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Adactio Go to the source

I use my walk to and from work every day as an opportunity to catch up on my Huffduffer podcast . Today I started listening to a talk I’ve really been looking forward to. It’s a Long Now seminar called Universal Access To All Knowledge by one of my heroes: Brewster Kahle , founder of The Internet Archive . Brewster Kahle: Universal Access to All Knowledge — The Long Now on Huffduffer As expected, it’s an excellent talk. I caught the start of it on my walk in to work this morning and I picked up where I left off on my walk home this evening… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Aral recently released the videos from last September’s Update conference . You can watch the video of my talk if you like or, if video isn’t your bag, I’ve published a transcription of the talk . It’s called One Web, Many Devices and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. It’s a short talk—just under 17 minutes—but I think I made my point well, without any um-ing and ah-ing. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

Using CSS transitions can be quite fun. But what’s not fun is when you want to transition something that needs to use display:none or visibility:hidden (or really, any non-transitionable property). For example, let’s say you have a dialog. When the user clicks on the close button, you want the dialog to fade out — a simple transition from opacity:1 to opacity:0 . The problem is that the element is still there, even though you can’t see it… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

By far the most common use of media queries is to execute CSS based on viewport width (using min-width or max-width ). Lately there’s been more talk about using media queries based on height as well. Paul talked about using min-height media queries to adjust content appearing above the fold . Owen Gregory wrote his superb 24 Ways article on using viewport proportions and device-aspect-ratio for media queries. Trent has documented his use of horizontal and vertical media queries to bump up the font size for wide and tall viewports . One of the areas where I’ve found height-based media queries to be quite handy is in combination with another CSS3 module: multiple columns . … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

While I was in San Francisco for the last Event Apart of the year in December, Luke pulled me aside while he was preparing for his A Day Apart workshop on mobile web design. As befits the man who literally wrote the book on web forms and also wrote the the book on mobile-first design , Luke was planning to spend plenty of time covering input on mobile devices and he wanted my opinion on one of the patterns he was going to mention. Let’s say you’ve got your typical checkout form asking for credit card details. The user is going to need to specify the expiry date of their credit card, something that historically would have been done with select elements, like so: January February March April May June July August September October November December 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 With the introduction of the new input types in HTML5 , we can now just use input type=”month” . That’s particularly nice on mobile devices that support input type=”month” like Mobile Safari since iOS5. But the behaviour on non-supporting browsers would be to display just like input type=”text” …not ideal for inputting a date… Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Here’s a nifty piece of in-browser behaviour… Fire up Chrome and in the address field type “huffduffer.com” followed by a space and BOOM! …the address field transforms into a site-specific search field: “Search Huffduffer.” That’s thanks to this XML file that’s been on Huffduffer since day one. It’s the most straightforward example of the OpenSearch format. It’s the same format that powers Firefox’s search providers. If you visit Huffduffer with Firefox and click in the browser’s search field, you’ll see the option to “Add Huffduffer” to the list of search engines. I can’t imagine many people will actually do that but still, no harm in providing the option. Another option that’s been added to Huffduffer recently (thanks to Andy ’s hacking) is the ability to access the API through YQL … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Local lads British Sea Power have started up a residency, playing the first Friday of every month down at The Haunt. Myself and Jessica went along to the inaugural event, which was great fun. The only downside was that it clashed with a one-off screening at The Duke of York’s of The Thing , the 1982 classic that conspicuous by its absence from the recent John Carpenter all-nighter . Now I’m sure you’ve probably seen the Thingu parody that’s been doing the rounds. Personally, I’m still laughing about The Thing: The Musical . … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

‘The Bacon and Cheese Machine’ is a collaboration between Illustrative genius McBess and P-G Bikes for Dudes Factory I’m a sucker for art projects like this, and really fancy having a go myself! This video shows the intricate painting process unfold: … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

2011 was the year that cycling replaced the “search for the right media centre” as the main blog topic at The Hickensian. I’ve been pretty much starting from scratch in terms of knowledge, and gleaning information from all sorts of sources. Here are just some of things I’ve learnt this year: There are Rules . 87 of them in fact. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

A few years back, Craig took some lovely pictures of four generations of sushi chefs : The story goes something like: Jiro trained Shiro who ran off to Seattle, started one of the first sushi joints in the city, and trained Taiichi, who now runs his own sushi shop. Jiro also trained his son, who works at Sukiyabashi Jiro and (one assumes) plans to take over the business once his octogenarian father retires (which, according to Jiro, is when he dies). I love the additional photos that Craig took of each chef making their nigiri-te (the hand motion they use when forming nigiri). The undisputed Jedi master of these sushi chefs is Jiro Ono. He’s the subject of the forthcoming documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi . Tagged with sushi documentary photography food japan … Read the rest here

Jason Santa Maria Go to the source

I generally avoid lists and New Year’s resolutions, but Mike Monteiro issues a rallying cry so poignant we all need to listen: I spent the first 10 years of my career saying things like, “If I could just do this work the way I know it should be done…” and convincing myself that someone else was keeping me from making better choices. I’ll often be reviewing work with another designer and they’ll say, “Well, if I were doing this…” I stare back at them in astonishment until they realise what they’ve said. What is this strange gene that makes designers handicap themselves? Mike sums things up as only he can and it’s a damn fine way to start off a fresh new year. Do yourself a favor and read this one. It’s a wake up call we could all use… Read the rest here

Cameron Moll Go to the source

Of Mice and Markets : Zeldman: In the short run it’s going to be hell, just as the browser wars and their lack of support for common standards were hell. But it is the short run…. When I see fragmentation, I remind myself that it is unsustainable by its very nature, and that standards always emerge, whether through community action, market struggle, or some combination of the two. This is a frustrating time to be a web designer, but it’s also the most exciting time in ten years. We are on the edge of something very new. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

A little while back, Andy wrote : Even if you happen to be a genius in the waiting, there are no svengalis to pluck you from obscurity and put you on the pedestal you know you deserve. … So if you want to contribute to articles, write books and speak at conferences, you’re the only person in the way. You can contribute to A List Apart . You can write for Smashing Magazine . You can also put a resource written in HTML at your own URL that is retrievable via HTTP …write a blog post, in other words. If you prefer dead trees, you no longer need a publishing house. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

It is once again that time of year where I reflect on the year that has passed and contemplate the year the come. Professionally On a professional level, this has been a fantastic year but still not without its ups and downs. This year capped my second and final year with Yahoo!. Yahoo! has been a great experience for me and exposed me to an environment that I hadn’t worked in before. I was able to work with large teams on a large scale across multiple products. To know that I had a big part to play in the success of those projects is very rewarding. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

As the year draws to a close, I find myself casting an eye back on the past twelve months. There are two events that stand out for me: Mobilewood —the get-together in the woods of Tennessee that led to the Future Friendly movement and Hackfarm —the Clearleft outing to Herefordshire that resulted in Map Tales . I learned a lot at both events. I think there’s enormous benefit in getting together with your peers for days of intense geekery—it’s quite the learning experience. Looking ahead to next year, there’s one more such event on the horizon. Aaron started up Retreats 4 Geeks last year and kicked it off with an outstanding week in the woods with Eric . … Read the rest here

Hicksdesign Go to the source

Here’s a great find from the dusty depths of YouTube – a British Transport promotional film from 1955. Not only does this feature Tweed (plus fours much in attendance), cycling, a fantastic soundtrack, railways and country pubs, it’s also filmed around the area I grew up in Warwickshire. So if you need an antidote to haggard looking men or hipsters doing trackstands on their fixies*, this is it! Part One Part Two Via the Tweed Cycling Club *I do love Rapha and fixie videos too, its just that, well, this is the complete opposite . Tagged: britain , cycling , films , retro … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

Dear Apple Claus, I’ve been a very good boy this year so I hope you don’t me asking for a little present. What I’d really like for Christmas is for you to fix that strange orientation scaling bug in Mobile Safari. Just in case you’ve forgotten about it, my friend Scott —who has been a very, very good boy this year (what with that whole Boston Globe thing)—put together a test page quite a while back to demonstrate the problem. Basically, if I set meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0″ then it means a pixel should be equal to a pixel: in portrait view, the width should be 320 pixels; in landscape view the width should be 480 pixels. But in Mobile Safari, if I move from portrait to landscape, the width jumps to a value larger than 480 pixels, which means the hapless user must double tap to bring the scale down to 1:1. … Read the rest here

Andy Budd Go to the source

I first came across the term Minimum Viable Product when I dropped into a talk by Eric Reis at the Web 2.0 Expo in New Year a few year’s back. As a company that has always worked on variable scope projects, defining a MVP seemed like a great way of managing client expectations. Rather than clients worrying whether your team would deliver something useful, you’d work together to define the smallest thing you could release and it still be a success. You would then guarantee that the client would meet their core business needs, and everything else you manage to deliver in that time was a bonus. … Read the rest here

Adactio Go to the source

I flew out to San Francisco last week for An Event Apart . This was the final event (apart) of the year so it was something of a bittersweet affair. This year the line-up for AEA was—with some minor modifications—consistent from city to city: Seattle Boston Atlanta Minneapolis Washington DC San Francisco It was like a travelling roadshow, a carnival of web geekery. Next year’s AEA line-up will be very different from city to city, showcasing lots of new speakers, so last week’s San Francisco gig felt like the last concert of a tour before the band breaks up. Well, we went out with a bang. … Read the rest here

Snook Go to the source

I hesitate putting this information out there as I’m not sure what its relevance is. I merely note it as interesting, especially in light of gender inequality in our field. In number crunching the people who have purchased a SMACSS e-book or site membership, I’ve noticed that the numbers are heavily skewed in one direction: 94.5% of the purchases are by men. That means only 5.5% of purchases were by women. I wonder if there is anything in the way that I’ve presented the information that has turned women off from buying the book. Since I market the book under my personal ‘brand’, especially via Twitter, I wonder if my particular following is also heavily skewed towards men (I suspect it is). … Read the rest here