Wednesday, 18 August 2010

From the Apple Human Interface Guidelines:

When making design decisions regarding features in your application, it’s important to weigh the costs, not all of which are financial, against the potential benefits. Every time you add a feature to your application, the following things can happen:

Your application gets larger.

Your application gets slower.

Your application’s human interface becomes more complex.

You spend time developing new features rather than refining existing features.

Your application’s documentation and help become more extensive.

You run the risk of introducing changes that could adversely affect existing features.

You increase the time required to validate the behavior of your application.

Choosing appropriate features and devoting the needed resources to implement them correctly can save you time and effort later. Choosing poor feature sets or failing to assign appropriate design, engineering, testing, and documentation resources often incurs heavier costs later when critical bugs appear or users can’t figure out how to use your product.

and, the 80 percent solution:

During the design process, if you discover problems with your product design, you might consider applying the 80 percent solution—that is, designing your software to meet the needs of at least 80 percent of your users. This type of design typically favors simpler, more elegant approaches to problems.

If you try to design for the 20 percent of your target audience who are power users, your design may not be usable by the other 80 percent of users. Even though that smaller group of power users is likely to have good ideas for features, the majority of your user base may not think in the same way. Involving a broad range of users in your design process can help you find the 80 percent solution.

Reverse Engineering a Data Model #

Regular Expression Pattern to Clean Microsoft Word-Generated HTML #

Great stuff from Tim Mackey: a regex search pattern to clean Word-HTML cruft, to be run on your dirty data in two passes:

Removes unwanted tags:
<[/]?(font|span|xml|del|ins|[ovwxp]:\w+)[^>]*?>
Removes unwanted attributes: <([^>]*)(?:class|lang|style|size|face|[ovwxp]:\w+)=(?:'[^']*'|""[^""]*""|[^\s>]+)([^>]*)>

Check out the comments under Tim’s article for more.

Tuesday, 17 August 2010

HTML5 Reset #

Zen Coding #

“A new way of writing HTML and CSS code. Features a powerful abbreviation engine which allows you to expand expressions similar to CSS selectors into HTML code.”

Yay!

Update: Example syntax for creating a new HTML 5 page:

html:5>div#header>div#logo+ul#nav>li.item-$*5>a

In Texmate (there is a bundle), hit Cmd-E to expand the above into:

<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<html lang="en-US">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title></title>
</head>
<body>
    <div id="header">
        <div id="logo"></div>
        <ul id="nav">
            <li class="item-1"><a href=""></a></li>
            <li class="item-2"><a href=""></a></li>
            <li class="item-3"><a href=""></a></li>
            <li class="item-4"><a href=""></a></li>
            <li class="item-5"><a href=""></a></li>
        </ul>
    </div>
</body>
</html>

Markdown2Book #: Textmate bundle for compiling a Documentation project made of several Markdown files to HTML. Generates a TOC, a print version with all chapters on one page and HTML files for each chapter. Use references to easily link between your pages.

Digging Into Textmate #: Helpful tips worth re-remembering. Thanks to Zeldman.

SpriteMe #: Bookmarklet to help you combine multiple images on a page and create a CSS Sprite. And here’s a workflow example.

Saturday, 14 August 2010

Star Wars Weather #

Voogle Wireless #: Early this week Verizon and Google issued a joint statement to U.S. legislators titled “Verizon-Google Legislative Framework Proposal.” In this statement, Verizon-Google suggests exempting wireless broadband access from net neutrality. This was not an oversight. This is a departure from Google’s public stance and advocacy for net neutrality.

Journalism Warning Labels #

Wednesday, 11 August 2010

URL: Universal Noun #

Ryan Tomayko in How I Explained REST to My Wife:

“Machines don’t have a universal noun – that’s why they suck. Every programming language, database, or other kind of system has a different way of talking about nouns. That’s why the URL is so important. It let’s all of these systems tell each other about each other’s nouns.”

(REST as in Representational State Transfer.)

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Change File Permissions Recursively

Monday, 9 August 2010

To unlock all files in a folder and all its subfolders, open a terminal window and type (in OS X and most Unix systems I believe):

sudo chown -R yourusername /path/to/folder

It is good to do this to a folder of photographs that you are about to backup so that you avoid the backup failing half-way through when the backup script finds a locked file.

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    o´   `o

Sunday, 8 August 2010

Bespin Project #: Mozilla Labs project to build a web-based code editor using the emerging HTML5 standard. Could be the open source iPad code editor I have been looking for…

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