I’ve never met so many wonderful people gathered together in one place. It was tribal in the true sense of the word (that would be the cool, fun-loving sense as opposed to the hippy-dippy sense). - Jeremy Keith
Jeremy Keith wrote that in 2005 about South by Southwest. He quoted it in a recent blog post about web award ceremonies. In it, he raises a warning to us, the community of the web industry, against web awards. The spirit...
While working on browser compatibility for a web app my company develops, I discovered that one area consistently crashed mobile Safari on our iPad. At first I figured it must be a JavaScript issue as we’d added some significant code for a new feature. But where even to start with that? The crash log for the iOS simulator in xCode revealed that the crash was happening around animations. So I went to see what CSS animations we had in our...
The web industry is going through a painful time - not in technological growth, programming language arguments, framework choices, or ugly design patterns, but in a raft of abusive behaviors towards the women in the industry. This cannot continue.
This morning I worked from the living room of my brother’s house, over 100 miles away from my office. I remotely connected to my desk computer and met with my coworkers via a conference call. While this was going on I chatted with a friend who works in Cambodia and snuggled with my youngest niece. Now, this evening, I’m typing this on a glowing screen at 30,000 feet as I head out on vacation.
Ladies and gentlemen, the Future.
A few weeks ago an industry peer of mine that I’ve met once here in Portland contacted me to tell me that the company he works for is hiring. I wasn’t really interested. I’m a freelancer running my own business. Between international travel and a one-year stint with another company, it’s been that way for 12 years. I love it: the flexibility, the diversity, working with clients. And yet my friend kept encouraging me to look into it, so I...
A project I was working on the other day needed an automatically generated password. I had an old script that spat out a really basic alphanumeric 6-character password, but I wanted something a bit stronger and more versatile. I thought I’d share. This code will give you a default of 8 characters, alphanumeric plus special characters, with flexibility for whatever length you want. The implementation is nothing fancy.
Last week I was looking for a way to create a background of alternating colored stripes for an entire web page or element. I needed to be able to easily change the colors so I wanted to do it with CSS and not images, but without adding a bunch of extra DIVs (which wouldn’t have worked anyway). I looked into gradients, but without knowing how tall the display area was, that wouldn’t work either. Plus, a gradient...
A couple weeks ago Jeffrey Zeldman wrote an article about responsive design and where breakpoints can be set in the underlying media queries. The article discusses the difficulties with the fact that there are literally hundreds of screen resolutions across a myriad of iOS, Android, and Windows Phone devices. There isn’t a set group of width breakpoints to set your media queries at for altering your site or apps...
Aaanndd I’m finally back after being hacked. Hopefully you all can access those articles you were looking for and I can start writing some new ones!
Earlier today the web font service Typekit announced that it has been acquired by Adobe. Is it time to host your own fonts (again)?
There has been quite the mixed reaction to this. Not only people completely against it and those totally for it, but most comments and tweets I’ve seen in reaction to the announcement show most people (myself included) both happy for those currently working for Typekit and worried about the future.
It seems that...