This year Future of Web Design got a lot of things right. The venue was excellent, and the provided food was too — no more hunting for lunch! Overall, the event was more focused and enjoyable.
It seemed like there were too many people covering CSS3 and HTML5. They were really the hot technical topics of this event, which is fine but I’d like to have seem more JavaScript and mobile talks. It might have been confusing for non–technical designers as well — Molly Holzschlag said not to use CSS3 in production sites yet, whereas everyone else didn’t seem to care.
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I revealed desktop earlier and was surprised to find a utilitarian utopia:
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I’ve updated both JsChat and Ico with major changes recently, as a result of some healthy Easter weekend open source hacking.
JsChat: Mongo, Twitter Auth
JsChat can now be configured to work with Mongo and Twitter authentication:
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I’ve discovered the secret of making a blog popular. You’re not going to like the answer. Mainly because the answer is a few hundred words of me ranting: but herein lies wisdom I have recently accrued through my adventures in blogging.
The story begins when I started writing on DailyJS. With no bullshitting around it has almost 1400 feed subscribers. Granted, that’s not massively popular by any means, but it’s more popular than any other blog I’ve started. It’s actually pretty stellar given how many readers most blogs get.
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Apple’s iPhone SDK provides a set of building blocks for creating interfaces. There are broadly two groups: controllers and low-level widgets like buttons. When designing your app's interface, even at the speculative stage, you should be aware of what's possible in terms of controllers.
By using controllers as they’re intended, and in the right combination, you can create an app that’s consistent with other well–designed apps, and is therefore easy to use.
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Like many teenagers in the 90s Massive Attack held a deep fascination for me. I was just old enough to appreciate their second studio album, Protection, but it was Mezzanine that made me go out and buy their CDs. Mezzanine struck that rare balance between memorable ballads and deep, dark atmospheres. After several years besotted with grunge, this was one of the albums that encouraged me to explore new genres. I can still listen to Mezzanine on a pair of big studio headphones and become totally immersed in it.
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Back in November I started a new JavaScript programming blog called DailyJS, with help from Ric Roberts and Justin Knowlden. I post almost every day about interesting developments in JavaScript — techniques, tips and library/tool reviews.
I recently toiled over a lengthy review of JavaScript Performance Rocks! by Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs — a book that has taught me a lot despite my years of JavaScript experience.
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I’ve been playing with an Android phone recently (the Nexus One. Android has a screen lock feature where you can draw a shape on the screen instead of entering a code. Lazily tracing the unlock code with a finger is a novel (and very fast) way to unlock the phone.
I noticed that every time I do this my code is visible in finger grease on the screen. As disgusting as this sounds it’s an amusing security flaw. Even though it only shows you the overall shape (not the direction the shape is drawn) you can bet native English speakers are more likely to draw the shape left–to–right due to the writing system working that way.
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I was at the London iPhone Tech Talks yesterday. It was a free event put on by Apple with talks by Apple’s engineers. More importantly, it was at a great venue with free food and drink all day, and free beer and wine afterwards. Also, the wifi worked!
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I really like Riot, the Ruby unit testing framework, so I decided to port it to JavaScript. You can get it from GitHub at alexyoung/riotjs.
I’ve worked hard to keep the syntax minimal. This is challenging in JavaScript, as you may have gathered from my Fear and Loathing in JavaScript DSLs article.
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