ramble on rocker

Mixing Responsive Design and Mobile Templates | CSS-Tricks

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 21:26:33 +0100

Mixing Responsive Design and Mobile Templates | CSS-Tricks

How to bring back the iTunes 10 functions on iTunes 11!

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:49:00 +0100

This tutorial is level: total dummy. But in case some people are still frustrated at the new iTunes’ UI, I thought I’d share it anyway.

Since I stream most of my music these days, iTunes is something I barely use. Even less since they updated it to version 11, which basically turned a busy and confusing interface into a clean and confusing one.

After many hard drive moves, I needed to do some serious file cleaning, and the “album view” was just not cutting it. So I dug around for a while and realized – the old iTunes is still in there!

1. Bring back the sidebar. Simply go to View > Show Sidebar on the menu and voila! No more one-pane-at-a-time. Drag-and-drop is easy again. Too bad they killed the “popup” functionality… for extra information, re-enable the status bar.

2. Ye ole’ three-column view. Simply click on “Songs” at the top of your collection and there you go! Back to the old, simpler times. You can switch back anytime.

Meet HipChat for Mac (Beta) – Fast. Fluid. Native. — HipChat Blog

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 14:00:01 +0100

Meet HipChat for Mac (Beta) – Fast. Fluid. Native. — HipChat Blog:

Fucking finally! Been using it for the last few days and it looks great (and works like a charm, only crashed once so far).

Stopped to say great blog.

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 21:11:42 +0100

Thank you :)

Do you use any type of cloud storage? If so, what kind, and why?

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 21:11:03 +0100

I use Dropbox for my work, SugarSync for another job and CrashPlan for backup. Why?

Removing Interface Elements: Should You Ask The User Or Their Browser? | Smashing UX Design

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:39:16 +0100

Removing Interface Elements: Should You Ask The User Or Their Browser? | Smashing UX Design:

When should the site make the call for the user vs. asking? Great points here.

Shaya Potter - Google - Apparently, facebook API calls expose all the privacy…

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 15:28:18 +0200

Shaya Potter - Google - Apparently, facebook API calls expose all the privacy…:

Good job on the whole privacy thing…

Most impressive. This guy (or gal?) teaches you, step by step,...

Sat, 08 Sep 2012 09:58:04 +0200

Most impressive. This guy (or gal?) teaches you, step by step, how to create an iPhone out of one freaking CSS element.

This site’s the very definition of hot. Minimal,...

Wed, 18 Jul 2012 18:18:26 +0200

This site’s the very definition of hot. Minimal, atmospheric, explorational and functional. The UI is invisible but effective. LURV IT.

Excellent UI reference site, full of yummy ideas and lots of...

Fri, 13 Jul 2012 18:46:08 +0200

Excellent UI reference site, full of yummy ideas and lots of freebies.

Infographic: understand the Libor Scandal

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 15:22:19 +0200

Infographic: understand the Libor Scandal

Creative UI Design Examples for Great UX

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 14:19:00 +0200

Creative UI Design Examples for Great UX:

I love these. Some people like skeuomorphic design because maybe if it looks more like reality, it feels easier to use. Others think it’s a waste of space and purity of shapes and UI is best. I like it when people mix both (like in the example where suddenly you have a folding effect, totally well-placed, not getting in the way of anything, but pretty delightful to the user).

(via David Roberts)

Open-source app to optimize your image file sizes

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 19:42:30 +0200

Open-source app to optimize your image file sizes:

Pretty convenient for those of you upgrading sites to retina-friendly versions.

“ImageOptim optimizes images — so they take up less disk space and load faster — by finding best compression parameters and by removing unnecessary comments and color profiles. It handles PNG, JPEG and GIF animations.”

The IE7 Tax and browser militancy in the age of responsive...

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 16:24:00 +0200

The IE7 Tax and browser militancy in the age of responsive design

The latest effort to rid the internet of IE comes from an Australian retailer, who took a bold step and started charging IE7 users a “tax,” claiming higher maintenance costs. Hilarious, and true: adapting a site’s design and functionality to look and perform just as planned on non-compliant browsers is a bit waste of time and resources. But is this approach still necessary?

Up until a few years ago, devs were expected to bend over backwards to make everything look as closely as possible as the original comps, on every existing browser. Back then, most users had no idea their “internet thingy” was even called a browser, let alone that you could download a better one. Besides, in those days it took so many hacks to do simple things (spacer.gif anyone?) that chances were your site looked either just right, or completely broken.

In the late 2000’s, when the scale tipped and Firefox, Chrome and Safari became popular and easy to obtain, many website professionals (and their clients) decided to simply say no to IE, include colorful, hard-to-miss bars atop their sites informing (often in a pushy tone) the user their experience would suffer. You could close it, and navigate at your own risk. Heck, even Microsoft embraced it! This cut down many hours of extra, unnecessary development and forced the web to move on, getting a lot of previously hopeless users to finally upgrade.

I loved that idea. Why cater to a minority still on a browser which is not only bad for the internet, but bad for the security of those people’s computers? I was among the designers who quickly adopted the technique, and it seems to have worked (IE6 has less than 1% of the browsers share, according to slightly biased w3schools stats).

However, the web moved on even more; since then, we’ve turned away from Flash and embraced HTML5; CSS3 is in heavy use and semantic HTML is the goal of most front-end devs, making sites more open and accessible to not only any browser, but also assistive devices for people with disabilities. We also saw the birth of two incredibly important philosophies: responsive design (same layout adapts to different resolutions) and graceful degradation (every browser doesn’t need to look exactly the same, as long as experience is maintained).

A well-coded site using these philosophies (and a few inevitable hacks) will work on any browser, compliant or not, whatever the resolution. Granted, good execution of a flexible layout like this demands more time planning before jumping into design and code, but it pays off in that you no longer have to keep people out of your site.

So should we stop asking users to switch their browsers? On the contrary, I think that educates and helps the web to keep moving. But I think at this point we can – and should – always work to deliver the message no matter what the platform, and not simply blame the user for their legacy browser.

SCRIBBLY IS HERE! And I want one. Or two. Or four!

Thu, 07 Jun 2012 14:27:00 +0200

SCRIBBLY IS HERE! And I want one. Or two. Or four!

Nifty idea. But WHY THE HECK FIREWORKS?!?

Sun, 27 May 2012 14:42:13 +0200

Nifty idea. But WHY THE HECK FIREWORKS?!?

How not to kill your legs & feet on a standing desk setup

Thu, 17 May 2012 12:05:00 +0200

How not to kill your legs & feet on a standing desk setup:

Great Quora thread.

Hagin is a free web-font which is svelt and has cool hair, but...

Tue, 15 May 2012 11:20:00 +0200

Hagin is a free web-font which is svelt and has cool hair, but also wears a tweed jacket with elbow patches and smells a bit funny. Just look at that “K”!

Instacast releases v2.0, totally muddles up the UX

Fri, 11 May 2012 14:53:00 +0200

The many football fans where I come from, say you don’t change a winning team. Then why screw with one of the interfaces most full of win on iOS? Yesterday I updated to the newest version of Instacast, and although I there are some neat improvements, I gotta say I’m at a loss about a few of the choices.

I listen to 30+ podcasts weekly, and the iPhone default player is awful for that. You can’t sync over-the-air, and need iTunes to subscribe or stop subscribing to anything, which means if you’re travelling, you might spend a week without updates.

Enter Instacast. Clean interface, beautiful user flow and intelligent use of swipes to perform actions – that is, until the latest update a couple days ago, which removed my very favorite features and turned it into an app that quite possibly demands an instruction manual. Sure; there are nice new features, like bookmarks, pausing downloads, or adding playlists, but I’m not sure they make up for the flow screeching to a halt.

Some pet peeves:

No more left-to-right swipe for “mark as played” (or right-to-left for “favorite:” both gestures now bring up an “archive” function (more on that later), like on the Mail app, except this isn’t email. To perform the old tasks, you now have to tap and hold, then select an action. More scalable? Sure. Better? Not sure.
New “archive” function: isn’t the archive the RSS feed itself? Why do I need to archive a Podcast episode? Besides, the archived files seem go nowhere, and now when I mark something as played, it doesn’t automatically remove the file. Most of the time I want as few files as possible hogging my iPhone’s disk.
Playlists & Smart Playlists: this feature was long awaited, and I’m glad it’s here. But since “played” files remain on the disk, browsing the “Downloaded” playlist brings up a lot of episodes I already listened to, and I can’t make a playlist of “Unplayed AND Downloaded,” so I have to browse a list full of dead files.
New location of volume & speed: in order to fit more buttons, they’ve created something which imitates the iOS function that happens when you double-click the home button. Two of the buttons are indecipherable (some sort of clock in the middle and an arrow coming out of a line, which switches left, right or off as you tap); one is unnecessary (the AirPlay function is always accessible from iOS, and looked fine by the volume button anyway) and another already had a good location.
Paid “pro” version with few new features, and some old ones: People don’t have a fundamental problem with paying for a Pro version; they do however dislike being forced to pay for previously free features, such as the replacement for the now-extinct “All Episodes” feature.

Overall, this version has its value and some great new features. But the new user flow goes from frictionless and exemplary to choppy and confusing, and the IAP will piss a lot of people off. Sad stuff…

Felix's Node.js Convincing the boss guide

Wed, 02 May 2012 15:54:37 +0200

Felix's Node.js Convincing the boss guide:

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been nerding out a lot lately, and was introduced to Node.JS by the old McRoberts. Here’s a handy guide for those of you trying to convince a client to switch, or even whether it’s for you. (via Hackernews)