February 2012
1 post
Design is how it works. Design is what it looks like. Design is it.
Design isn’t, however, a concrete component. Each thing isn’t the essence of 1/nth part design – there is no discreet measure for this essential element of a thing. Rather, design permeates the form, function, intent, and feeling of any made thing – the gestalt.
The nature of design is process: from an existing...
October 2011
1 post
August 2011
1 post
3 tags
OAuth is good for you
I dislike making accounts. I dislike that Keychain sync will disappear when MobileMe goes. I also dislike 1Password’s UI and its kludgy integration. Finally, I dislike typing usernames and passwords.
OAuth allows users to forget about “logging in” an instead think about their identity in a more realistic way. When you sign-in to a website with Facebook, you’re providing...
March 2011
2 posts
Twitter isn't evil or anything, its gonna be ok.
Twitter is not a developer’s OS but that is alright.
Twitter has grown, in part due to its third party clients. But as they scale, they want to ensure that the Twitter experience will scale as well. Although we all might feel tremendous ownership over it after bringing it into our lives, it is still Twitter’s platform.
After this, the “simple twitter client” will no...
1 tag
Event Delegation with Prototype and LowPro
Tumblr makes me put something here before a code block—
Event.addBehavior {
"button:click": ->
alert "A button was clicked."
this.disable().update "Clicked"
}
LowPro makes it easy to delegate events. The advantage of event delegation
is that you can add to your event pool without adding individual listeners
to many elements, greatly simplifying your...
January 2011
1 post
1 tag
Snap your pixels
Snap to pixels in Illustrator CS5
Unsnapped
Snapped
Snap it all
November 2010
1 post
Accelerating 417east
Recently I’ve been experimenting with methods for decreasing load on 417east. Currently it hosts 38 virtual hosts running on nginx: a few Rack applications passed through mod_rack; half are passed through PHP-FPM; the rest being static HTML sites. The server also runs sshd and afpd (so Mac users smile), and tends to run low on memory if applications leak.
First, I switched from Apache to...
August 2010
1 post
Pascal famously said, “I wrote you a long letter because I didn’t have time to make it shorter.” The longer the argument, the sloppier and less well-thought out it appears.
Found on ALA.
July 2010
1 post
Consider this:
if (@current_location == :nyc)
@pizza_sux = true
end
The internets are drastically mistaken about pizza quality. New York’s average slice is really awful. It’s wet, huge, greasy, and predictable. Chicago suffers from the same ailments.
June 2010
1 post
April 2010
2 posts
Prototype 1.7, nice. →
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2241-a-little-sketch... →
A little sketching is an exploration. A lot of sketching is a procrastination.
March 2010
3 posts
These United States: Daytrotter Session recorded... →
Huge line-lengths, sqrshd type — awesome site, poorly finished. Too bad, so sad.
http://chikuyonok.ru/ambilight/ →
"Studying the computers"
Apparently, my four years of design education equate to “studying computers.” I suppose had I been born a decade ago I’d have “studied pencils.”
December 2009
1 post
November 2009
2 posts
iatrogenic (comparative more iatrogenic, superlative most iatrogenic)
(medicine, of a disease etc.) Induced by the words or actions of the physician.
2003, Michael L. Raulin, Abnormal Psychology, Pearson Education, Inc. (2003), p. 494,Another group argues that the diagnosis is being overused and that many of the diagnosed cases are iatrogenic, or unintentionally shaped or caused by the...
My peers and I are encouraged to attend a weekly panel of design professionals who talk about their work, the industry and employment in design. The Q&A period is usually pretty silent, likely for two reasons: uninterested attendees and uninteresting topics. Last Monday one of the few questions asked with this: ”How should we go about quitting a design job?”.
The same way...