Published
Weekend Reading – Proofreading at T+0.5
Design Objective
§ The iOS Design Cheat Sheet: everything you need to know about resolution, icons, element sizing, status and navigation bars, iconography, and typography.
§ Email as UI:
But I strongly believe that the majority of "regular" users would far prefer receiving an email than having to go to your site, remember their password, log in, and only then reach their goal.
In fact, I'm working on a new app right now, and our first iteration UI is simply a status update sent via email. We will add a place you can login … later.
§ Replacing The User Story With The Job Story:
Job Stories are great because it makes you think about motivation and context and de-emphasizes adding any particular implementation. Often, because people are so focused on the who and how, they totally miss the why. When you start to understand the why, your mind is then open to think of creative and original ways to solve the problem.
I just started using job stories, and it does change how we define what we're working on. Our stories now focus on what customers expect the product to do for them.
§ Great copy is key to great design. Designing The Words: Why Copy Is A Design Issue covers three common copy mistakes and how to overcome them.
§ Make your Web forms look more like printed forms with Grid Forms. I just added this to a new UI I'm working on (few minutes of minor HTML tweaks), and it does feel better than stock Bootstrap, on both desktop and mobile.
§ I like iOS7 better than iOS6, but still feel it is flat design carried too far. Designing for iOS7: Perils & Pluses:
You can see a lot of places in iOS7 where the flat design style makes the hierarchy of actions less clear.
Lines of Code
A common fallacy is to assume authors of incomprehensible code will somehow be able to express themselves lucidly and clearly in comments.
§ If you like how iOS shows a progress at the top of the page, you can use Pace.js to add this to any browser. Just remember to disable it on /Mobile Safari/ – one progress bar is enough.
§ On the difference between advertised and actual reliability – Getting Real About Distributed System Reliability:
I think we should insist on a little more rigor and empiricism in this area.
I would love to see claims in academic publication around practicality or reliability justified in the same way we justify performance claims—by doing it.
§ Hone your regular expression skills with the Regex Crossword, part crossword puzzle, part Sudoku.
§ 7 Reasons Webhooks Are Magic. We've been using Iron.io to handle Webhooks and, yes, magic.
§ How To Survive a Ground-Up Rewrite Without Losing Your Sanity. A great tear-down of why Big Rewrite projects go bad, and why you should choose succession instead:
Fortunately, there's a very simple test to determine if you're falling prey to the False Incrementalism: if after each increment, an Important Person were to ask your team to drop the project right at that moment, would the business have seen some value? That is the gold standard.
§ Canadian vs. American coding styles.
§ Everything you need to know about the implementation quirks of CSS transitions: Thank God We Have A Specification!.
§ Deploying JavaScript Applications is mostly about shipping responsive apps, with great tips for minimizing what different clients load, merging resources and parallelzing them, and using CDNs effectively.
Did you know? The collective noun for a group of programmers is a merge-conflict.
Startup Life
§ Leadership without managment:
Recognizing that software engineers are natural leaders changes the way we organize them
One need not have middle management; a flat structure with open communication and flexible teams allows software engineers’ natural leadership to develop
Their big takeaway was how easy it was to make a lot of money without regard to the niceties of creating much value. He finished with the memorable line, "You never know what book you wrote until you know what book people read."
None Of The Above
§ Top 20 Hidden iOS 7 Features That You Likely Don’t Know About, including the URLs list, changing text size, caller blocking, and controlling your iPhone with head movements.
§ Extraversion and Introversion: What You Believe Is Probably Wrong.
§ Netflix Spoiler Foiler – you can now tweet about the Breaking Bad finale.
§ This is big: FDA removes roadblocks to medical app innovation.
§ Why I Hacked Apple’s TouchID, And Still Think It Is Awesome:
As a technology, fingerprint biometrics has a flaw that’s likely to be repeatedly exposed and fixed in future products. We shouldn’t let this distract us or make us think that fingerprint biometrics should be abandoned, instead we should ensure that future products and services are designed with this in consideration. If we play to its strengths and anticipate its weaknesses, fingerprint biometrics can add great value to both security and user experience.
§ The shittiest project I ever worked on. I won't ruin the punch line, but it mirros my expericen of everything that's wrong with big companies and their disconnected stakeholders.
Somewhat related, On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.
§ Equus Bass 770 is one bad ass modern-day muscle car.
§ Me too! Corey Phillips:
I do my best proofreading 0.5 seconds after hitting send.