Piotr Walczyszyn created nice tool in Responsive Inspector (Chrome Web Store link).
Category: Links
Another great episode of The Critical Path.
Horace is pointing out the BS news write about Apple and then thinks loud about possibilities in car manufacturing disruption.
Michael Mace dissecting PC industry:
The PC companies married themselves to the Microsoft-Intel growth engine years ago. In exchange for riding the Wintel wave, they long ago gave up on independent innovation and market-building. In many ways, they outsourced their product development brains to Microsoft so they could focus on operations and cost control. They trusted Microsoft to grow the market. Microsoft is now failing to deliver on its side of the bargain. Unless there’s a stunning turnaround in Windows 8 demand, I think it’s now looking increasingly likely that we’ll see a sustained year over year drop in PC sales for at least several more quarters.This is an existential shock for the PC companies. It’s like discovering that your house was built over a vast, crumbling sinkhole.
Via @Asymco
Collection of the best articles, videos, presentations and other resources on large JavaScript apps.
Dragging with (multi)touch, IE8+ and 11 KB? What’s not to love here.
Facebook Home is a trojan horse designed to steal the Android experience, and the Android user base, right out of Google’s hands.
Via Daring Fireball
A Short Translation from Bullshit to English of Selected Portions of the Google Chrome Blink Developer FAQ.
This very nice, interactive infographics reminded me of Douglas Adams:
“Space,” it says, “is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space, listen…”
— The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Brent Simmons writing for Macworld:
One of the guys who works on Windows Azure Mobile Services gave me a demo of its support for iOS.What? Microsoft supporting iOS? What? That isn’t the Microsoft (I thought) I knew.
Once I got over the shock, I expected that I’d have to write code in C# (a Microsoft language), that services would run behind IIS (a Microsoft webserver), and that I’d have to use Visual Studio (a Microsoft developer tool) on Windows, which I don’t have. That would be typical Microsoft, right?
Instead: The code is JavaScript, the webserver is Node.js, and I can write code in any text editor. No Microsoft things. The company even released some related code as open source and put it on GitHub.
(Microsoft? Hello, are you feeling okay?)
In other words, Microsoft noticed the world outside Redmond, and it likes it.
And I like them for liking it. And it doesn’t even hurt.
What I see is Microsoft being scared shitless that they are losing developer minds, that there are now thriving ecosystems that Microsoft does not control and their own attempts of building new fortresses is going nowhere slow. So now they are willing to bend over backwards to look good again. See also all the marketing around IE10 targeted to developers.
I like to see Microsoft doing this, but I don’t view it as “look we are the good ones now”, but as a “look how scared we are”. They have to prove they are actually also good at the new services they offer. We’ll see.
Via Daring Fireball
In a world where RSS readers are “dead”, it would be much harder for new sites to develop and maintain an audience, and it would be much harder for readers and writers to follow a diverse pool of ideas and source material. Both sides would do themselves a great disservice by promoting, accelerating, or glorifying the death of RSS readers.
Marco Arment thoughts on free as a business model in the light of Google Reader shutting down:
In other industries, this is called predatory pricing, and many forms of it are illegal because they’re so destructive to healthy businesses and the welfare of an economy. But the tech industry is far less regulated, younger, and faster-moving than most industries. We celebrate our ability to do things that are illegal or economically infeasible in other markets with productive-sounding words like “disruption”.Much of our rapid progress wouldn’t have happened if we had to play by the rest of the world’s rules, and I think we’re better off overall the way it is. But like any regulation (or lack thereof), it’s a double-edged sword. Our industry is prone to many common failures of unregulated capitalism, with the added instability of extremely low barriers to entry and near-zero cost per user in many cases.
Via Daring Fireball
I should read this, maybe you want too.
Blueprints by Codrops starting with full width image slider and elastic content slider.
a fast and fully-featured autocomplete library
Native views and web views are good at different things.
Native is good for high fidelity interaction, animations, responding to gestures. However the native APIs are bad for designing “documents” — that is, layouts where elements flow within a container and push each other around. That means that things that are extremely easy on the web can be painstaking in native UI without much upside.
Web views have limited interactivity, but they have other advantages:
* Faster iterations. You don’t need to push a build when a webview changes.
* Document-style layout, as mentioned above.
* Higher density. We found it easier to show more information on the screen with HTML/CSS than the native controls. Looking at other apps out there makes me think it’s an attribute of the medium, not just us.
* No need to sync data or duplicate logic. Sending HTML down the pipe is simple.
Finally yes, we get the multi-platform advantages because the web views are also served to people who hit the regular mobile web version of the app without any wrapper.
Via @keff85
Nice overview by Harry Roberts.
Via @sixrevisions