January 2012
1 post
5 tags
December 2011
3 posts
3 tags
9 tags
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November 2011
5 posts
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October 2011
4 posts
“Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious...”
– Stephen Fry on Steve Jobs
9 tags
iOS eBay: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
Mike Rundle, author of Design Then Code, is a firm believer in an iOS application being a pixel perfect representation of a company’s branding and unquestionable design. He can be a real stickler, calling out poor design or UX conventions on Twitter and just generally being a loveable prick about it all. But every so often he does stop and remind us that there are real people behind these...
1 tag
William Rainbird: In two weeks time I'll be... →
rainerbird:
It was a big decision to make but I’ve decided to leave my full time job.
I’m going to be spending my time completing my studies, taking on freelance work, working on many of my personal projects and wearing more t-shirts (even some with stripes on them).
I’m also planning an overseas…
This is a big step from an ex-colleague and a friend. And to be honest, I’m...
September 2011
5 posts
3 tags
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Repository Updates (Aristo + Guidelines)
Some recent changes to some of the GitHub repositories that I manage include:
Aristo: implemented future proof (IE10, Opera etc) cross browser CSS3 gradients as per this snippet.
Aristo: resolved a z-index bug and a timepicker incompatibility bug.
Front End Dev Guidelines: added section on Minimising Repaints and Reflows.
Front End Dev Guidelines: added section on Using data-* Attributes.
...
1 tag
What Problem are you Solving? →
It’s in your nature to solve problems. So what problems are you solving?
pieratt:
Dear Graphic and Web Designers, please understand that there are greater opportunities available to you.
You have an inherent need to solve problems, visually and conceptually. There is enormous value in this, but you may be misplacing your talents.
The internet, at this time in history, is the greatest...
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1 tag
“Very soon, not having a tattoo is going to become the new tattoo.”
– Chris Moore
August 2011
7 posts
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Developer Snippet - Pretty AJAX Errors
Tired of drudging through the console when looking for the cause of AJAX errors? Sick of trying to scan the stringified .NET or webservice error pages for the underlying error? Do I have the handy hint for you!
The following snippet creates a global listener for AJAX errors, shows a jGrowl reporting the error thrown, and then allows you to view the resulting error page - all without breaking the...
6 tags
Developer Snippet - Capturing Console.Log
Nobody is perfect. I’ve left a console.log() in countless live deployments, and I will probably do it again. While it does speak volumes about my attention to detail after a long day of coding, there is a way to prevent it. It’s easy enough to detect when the console object doesn’t exist - so you can just do the following.
if (!window.console) {
window.console = {};
...
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Making OS X Look Like iOS - Quick & Easy
Before we get started I’ll answer the obvious question: why would you do such a heinous thing? Well, I like consistency - and so do others. Apple’s recent direction with the Lion UI has been to make things more like the iPad, so why should the overall skinning be any different. It’s also great for people who have never used a Mac before, or have trouble adapting from a Windows...
5 tags
Repository Updates (iOS Theme + Front End Dev)
Front End Development Guidelines (Demo | GitHub)
The ability to “deep link” to categories and articles went in a while ago, but until today there wasn’t a UI to make it easy. I also added a section on centering content, both horizontally and vertically. It reflects the blog post I recently posted on the matter.
iOS jQuery Mobile Theme (Demo | GitHub)
I’ve replaced...
July 2011
5 posts
3 tags
Vertically Centering DIVs
The ability to vertically center a DIV in HTML is one of the holy grails of web development, along with sticky footers and just generally making shit work in IE. I had to vertically centre something recently, and I was sick of using the dirty hacks involving absolute positioning, negative margins and extra HTML elements.
The solution below works in all modern browsers, and is supported in IE8 and...
4 tags
Chosen - a javascript select thingy →
I’ve been using the Select Menu plugin by Filament Group, but this looks like it’s possibly better. The reason I like the Filament Group one so much is it’s adherence to jQuery UI practices in classing etc and it’s full ARIA compliance.
jessedodds:
Chosen is a javsacript plug-in makes long, unwieldy select boxes much more user-friendly. It is currently available in...
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Hi, I'm a UX Developer - You're a What? →
I showed this to my computer-illiterate girlfriend a while back to help her understand what I do for a living. While broad articles like this are never going to describe every person, perfectly; it did ring true in a few regards.
A really good read. Recommended.
8 tags
June 2011
6 posts
8 tags
@font-face Smoothing in Windows Chrome
You may have noticed the issue in which @font-face embeds rendered in Windows Chrome look mighty jagged. Fixes such as -webkit-font-smoothing barely do anything, so this hack relies on a fairly well known fact about Windows Chrome: putting text-shadow on anything makes it blurry as shit. Original implementations of the hack relied on a solid text-shadow colour, but this no longer works in recent...
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Front End Development Guidelines - Update
Well that was a wild ride indeed! Since release, the front-end development guidelines I posted have gone bananas. Tens of thousands of page views, plenty of GitHub forks and followers, and even a kind word or two. Many thanks to Paul Irish and other figureheads for tweeting about the resource I put together. It really helped spread the word about what I was trying to do, and in turn pulled in some...
6 tags
May 2011
4 posts
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The iPad as a Travel Companion
Believe me when I say this, the iPad makes an excellent travel companion. It’s easy to dismiss what you see in the Apple commercials as being purely marketing hype. All I can offer you in response is a real world example of real people travelling with an iPad. The following thoughts and experiences may not be original or applicable to you, but they happened.
Up, Up and Away!
You’ve...
8 tags
Aristo 1.2 Released
The latest release of Aristo closes some long term issues, as well as those introduced in my last commit. User comments expressed a need for styled inputs and text areas. My last commit included my implementation of these, but the selectors were too generic and were not sandboxed to any particular class. This has been recitified, and you will now need to place the “ui-form” class on a...
13 tags
April 2011
4 posts
4 tags
Aristo in the Wild
Here’s a simple list of places I’ve noticed my Aristo jQuery UI theme popping up - or received a tip off either here or on Hacker News. Are you using Aristo somewhere exciting?
Native Implementations
jStat: A JavaScript Statistical Library
Nooots
Text Drop App
Butter App
Time Glider
Aristo Menu Plugin
Qooxdoo Theme
Derivatives
IconFinder
6 tags
“If a tree falls in the woods and lands on Schroedinger’s cat; is it really...”
March 2011
7 posts
5 tags
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Aristo 1.1 Released
I woke up on Saturday morning to find about 2,000 new visitors to my blog and 22 email notifications of new Twitter and Tumblr followers. It turns out Aristo made it to the front page of Hacker News for the second time in it’s short lifespan, and in turn was tweeted about by some popular Twitter users.
HN users had some great suggestions in the comments section, and most of those have been...
7 tags
Audi A3 Concept
Audi has officially released details on an A3 concept sedan following it’s earlier picture leak. Powered by a whopping 300kW, 5 cylinder engine and nearing A4 length, it poses some serious questions about model cannibalisation. If this goes into production, what will happen to both the A4 and the RS3? The silly sequence of A4 (add a few inches) A6 (add a few inches) A8 seems to become...
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Linking JavaScript Objects to HTML Elements
Alternative Title: The jQuery $.data() Function is Awesome
The Workflow creation tool I’ve been working on and blogging about (design & code pattern) would have been impossible without forcing myself to learn object oriented (OO) JavaScript. It was a pretty steep learning curve for a designer, and I soon came across the common pitfalls of writing OO code. The factory pattern structure...