User Styles: The Age
Alternate title: “The day I took Occam’s razor to The Age”
I really dislike visiting theage.com.au. It’s ridden with click-bait articles, annoying advertising and shameless cross promotion, but for some reason we can’t seem to shake it as a local news source. What else are we going to read, the Hun? I’m not alone in expressing these sentiments, and this is a post I could have composed almost entirely from tweets.
I’ve highlighted all ‘news’ on The Age homepage (i.e., not entertainment, sport, editorial, lifestyle, etc) dl.dropbox.com/u/128401/Scree…
This got a few people discussing custom user styles for The Age, and I decided to have a dabble.
Are you left wondering why I hid certain features? Particular “news” streams, comments, author bios et cetera? Let’s focus on the news, and nothing but the news. Reading the comments of any Australian news website, generally comprised of deliberate trolling or plain good old fashioned stupidity, is a pain I wouldn’t wish upon anyone.
*passes thru suburbs* roll up ur window, son. this is a bad neighborhood. this is where ppl who comment on newspaper articles live
You can try my user styles on for size by installing something like Stylish (Chrome Firefox) and copying the styles across from the GitHub repository. I attempted to make the upgrade process as seamless as possible by referencing the raw CSS with an import tag but GitHub prevents this by serving up a different content-type. That would have meant any improvements I made would have reflected immediately. I’ll think of something else.
iosOverlay.js — iOS Overlay/Notification Plugin
Here’s a plugin that allows you to place iOS-style notifications over your web app. It’s useful for showing short succinct messages, or notifying the user of what action is being performed. It’s great for the same reason that the native iOS overlays are too; it’s intrusive enough to grab your attention, but doesn’t steal focus entirely.
This plugin works equally well on desktop, mobile and tablet.
Given the trend towards micro js libraries and removing dependencies, this plugin can stand alone or work nicely with other frameworks.
Features and details:
- Uses CSS3 transitions for smooth animation
- Plays nicely with spin.js for sweet spinners
- Notifications can show for a duration or be manually closed
- Notifications can be updated on the fly (icon/text)
- Framework agnostic (but you can degrade to jQuery animation if CSS animation is not supported)
- IE7+ support (minus rounded corners) and all the usual suspects
- Fully documented
- MIT/GPL/Who gives a shit just don’t be a nozzle about it license
To do:
If there’s a bit of interest in this project then there’s more I’d like to do.
- Add fancy CSS 3D transitions (drop, 3D drop etc)
- Use fader.js for cleaner animation syntax (one less optional dependency)
- Add a fallback IE rounded corners PNG
- Option to dismiss with ‘Esc’ keypress
- Add some retina icons
Styling File Inputs in iOS6 with jQuery Mobile
File this post under: “stuff that’s in obscure forum posts but not really documented well”. As per a previous post, iOS6 brought about access to the camera in Mobile Safari. While access is not real time (getUserMedia would be amazing), we are able to prompt the user to take a new photo or access the camera roll. Presumably for security reasons, styling file inputs in desktop browsers has always been hell on earth. Mobile is much the same.
What you can do as a work around is rely on native browser functionality where clicking a <label> triggers the clicking of it’s associated <input>. I’ve relied on the native jQuery Mobile button styling for speed, but you can achieve pretty much anything. Hiding the input can be achieved in various different ways, but as far as I know it cannot be display: none; for security reasons. Setting visibility: hidden; or opacity: 0; will all achieve the same effect, and setting position: absolute; will take it out of the page’s flow.
You can see it in action in the JSFiddle below.
UX Lab 10, 11 & 12
Here’s a bulk upload of three UX Lab experiments. I’ve been pretty busy, but these are ideas I’ve had for a long time and have been kicking around on my hard drive to some extent. I thought I’d better get them out and about.
UX Lab 010 - Blurred Modal Backgrounds
Modal dialogs are used in preference to regular popups because they generally disable interaction with the page behind and guide focus to the new window. This is achieved by visually obscuring the content behind the modal, but not so much that the two seem disconnected.
As long as people have been doing this, the have been attempting to blur out the background to greater magnify the effect. It hasn’t been possible without the use of non-dynamic PNGs, Flash or some other form of hack. Now that Webkit-based browsers are supporting the CSS filter property (not to be confused with the IE legacy one), the sought after feature is now possible.
The linked demo guides focus in two modes. One blurs out all background elements, the other desaturates them. Unfortunately there is no support for animation of these properties, so until that is implemented the effect is a bit blunt.
UX Lab 011 - Flipboard-style Notifications
I see notifications similar to these throughout iOS and OS X applications everywhere. I like the way they demand a bit more attention than your normal jGrowl, but still aren’t too impactful.
Maybe I’ll fork these properly into their own GitHub repo. Maybe I won’t.
UX Lab 012 - OS Dependent Modal & Close Buttons
This is something I thought of a long time back, and has been live in Kiandra IT development template for a while now. It’s frustrating that on the web, OK/Cancel button order and close button placement are all decided by the designer/developer. I remember a while back when a notable ex-Apple designer more or less told Dan Cederholm the close/delete icons should be on the left for everyone. Sure, there are probably more Macs and iOS devices on Dribbble than Windows - but it’s still pretty inconsiderate to force that upon the entire audience.
A UX guy once explained to me that the OK/Cancel placement on a Mac had a lot to do with the linear direction of the workflow. The OK being on the right, as it advances you another step to the right in a wizard. I remember the Windows placement being that you read the desired action first, and that’s the most important. After a bit of research, it appears Jakob Neilsen summarised it quite nicely..
But the little Mexican girl in me says:
It’s not even remotely difficult to implement technically, and shows you’re willing to compromise. Exhaustive studies may one day show one method to be “better” than the other, but until then, don’t be a dick about it.
Repository Updates (iOS Theme + jQuery.Gantt + Aristo)
Hey guys, not much has happening on the design/development front while I’ve been away on leave. Today I’ve landed some fairly big pull requests and bug fixes to what are probably my three biggest repos.
jQuery.Gantt
This is the big one. I made some pretty major changes before I went away but wanted a few more people to test it before I did the writeup.
I received a fairly major (and necessary) rewrite from Leo Pfeifenberger who sped up this project like you wouldn’t believe. It wasn’t a simple matter of landing the pull request, as the performance changes did come at the cost of coding standards and consistency. Some parts had been buggered by what looked like Visual Studio auto formatting, but they could have been hand-coded that way too.
For future reference, here are my own personal front end dev guidelines that have been received well by the community. They’ve changed in some regards based on feedback from individuals and organisations and represent how you should aim to format your code.
- Major performance increases.
A before and after IE9 test shows performance going from 20 seconds to 400ms.
That’s 2% of the previous run time. - All new click events - fired when clicking an item or when clicking the empty space. Use this to edit events or create new events at certain points.
- State persistance - requires cookie.js to work.
- Scroll to today on load
- Extensive documentation
- Defined a license (MIT)
- Removing
$.ajaxSetup, which was corrupting other scripts in the page.
According to this stackoverflow answer it was only there to ensure it worked in ASP.NET situations. If you’re using it there, consider setting$.ajaxSetupexternally.
Unfortunately that means there are some new issues:
- Code standards - I spent a considerable amount of time running the code through JSHint and fixing issues. I got most, but that included setting a few ignores.
- Eval - yep, as above, you’ll notice that there’s an eval in the code. Yuck.
- Holiday and “Today” highlighting are not occurring on the cell, only the header.
Two steps forward one step back. No biggie.
iOS jQuery Mobile Theme
I realised there was a big difference between what I was seeing in Chrome, the iOS simulator and my iPhone running iOS 5.1. Turns out the iOS simulator was only running 4.3.1, so I’ve now got the 5.1 simulator and that’s helped me resolve some visual quirks.
- Fixed: header bars had black top border
- Fixed: Vertical centring of header buttons was off (related to above, layout woes)
- Fixed: Black buttons had blue text shadow
- Fixed: Footer icons had crept to the right with last update (jQuery Mobile styles took precedence)
- Pull Request: <label> styles coming from poorly scoped selector
- Pull Request: Demo page typo
- Set demo page transitions to “slide” by default
- Set all demo page toolbars to be position=”fixed” by default
- Decided on licensing (MIT)
Aristo jQuery UI Theme
- Fixed: Cross browser CSS3 animations appear to have been re-instated.
- Pull Request: Added a non-prefixed value that I missed.
- Pull Request: Widget nesting issue fixed.
What iOS 6 Mobile Safari Offers Front End Devs
Update: Now that iOS 6 is out and the NDA is no more, Max Firtman has posted an excellent summary of new iPhone 5 and iOS 6 mobile Safari enhancements and regressions. It goes into further detail and mentions features that couldn’t be publicly announced while still under NDA (not that I was, I’m not a registered dev).
Corrections: Although I recommend checking out the above link, I received two corrections via email from Apple. One regarding smart banner documentation and one clarifying css filter support.
Here’s what we know about Mobile Safari in iOS 6 so far, and what it brings to the table for front end developers. I expect there’s more to come in future betas and as people experiment with the current beta more.
Web Inspector via Remote Debugging
The pre-existing developer tools for iOS are limited to say the least. A console.log is flattened to a single level, without actually presenting the contents. iOS 6 introduces the Safari Web Inspector to both the iPhone and the iPad via the Safari ‘Remote Debugging’ interface.
It implements a similar interface to how the Chrome for Android remote debugging works. Safari remote debugging acts in a similar fashion, such that when you select an item in the Safari desktop inspector, it is highlighted on the iOS device.
Prior to this, the only alternative was embedding Firebug Lite, which while powerful, is not designed for touch screen devices.
As far as I can tell, the old, flawed Developer Console has been removed.
Many thanks to Andrew Harrison for fact checking and screenshots.
<input type=”file”>
Finally, it’s here. You can now upload photos and videos from the Photo Library using a regular input element. This was previously only possible via the use of Phonegap etc.
This is a real game changer for mobile apps.
No word yet on if it allows you to capture a new photo. It does.
Real time camera streaming has been confirmed as not supported.
Smart App Banners
The new Smart App Banners are a way of showing Safari users a message indicating that a native app for the website is available in the App Store. While not really a great thing for those of us hoping to move apps back towards the web, it’s still a good experience for the end user. It’s also possible to preserve the page/state/view and send this to the native app. Documentation is available on the Safari Developer Library.
Picture via Wired.
Web Audio API
How useful this is remains to be seen. Web audio tends to be fairly handicapped, regardless of browser, operating system or device. Microsoft’s HTML5 Cut The Rope game still used Flash to play the sound effects. I truly hope the iOS implementation changes that, but I’m also a realist.
CSS Filters
According to the Can I Use report, these are only supported in Chrome 18+ with a -webkit- prefix. CSS Filters are also supported in Safari 6, on Mac OS X Lion and Mountain Lion (10.7 and 10.8, respectively).
Full Screen View in Landscape Mode
Interesting by itself, but with desktop browsers beginning to land support for a full screen API - can this be triggered progammatically?
requestAnimationFrame
This has landed, albeit with a webkit prefix.
You should be using the Paul Irish polyfill anyway.
App Cache Upped from 5MB to 25MB
I believe it used to show you a dialog asking for more if you exceeded the 5MB limit.
JPEG Downsampling Ceiling Lifted
JPEG downsampling no longer occurs at 2MP, and instead kicks in around the 5MP on supported devices. The iPhone 3GS and 4th gen iPod touch remain at 2MP. That’s if your carrier isn’t downsampling for you (AT&T, Optus in Australia).
Faster JavaScript Performance
This happens every year, so it’s not really news. Nitro was previously brought to home screen apps giving them a massive performance boost. Nitro hasn’t yet been brought across to UIWebViews, one of the many reasons that the Facebook app is a steaming pile of shit. Maybe future iOS 6 betas will bring Nitro to UIWebViews? Maybe it’s already in iOS 6?
Repository Updates
iOS Theme for jQuery Mobile
Good news! I’ve just pushed some major changes for my iOS jQuery Mobile theme. It now works with jQuery Mobile 1.1.0, which was a bit of a struggle. It also forced me to do some major code cleanup, delivering cross browser gradients and various enhancements I had been putting off.
A full list of changes and resolved bugs follows:
- Supports jQuery Mobile 1.1.0 (this was a nightmare)
- Code cleanup more strictly obeys my coding conventions
- All gradients and effects are now cross browser compatible (Issue #2)
- Updated slider toggle to iOS 5 style (Issue #7)
- Got dialogs looking as close to native as possible considering jQuery Mobile doesn’t support overlayed dialogs (they’re standalone pages) (Issue #3)
The changes have introduced a few minor visual quirks relating to the .ui-focus box shadows etc, but hopefully these will be rectified in the near future.
jQuery Gantt
I made some minor code changes, but the most important thing here was the addition of documentation. The original creator didn’t provide any, so hopefully this makes a bit more sense. I’m sure I’ve missed something here and there (holidays?), but I’ll fix that up as we go.
The changes:
- Added documentation and better demo with bootstrap popovers
- Works with latest jQuery 1.7.2
- Merged pull request for “undefined error”, thanks Nathan Colgate.
- Code and folder cleanup
Front End Development Guidelines
The page now passes HTML5 validation. Apparently some people care about this.
bootstrap.footnotes.js - UX Lab 008
I love the Instapaper-style footnotes/endnotes that came about with the last major update. Here they are in web form, as a jQuery/Bootstrap plugin. Unfortunately there’s a dependency upon Bootstrap CSS/JS, but such is life. It’s retina ready too - as everything else should be these days.
Here it is in action:
Documentation and options are available on the demo page.
It also has its own GitHub repository.
HTML iOS Notifications - UX Lab 007
I thought I’d build a facsimile iOS notification plugin for shits and giggles. It’s pretty much the exact opposite of a good UX, but it’s more of a proof of concept than anything else.
- It’s 100% wide on standard and retina iPhones and 60% on desktop and iPad resolutions.
- It has built in retina icon handling.
- Doesn’t break middle mouse clicks when using a URL.
- Passes JSHint.
- It works with Chrome, Safari, Firefox and I believe Opera, but I haven’t tested.
Documentation and options are available on the demo page.
It also has its own GitHub repository.
3D Accordion Effect - UX Lab 006
I posted the following experiment as a way of demonstrating just how far the line has blurred between web based animation and OS based animation. I saw Dribbble shots (one and two) by Indian designer Pranav Pramod and was inspired to replicate the effect in CSS3.
Unfortunately nothing is ever as easy as it seems. If it was, someone else would have already posted a similar effect. The problem is that when animating something with a 3D transform with a forced perspective, there is no way to measure or mirror the actual height represented in the browser using CSS. If you animate the parent element from 0px in height to 30px, it’s a straightforward linear animation. The 3D transform, on the other hand, changes on a non-linear scale because of the perspective.
There are two solutions, neither of which are desirable.
The first involves JavaScript, which frankly I had tried to avoid. In this example, the animation is triggered by the addition of a CSS class via JavaScript - but could just as easily be bound to an :active:target CSS event. The only way to get the actual browser rendered height of the element is to get it via JavaScript with the obj.clientHeight getter. While discussion pointed to wrapping the object in a parent element and not needing JavaScript at all, this does not work in all browsers.
Instead the JavaScript method involves binding a function with requestAnimationFrame which sets the parent objects height to mirror the calculated height of the transformed object. Accurate, but if we wanted to perform calculations many times per second, why did we bother animating with CSS at all?
The other method, considerably less accurate and very fiddly, is to match the easing or timing of the two animations. It may be possible to create a custom timing function using cubic-bezier which matches the rate of easing of a 30px tall object, rotating from -90deg to 0deg, with a perspective of 400 units. But why would you? That’s shit house.
Maybe in this instance a flat out Canvas animation would have been much more sensible. You’re still performing a function every ‘x’ milliseconds, but at least the canvas itself may be hardware accelerated. Until CSS animation matures, we will most likely have to abuse the JavaScript add-ons such as the one described earlier. Or even better yet, sever the ties with HTML and CSS and - get this right - use graphical languages for what they’re intended.
Ninja Edit: Also, you can’t yet animate background gradients so the whole 3D effect on the depth of the flaps is kind of impossible for now.
Sad-face Edit: The second I posted this, someone posted pretty much the exact same thing to Hacker News in a much more polished way. Check out Paperfold CSS.
It’s just a little micro-site tying together a range of social media websites. There’s some fancy coding behind the scenes that predicts where I’m going to be at any given time, because we’re all a walking bell curve. It’s good to get it out the door, because designers are notorious for over-designing and iterating their personal sites.
Enjoy,
taitbrown.com
I’ve just pushed some major changes to my front end development guidelines to the public site. I spent a lot of time on this update, and it shows. I’ve added new content and improved old. I’ve ditched my own slap-dash styling in favour of the Twitter Bootstrap with some of my own personal tweaks. Be sure to check it out.
I’ve added some sections on:
- The importance of understanding the box model (CSS)
- Knowing when to float, and when to position (CSS)
- Generating unique IDs without timestamps (JS)
- Preserving middle mouse click functionality (UX)
I also:
- Made the website work without JavaScript enabled
- Cleaned up the overall design and interaction (Bootstrapped!)
- Re-wrote some content here and there
- Added pretty graphics to explanations
- Added some resources to the list
Basically, we’ve gone from this:
To this:
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 above.
<div id=”centered”>
I’m centered vertically and horizontally
</div>
#centered {
position: absolute;
top: 0;
right: 0;
bottom: 0;
left: 0;
margin: auto;
width: 200px;
height: 200px;
}
It is listed as Method 4 on this page, but frankly should be Method 1.
The reason I love this solution so much is that we have all been using margin: 0 auto; to horizontally center things for yonks. This answers the age old question of, well, why doesn’t it work vertically either? Another big plus is no extra HTML elements. Generally you’re forced to create one to horizontally center an item. Another to offset it 50% from the top and, depending on your cross browser confidence, another to negatively offset this with a margin. ■
@font-face Smoothing in Windows Chrome
WARNING: THE FIX BELOW IS DEPRECATED IN CHROME 16 + 17. SAD-FACE :(
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 updates. It is now vital to enter an rgba() value instead.
Hopefully you will end up with something like this:
h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 {
font-family: ‘TodaySHOP-BoldRegular’;
text-shadow: 0 1px 0 rgba(0,0,0,0.01);
}
Real World Examples:
A real world example of this is best demonstrated on my own Front End Development Guidelines. My header tags were smoothed out with a solid hex colour, prior to the rgba() update. They’re still broken to date. Oops.
But the problem is much more widespread. Consider this ironic blog post on IE font smoothing by @Koodoz, in which the Chrome problem rears its ugly head again. It leads to some interesting accidental changes, where “hate” has become “hale”.
Caveats:
Be aware that this can modify the kerning of the text. There are also situations where the font is hinted in a way that this hack is detrimental. The over-used League Gothic, for example, does not bode well with this method at smaller font-sizes. There were also some comments that this makes Chrome on Mac even blurrier than usual.
Credit:
I’ve been trying to track down who taught me this little trick for a while now. I originally assumed it was @Koodoz, as he invests heavily in @font-face in his designs - but it was news to him. I thought it might be @Rainerbird, as we both read the same kind of stuff online. No dice there either. This blog post also describes the method, but I have probably been using the method just as long and don’t recall visiting that site. The comments and feedback on that blog post are great for further explaining the method and its shortfalls. ■
A Sneak Peak at Aristo 2
As the Cappuccino Conference in the states winds down, a sneak peak at Aristo 2 was announced over Twitter. Frequent readers will remember that Sofa designed the original theme for the Cappuccino framework - and my jQuery UI theme was based off of this. Not only does the update refresh familiar UI components, it also includes an exciting new icon pack. From what you can see below, they’re nothing to laugh at either. A preliminary count shows 108 icons available in the same glyph style no doubt popularised by iOS and now OS X.
The changes have already been reflected in the design section of Sofa’s website, but the PSD on their GitHub repository remains unchanged.
You can get a more in depth view of both the UI components and the icon set by downloading the sneak peak of Aristo 2.
So Will I Be Making an Aristo 2.0 jQuery UI Theme?
Initially, no. I think that the original Aristo theme is still travelling along quite nicely. The design direction the new theme is taking is not entirely different enough to warrant the extra time. It’s also worth considering that a lot of the unique touches in Aristo 2 don’t translate that well to jQuery UI themes. The modal and datepicker are just different enough to cause a few cross-browser headaches. Other components like checkboxes, radio buttons and dropdowns aren’t natively supported - even if popular plugins do exist.
Hats off as usual to Sofa, it’s no surprise they were acquired by Facebook.
