Trevor Davis made this plugin that allows you — surprise, surprise – to stick any element so it does not scroll off the view.
As we are all going to do mobile first soon, these printable free templates will come in handy.
I’ve noticed this question on Quora.
And there’s an answer in a form of a quote from Ira Glass which just hits home for me:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you.
A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this.
And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions.
And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
(Speaking of Ira Glass, you do listen to This American Life, right?)
For me it stands right beside another big one by Steve Jobs:
When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.
Horace Dediu asks this question from the viewpoint of disruption theory, where if you are trying to make better something, that’s good enough from perspective of some customers, you are creating a room for being disrupted.
The clue to this experiment is the presence of a control group. We could test the question of absorbability by by keeping a version of the product which did not improve (or got cheaper) and measuring whether is performs better vs. the “improved” version.Of course, this is exactly what Apple does with the n-1 generation products. By ranging products which are older and at lower price points it can measure whether the improvements are valued.
I’ve been thinking more about how I review a design – both my own and someone else’s. So over the past couple days I’ve been writing down every question I’ve been asking when I look at a design-in-progress. Some of these I say out loud, some just go through my head, some are in person, others are posted to Basecamp or Campfire.These are in no particular order, and I don’t ask all of them every time.
MG Siegler for TechCrunch after explaining the meaning of “The Pledge”, “The Turn” and “The Prestige” in the parlance of magic tricks:
Look at the mobile landscape right now. There are two companies that are making any money in smartphones: Apple and Samsung. Or, put another way: Apple and the company Apple just won a billion dollar-plus judgement against for copying their smartphone designs. So while some may find Apple’s trick old hat now, no one else has figured out how to pull it off — except for the company doing a mediocre copy of the trick. I’d argue it’s because everyone is focusing on The Pledge and The Prestige, but Apple is the only one focusing on The Turn.
Via Daring Fireball
John Gruber paints the picture of how different a game Amazon is playing.
It’s a heads we win, tails you lose strategy. That’s the brilliance. If you buy an iPad but use Amazon’s iOS apps to read Kindle books and watch movies through your Amazon Prime account, Apple wins but so too does Amazon. If you buy a Kindle Fire instead of an iPad, Apple gets nothing. Amazon wins so long as you consume media content from Amazon, no matter if you play it on a Kindle Fire or an iPad. Apple only wins if you buy an iPad.
I’m watching the Amazon’s kindle press event right now and as John points out, it’s definitely delivered too slowly.
From the Stanford University’s Entrepreneurship Corner:
Adam Lashinsky, Fortune senior editor-at-large, shares an insider look at Apple, one of the world’s most iconic and secretive companies. Based on his research into the technology giant’s internal processes and approaches to leadership and building products, Lashinsky offers insights and surprises from his book, Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired–and Secretive–Company Really Works.
Via @robertvlach
Granted, it is a preview and the real version should ship early 2013, but if it looks anything like this then Microsoft is crazy.
One comment from the guy doing the video made me laugh:
Obviously, you can see it’s not entirely optimized for a touch experience… but it is there.
Let me paraphrase that: Obviously, you will feel like throwing the thing against the wall in 5 seconds, but for some perverted reason it is there.
That’s what a disrupted company does.
Via @satai
This article by Mark Sigal on GigaOM goes nicely with my post about disruption.
We’re all lemmings in terms of following what works. So when the horizontal model made Bill Gates the richest man in the world, industry after industry embraced it as the one right way.With the advent of the Internet, however, a vicious cycle of commoditization — horizontal’s downside — began to play out. We are now at the endgame of that cycle, a point where few companies can make money via commodity economics, and HP and Dell are Exhibit A and B, respectively.
Nice presentation on CSS animation by Dan Eden.
Via @martindrzka
Reading Cap Witkins’ essay “Death of the Free Web” I have a though that the once rogue 37signals-ish view, that there should be more web apps build for profit, is going mainstream? It’s about time, I suppose.
We’re discovering that you can’t create that sort of passion with free.
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And so we’ve begun searching for and creating services that not only solve problems, but also solve them in a way that puts the customer first. In doing so we’re creating smaller, but more lasting and passionate communities of people that believe not only in the products, but in the vision and principles behind them.The free web is dead. Good riddance.
Via @janrezac
An opensouce library that brings database features into your JavaScript applications.
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- Small file size, extremely fast queries
- Powerful JavaScript centric data selection engine
- Database inspired features such as count, update, and insert
- Robust cross browser support
- Easily extended with your own functions
- Compatible with any DOM library (jQuery, YUI, Dojo, etc)
- Compatible with Server Side JS
Via WebAppers
In terms of images, the goal of web app developers is to serve the best quality images as efficiently as possible. This article will cover some useful techniques for doing this today and in the near future.
Article worth reading by Rob Banagale.
Positioning your HTML5 mobile web developer as the primary domestique (flanked by UX design and UI design) is the best way to cut through the “wind resistance” of developing for multiple mobile platforms.
Patrick McKanzie about his rework of Server Density pricing model. At the very least it’s a good inspiration of how you should approach your pricing strategy.
Also, have you read this one on pricing by Bidsketch founder?
Via @daeltar
Informative article over at A List Apart by Peter Gasston takes you through relative size units, viewport-relative lengths, calculated values and more.
Funny illustration by Kevin Cornell included.