually has to do with the CSS spec. It doesn’t specify how browser vendors should deal with percentages that contain decimal place precision. For example, with a 6 column grid, each column is 100% ÷ 6 = 16.666667% wide. On a 1000 pixel wide viewport (which I’ve conveniently picked to make our math easier), that calculates to 166.66667 pixels per column. Since the spec gives no guidelines, browser vendors are free to make their own rules.
I’ve learned this problem the hard way several times. It’s a frustrating problem, but John goes on to list several great remedies: adaptive (break point)based design, the CSS border-box element and container-relative floats.
There are several bookmarklets out there that can do a simple change of your viewport to match the size of common mobile devices, but I’ve never seen it in as slick a package as what Viewport Resizer offers. You can customize the bookmarket to only include the viewport sizes you chose and jump between portrait and landscape views with a single click. It works great on local development files and, while I haven’t directly tested it, is touch friendly as well.
Cross browser, flexible custom icon web fonts. Just throw your SVG files in a subdirectory, run a command line prompt and you’re good to go. I haven’t directly tested this myself, but this could be a very useful tool.
Jeffrey Zeldman:
Say it with me: There is nothing wrong with id when it is used appropriately (semantically, structurally, sparingly). There is plenty wrong with the notion that class is always preferable to descendant selectors and semantic, structural ids.
Pretty hard to argue with one of the web godfathers on this one.