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.
We must abandon invisibility as a goal for interfaces; it’s misleading, unhelpful and ultimately dishonest. It unleashes so much potential for unusable, harmful and frustrating interfaces, and systems that gradually erode users and designers agency. Invisibility might seem an attractive concept at first glance, but it ignores the real, thorny, difficult issues of designing and using complex interfaces and systems.
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
John Gruber does some reality checking:
The desire for the “Oh, how the mighty Apple has fallen” narrative is so strong that the narrative is simply being stated as fact, evidence to the contrary be damned. It’s reported as true simply because they want it to be true. They’re declaring “The King is dead; long live the King” not because the king has actually died or abdicated the throne, but because they’re bored with the king and want to write a new coronation story.
Nice article about the classic dropdown menu problem – the one with the mouse cursor path. Even better, the post ends with a jQuery-menu-aim thingy :-)
Think of it as a WordPress template but for your next web application.
I should read this, maybe you want too.
A Gesture Abstraction Library for both MSPointer and WebKit Touch APIs
Blueprints by Codrops starting with full width image slider and elastic content slider.
a fast and fully-featured autocomplete library
…fast and lightweight (3KB) javascript utility that detects browser and pixel ratio, allowing you to serve conditional JavaScript and CSS files. Rebuilt from it’s jQuery predecessor, it’s now 50% faster.