Panic’s ‘Code Editor’, and the Lack of Pro Apps for iPad
Panic’s discontinued Code Editor exposes how iPad restrictions and App Store economics keep powerful hardware from getting professional software.
Web Development
→
Where The Web Fonts Go
Some simple best practices for self-hosting web fonts in the cloud
Parcel Post
Recapturing the magic of early web development with modern tools
No More Masters
It’s time to change your Git repo’s default branch.
Hello world.
Restarting my blog means letting go of perfectionism and making room to share unfinished ideas and things I like.
Blogging is a Pain in the Ass
Thoughts on blogging, or trying to blog, in 2018
Jeremy Keith on Web vs Native
Peter-Paul Koch wrote a post suggesting it was time for web developers and advocates to “concede defeat — or, at least, concede that the web cannot, and should not, compete with native when it comes to complex, app-like structures.” In…
Living With Two Laptops (and Two Platforms)
Now I have two laptops. My MacBook Pro is relatively huge, but not that big, and it does absolutely everything I could want it to do, in style. My Surface Pro is smaller, thinner, and lighter. It does virtually everything—certainly…
My TYPO Berlin Talk: “The Weight of the Web”
Slides from the talk I just finished presenting at TYPO Berlin 2013. I was a ball of jet lag and nerves, based on the live-tweeting from @mfacomdes I think I got across what I wanted to, and that the bits that were interesting and…
Hi-DPI web typography on the Typekit Blog
A little something I wrote for the Typekit blog about high-density displays and their impact on readability. You could call this a preview for my talk at TYPO Berlin 2013 Touch, two weeks from tomorrow.
Coda 2 & Diet Coda
Hell yes. I've been beta testing Coda 2 for a few weeks — it's a fantastic update, still very much the same Coda I've enjoyed using for years, but totally cleaned up and refreshed. It's still the best way to edit static/PHP web sites on…
Adobe Shadow
A seriously cool new app for web designers who design sites for mobile devices, that lets you preview and inspect your work on many different devices all at once. The demo video is pretty awesome. (via Jason Santa Maria)
Developing Facebook’s New Photo Viewer
Yesterday I spent a few hours building an elaborate web photo gallery for our wedding photos before my wife and I realized we're more interested in seeing everyone's likes and comments than in building yet another elaborate web thing for…
Heroku Supports PHP! Yay! (Yes, Yay!)
This week I (re-)discovered that Heroku's polyglot Cedar stack supports PHP. The PHP support was launched a while back in partnership with Facebook, to attract developers of Facebook apps to Heroku's cloud. While it's not listed on their…
Gaug.es for iPhone
A really nice, simple iPhone interface for the really nice, simple website analytics service from GitHub (who acquired it a couple of weeks ago along with its developers, Ordered List). I tried using their web interface to look at my…
Little Printer
People I know who aren't even web people are tweeting and posting about this Little Printer thing. I agree, it looks really, really cute. It's hard to design an electronic gadget with that much personality that doesn't look like a…
Better web font loading with JavaScript
In my epic-length debut post for the Typekit blog, I explain why we use JavaScript (instead of just CSS) to load web fonts, what our JavaScript does at load time, some of the problems this method helps us solve, and how we've solved them.…
Frames of Interaction
Matt Gemmell explains one major reason why native apps have an edge on web apps: The calculator web app is running in the frontmost tab of a web browser app, which in turn is running on a smartphone. The device’s screen is no longer…
Ethan Marcotte’s “Responsive Web Design”
Almost as exciting as whatever comes out of today's WWDC announcements: A Book Apart's newest title launches tomorrow, on how web designs can (and should) adapt to the devices used to look at them, rather than force users to pan, scan and…
Google Apps Dropping IE7 Support on Aug 1
This is big: For web applications to spring even farther ahead of traditional software, our teams need to make use of new capabilities available in modern browsers. … For this reason, soon Google Apps will only support modern browsers.…
Adobe ‘CSS Regions’
Because heaven forbid they figure out how to make useful tools for the Web we have before trying to shove a bunch of print layout conventions into CSS.
‘Inflate’ Web Type with FitText
A new jQuery plugin for creating ginormous headlines that scale to fit the width of their parent elements, especially useful in fluid or responsive layouts. Just beware: Don't you dare let us catch you using FitText on paragraph text.…
Pow! Zero-Config Rack Serving for Mac OS X
There is no non-nerdy way to talk about this, so non-developers feel free to sit this one out. Pow is a Ruby/Rack application server written in Node.js, with CoffeeScript, by Sam Stephenson. Through a series of small hacks, Pow lets you…
Out Today: The Elements of Content Strategy, from A Book Apart
It's amazing how every time ABA launches a new title about making websites it feels like an event, one that smart people worth paying attention to are genuinely excited about. Erin Kissane's Elements of Content Strategy is (naturally)…
Regarding Happy Cog Hosting
When I was a full-time freelancer, doing agency-type work, a big chunk of my business involved setting up and managing my clients' servers for them. In fact, this was part of my sales pitch to clients. I'm not just going to build you a…
Getting Hardboiled with CSS3 2D Transforms
Andy Clarke demonstrates one of the hottest CSS3 features: using transform to manipulate the size, placement and even rotation of elements. (And, as if that weren’t enough, tosses in some cool :nth-of-type pseudo selector action,…
It’s December, and 24 Ways is Back
24 Ways, "the advent calendar for Web geeks", is back with an article by Drew McLellan on progressive enhancement for embedded maps. There's always tons of good stuff posted here during the holiday season. Highly recommended for people…
Ageism? Really?
Scrunchup is a "web magazine" (some would call it a "blog") by and for young web professionals, where by "young" we mean "21 or younger". Anna Debenham is one of the founders and wrote a post about her experiences being discriminated…
In Which I Cut My Hosting Costs by 89% By Switching to Heroku
This morning/afternoon, I needed to make a long, long, long overdue change to my dear friend Lucy Knisley's web site. It was a simple change, literally just adding two images to a static HTML file. But I'm me, and that's not heroic…
The .ly Domain Space To Be Considered Unsafe
Short version: Ben Galbraith and his partner, sex blogger Violet Blue, were using vb.ly as a URL shortener for sexy web content and the Libyan government cancelled their domain registration. Additionally, the Libyans have decided to stop…
Anil Dash on the new Gourmet Live
Speaking of Condé Nast properties, internet hipsters, and the iPad: Anil Dash describes the all-star team of nerds (Paul Ford! Garrett Murray! Andre Torrez! Liz Spiers! And don't forget: Anil Dash!) who brought Gourmet back as a…
10 Things You Didn’t Know About The New Twitter.com
Of interest to Twitter Platform developers: the new site uses a new version of the @anywhere JavaScript SDK announced at the Chirp conference in April. And the other big Chirp announcement—Annotations, which would allow API developers to…
Apple Shocks The World, Announces Big, Helpful Policy Changes for App Store
Apple has revised some of the most controversial provisions of the App Store developer agreement — including section 3.3.1, which banned apps created using third-party tools like Flash. Executing JavaScript, Python, or other code on the…
Motorola Buys 280 North, Whose Technology is Basically Apple Stuff Ported to JavaScript, to Help “Foster the Android Ecosystem”
280 North's products are: 280 Slides, a web-based clone of Apple's Keynote slideshow app Atlas, a web-based clone of Apple's Interface Builder tool Objective-J, a port of Apple's Objective-C language to JavaScript And Cappuccino, a…
Neven Mrgan Compares iMac, HP & Dell’s Websites
Turns out almost everything you need to know about the differences between these companies can be found out by just looking at how differently they show off their flagship products on the Web. Apple's iMac site is clean, focused, and…
BBB Punk’d Into Giving An A- Rating to Hamas
Reputation isn't something you can pay for, but a positive BBB rating (apparently) is: The author of the website BBBRoundup went a step further to illustrate just how easy it is for an entity to earn the BBB's seal of approval. He…
Fun with HTTP
Following a series of events I won't recap here, this morning I launched Echofon for Mac to discover my password had been cleared out and instead of tweets Twitter was sending back a 401 Unauthorized response code. I clicked on the error…
“A conversation I have every month or so”
Man vs. Flash-based restaurant website. Guess who wins. (via DF)
‘Facebook login’
Web designers' worst nightmare come true: Fascinating. ReadWriteWeb has a weblog post that ranks highly in Google’s search results for “Facebook login”. The comments on the post are filled with complaints from confused people who think…
Adobe’s CTO: Flash Player is Fine, Thank You, We’re Fixing It Anyway
So, they don't have any known crashing bugs, and until now haven't seen much need to actually write a Mac-optimized version of Flash Player. Except now they're rewriting Flash's graphics engine, going from a direct port of the Windows…
Zeldman: Flash, iPad, Standards
Jeffrey Zeldman: Lack of Flash in the iPad (and before that, in the iPhone) is a win for accessible, standards-based design. Not because Flash is bad, but because the increasing popularity of devices that don’t support Flash is going to…
DF: What if Flash Were an Open Standard?
Gruber, in discussing the current blogstorm over Apple's continued non-support for Adobe Flash in iPhone OS, touches on why Apple—who certainly have no problem with proprietary technology so long as it's theirs—are being such champs about…
Pleased to Meet You, Won’t You Guess My Name?
While working on a little Rails project this week, I discovered something very interesting (and little-documented) in ActiveSupport: Module.model_name. It's a core extension to support Rails's handling of models as RESTful resources, as…
Maybe I Needing Later
“If you don’t paying, then I delete files that I send you,” he responded, “I don’t want deleting your web, but it is not fair for me. I know you changing my password and I can’t logging on, but I don’t needing SQL or server password to…