The guy with the great hair at Web Dev Simplified has made a “How To Handle Permissions Like A Senior Dev” video which addresses the issues that my Engaging OS handles. He comes to a slightly different solution, relying on a third-party setup, something I hadn’t even thought of doing, abstracting out the permissions. And I think I’ve been made to understand that attributes are not just a better and more detailed way to organize the user/role’s permissions, but liberate the user/role from primacy in handling permissions.
Elsewhere
MacRumors summarizes Apple’s announcements at WWDC 2024 in 9 minutes. Onboard AI and ChatGPT integration. More configuration and multiple screens in Control Center. Sending even regular messages via satellite. And so much more, for real. A huge raft of announcements!
Maybe the single killer feature of the Apple Vision Pro: entire home not desk as office:
Walking around my entire apartment with Vision Pro on my head, strolling between large windows that cover different walls in each space, with specific rooms dedicated to certain kinds of work activities, felt like a radical extension of the standing desk.
Especially useful for those who work at home and have it to themselves for the workday.
Via Hacker News, this Chrome for Developers post dives into browser colors beyond RGB.
Jason Fried again, with an insight into Apple’s new Vision Pro that one important value proposition is recording:
What I think is super interesting about the Apple Vision Pro is the potential to be able to literally see through someone else’s eyes. Not just see their field of vision — you can get at that with head or eyeglass mounted cameras — but to actually see where they’re looking. To know what they’re focused on. To lock in with them. To see how they see. To watch them look from their point of view. Standing in someone’s shoes is one thing, but even if you could do that, you’d still be looking through your own eyes. But to literally see as they’d see from someone else’s point-of-view perspective feels groundbreaking. If I was making an app for this, I’d call it “See With”.
For the past few months I’ve retreated from working on a software product to, well, for a month after October 7th I didn’t seem to get much work done, then I was working on software systems for clients. Now dipping my toe back into RSSDeck, the biggest edifice I’ve ever created, I’m inspired by this short piece by Jason Fried, “To Make”:
I’ve consulted. I’ve done client work. I’ve advised. I’ve served on boards. I’ve invested. I’ve written books. I’ve spoken on the circuit. I’ve blogged for years. I have to say, I’ve found no greater professional joy than working with a tight group of people to ship and support our own products.
Jakob Nielsen has written a series of articles (8 so far) on UX in the age of AI. They are:
- AI Is First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years
- AI Vastly Improves Productivity for Business Users and Reduces Skill Gaps
- AI vs. Metaverse: Which Is the 5th Generation UI?
- UX Needs a Sense of Urgency About AI
- Prompt-Driven AI UX Hurts Usability
- ChatGPT Does Almost as Well as Human UX Researchers in a Case Study of Thematic Analysis
- How Much UX Do You Need for AI Projects?
- “Prompt Engineering” Showcases Poor Usability of Current Generative AI
David Pogue on Apple’s VisionPro:
Its development was supposedly insanely expensive, internally contentious, and repeatedly delayed. But the result is so advanced and polished, it makes Meta’s VR headsets look like Blackberries.
My take on VisionPro: Tim Cook knew that the iPhone is near perfect for what it is, and Apple needs a whole new level of difficult to keep pushing the envelope technologically. Maybe I’m getting carried away, but I’ve just realized how many of my website’s categories this post is relevant to — a lot!
In “What’s your problem with Tailwind?” Chris Ferdinandi of Go Make Things articulates and illustrates why I’ve instinctively shied away from CSS frameworks:
It is faster during the prototyping phase… And then there inevitably comes a time where I need to update the style. Now, instead of just making a single change on a single class in a CSS file, I make a dozen little changes across numerous HTML elements scattered across many pages.
Basically, the styling code ends up being in the HTML, where it does not belong, rather than in the CSS, where it does.
At Why Svelte?, the homepage states “CSS is component-scoped by default” — the “by default” being the compliment vice pays to virtue. Because at the Github discussion on this issue (Ability to disable css scope across entire application #4764), Svelte Core Member/Maintainer @Conduitry, 2nd in commits only to founder Rich Harris, writes:
In general, using global CSS everywhere is something we want to steer people away from, and doesn’t feel like something we want to natively make easy or tacitly endorse.
The “C” in “CSS” stands for “cascading” yet the purpose of scoping CSS in components is to neuter that cascade. For the poster of this issue, Svelte’s stance was a dealbreaker, as it would be for me too. Scoped CSS components are the wussy option, which is fine and in many cases perhaps more viable, but the wussy option they should remain.
Interesting, seeing Ars Technica’s slant on Twitter’s handling of Matt Walsh’s What is a Woman because, like most tech blogs, they lean establishment/woke, and I’d expect some pushback in the comments. But instead the comments are far more supportive of the movement (I’m trying to find a term to speak of it without speaking against it, but it objects to even being termed) than is the piece itself, and quite a few condemn the author and the publication for irresponsibly posting a link to the film. One gem by mikesmith (8y, 3,207 comments):
The next time a right-wing weirdo confidently declares that the definition of “woman” is inexorably linked to their genitalia ask them how many genitals they’ve personally inspected to be sure about it since they’re so confident.
What a mindblowing, humbling project: infinitemac.org — every Mac system since January 24th, 1984, in the browser!
Via Paul Graham, who chose Gerald Ford’s portrait as his favorite, “every american president, but they’re all cool and they all sport a mullet” by Cam Harless.
It’s over too quickly, these two great alliterative-entitled Americans in conversation, Alan Alda and Kevin Kelly on AA’s Clear+Vivid podcast. Alda has such a gracious voice, and Kelly’s meets it. Kelly introduces some novel standpoints, earning his “world’s most interesting man” Tim Ferris monicker. The impetus and much of the conversation revolves around AI chatbots.
genders.wtf is an outstanding use of this thing we call the World Wide Web. It’s nice that it takes a hot divisive topic and makes it genuinely human and funny.
Pull up a chair, Bob Iger absolutely regales us for over an hour on the A16Z podcast.
What a fabulous talk by Chris Coyier on the state of web design and development, “Websites are Good Now” at GatsbyConf [starts at 6:00]. He reviews our new advanced state of affairs in typography, imagery, layout, componentry (a new term to me but yes, that’s how we do it now), animation and hosting.
An awed shoutout to Raycast, which I presume the cool kids have been using for years. I had given up finding a contemporary equivalent for SizzlingKeys, a way to control the Apple Music app simply from the keyboard regardless of which app I’m using. With Raycast it’s a breeze to set keyboard hotkeys for many Music app operations, including all the ones I’ve ever thought of using.
A tweetstorm on tagging by Hillel, with issues I’ve been mulling over myself.
What a fabulous — and fabulously-presented — list of free Mac utilities recommended by Snazzy Labs.
A good ol’ rant by everyone against Microsoft in this Hacker News thread, this time about Teams. When o when will this monstrosity of a corporation die already. “Developer-friendly”; may the GitHub guys get what they deserve for selling out to the Borg.
So ifixit are really excited by the repairability of the new iPhone 14, the internals of which have been totally redesigned. This was barely mentioned at the launch, and interestingly did not carry over to the 14 Pros.
Great interview at Berkeley with alum and local Oakland boy Craig Federighi [Dec 2019].
Managing Editor of eVTOL News Dan Gettinger rounds up recent developments by eVTOL leader Archer, Beta, Eve, Joby, Lilium, Volocopter and Wisk.
Reflecting on this nice history of Meteor, the first reactive web framework, I never could build anything with it, though did attend a number of London meetups, because I was seeking reactivity and componentization after building increasingly functional websites. Only once Vue came along did I get the aha moment.
Tom Johnson, author of “I’d Rather Be Writing”, a blog on technical writing, chronicles his journey away from smartphones. We know the topic but the author is pretty specific in his upset regarding how he feels that the phone has degraded his sense of self.
Sometimes, I’d occasionally pull out my phone without any particular reason, unlock the screen, and just stare at it dumbly, not sure about which app to open. When I caught myself doing this, I was kind of shocked, but also too desensitized to act. At every spare moment of inattention, I occupied my focus with some info from my phone. Something was wrong.
So Marc Andreessen’s interview with Tyler Cowen is making some waves because he seemed unable to justify Web3 (see tweets from Ian Bremmer, and, more predictably caustically, Nassim Nicholas Taleb). Personally I think Andreesse ha’s made the case better elsewhere, for instance, saying that if the internet had originally had a money layer then we’d never have had spam. But for me, as the developer of a new RSS reader, I was more interested in Tyler’s question about RSS:
Tyler Cowen: Do you still use an RSS reader?
Mark Andreessen: I do. This is actually an exciting moment on that topic for those of us who love these things. I use Feedly, which I like a great deal. It’s a guy. The guy who does it is a guy who used to work for us, a wonderful guy. I think it’s a great product and the inheritor of the now-lost Google Reader, the ruthlessly executed Google Reader.
This is talking about books, but Substack — one of our companies — has a new reader. It’s primarily for reading Substack. It basically is recreating, in my view, the best of what Google Reader had. That’s the other one that is getting a lot of use right now. I use both of those.
TC: Why does RSS at least seem to be so much less important than before?
MA: RSS is one of those things. I would say this gets into a broader, overarching, huge debate-fight happening in the tech industry right now. Internet got built on two models, which are diametrically opposed.
So Marc Andreessen uses Feedly and Substack! I wonder why both. I also want to know which reader TC uses — I seem to recall him saying that he does use one. The man seems to reply to hoi polloi — maybe I’ll ask him.
Incidentally I was surprised that this was not one of the better Conversations with Tyler. It didn’t really warm up into a good actual converation. For instance, I’d have thought MA would have asked TC, the world’s most renowned information omnivore, which RSS reader he uses. MA came across as a bit robotic, whereas I hadn’t gotten that impression from him before.
Venkatesh invites us to join him in exploring the hive mind (very meta). What a candy-maker, this one.
A reminder to just ship it:
I was scrolling their landing page and I was happy and furious at the same time. Someone solved the problem that I was solving. It was like someone literally read my mind and started coding. WHAT.
I have previously sent a video of my app to a couple of people (closest I came to shipping it) so I started getting suspicious if someone actually shared the video of my app with these people because they were solving literally the same problem, and they most of the features that I had.
I started getting this overwhelming happy, sad, and panicky feeling. I literally cannot explain how I felt while scrolling their page.
Tony Fadell from his new Build book:
And you have to hold on to that “why” even as you build the “what”—the features, the innovation, the answer to all your customers’ problems. Because the longer you work on something, the more the “what” takes over—the “why” becomes so obvious, a feeling in your gut, a part of everything you do, that you don’t even need to express it anymore. You forget how much it matters.
When you get wrapped up in the “what,” you get ahead of people. You think everyone can see what you see. But they don’t. They haven’t been working on it for weeks, months, years. So you need to pause and clearly articulate the “why” before you can convince anyone to care about the “what.”
In an interview on Israel’s national broadcaster Kan, this is a fair-minded well-informed backgrounder on Temple Mount tensions.
At TidBits Adam Engst points out that there are other professionals using Macs beyond “developers, photographers, filmmakers, 3D artists, scientists, music producers” who may not necessarily need such giant power but could nonetheless do with some improvements.
I remain flabbergasted that the FaceTime cameras in even Apple’s latest Macs are so pathetic. Even the cheapest iPad and iPhone put the newest Mac cameras to shame, and quite a few iPad and iPhone models have Face ID support for authentication. We’re talking about technology that Apple has used numerous times. So why isn’t it in Macs?
…
You can get an iPad with cellular connectivity, so why not a MacBook? The lack of a cellular option for Apple’s laptops has been a glaring omission for years and is yet another example of how Apple doesn’t acknowledge the needs of mobile professionals.
I hadn’t thought of any of these things, but they are obvious.
The kids wanted a Nintendo Switch. I thought — and was advised — a used Wii would be wise. Because kids, we now have both. Ever since my first computer, an Apple //c, your churlish host has considered a gaming console redundant and wasteful. But, like Apple, Nintendo it seems is a universe of excellence into which to dive. Yamauchi No. 10 Family Office is the website of the Nintendo founding family. Cool scrolling, ambitious mission, constant motion, and the music sounds like Son of Jeff Lynne.
eVTOL Innovation YouTube channel extols the Lilium as the most promising of the upcoming ways we will fly.
During this -26.4% period of reckoning for Facebook, David Goldman has linked to his 2012 essay What if Facebook is really worth $100 billion?
Where are the ads targeted to my tastes – harpsichords, assault rifles, kosher cookbooks, and cat toys? Perhaps I haven’t posted enough for the Matrix to process my profile. Still, I suspect that the more people use Facebook, the less the computers really will know about them … What makes Facebook so popular? The answer, I think is that Facebook exalts the insignificant.
Me, I never understood why Facebook and Microsoft are valued alongside Apple, Google and Amazon, which seem to have locks on more fundamental aspects of our lives: Apple for our increasingly central digital devices, Google for information garnered via those devices, and Amazon for fulfilling much of our material consumption. Yes, Facebook seems to have a lock on our relationships with friends and family, but it’s likely that nobody wants that intermediated by anything more than a tool; it’s the part we most want to keep keeping real.
Microsoft seems to have saved its bacon by going into gaming — which it totally deserves having developed the XBox — and by buying GitHub — and then in turn NPM! — and moving closer than any other corporation to open source, which was a scarily brilliant move that kind of upgrades its own DNA as a software maker (even as it likely somehow eventually stymies human progress). Its other big purchase, LinkedIn, strengthens M$‘s lock on the domain they’ve dominated for decades: the workplace. To me the Michael Scott social network seems more feasible to monetize than Facebook, but beyond that, the workplace feels at home with Microsoft; a Microsoft product need only be almost as good as a competitor’s to be selected. It’s a great brand that way. I guess. And being wrapped up in the Apple ecosphere one can forget that Microsoft remains the dominant player in device operating systems. Nonetheless in comparison to these other giants M$ seems a company just trying to keep up — though wasn’t it ever thus yet things continue to work out just fine for them.
Whereas Facebook’s Metaverse, without having watched the video, seems to either be a quest to dominate the online identity business, which, while suitably and juicily ambitious and evil, does not seem to be as giant a business as the others. Or else the Metaverse is a revisit of Second Life with improved resolution. Only if human existence on earth goes very pear-shaped indeed might people prefer this Virtual Reality Metaverse to a pair of Apple Vision shades, and of course if things got that bad we wouldn’t have the working infrastructure to power our Oculus Shmockuluses. Rather, perhaps Meta’s future is in analytics — even its new name suggests so — which is (hopefully) not as big a business as that of the other FAANGs.
A compilation of all eVTOLs.
The design of Lotus’s upcoming electric vehicle looks like a sleeker Esprit, reports Hearst’s Road & Track; when it’s released we can say we saw the blueprints for this car two years ago.
CSS bug still not squashed: In Safari, display:flex does not work on many HTML elements, such as legend. Legend!
As of Jan 14th, Marco Arment’s iOS podcasting app Overcast is now using Apple’s system font. Many commented on the change — (a few) people do care. Marco writes tantalizingly:
The way forward for Overcast is to use system fonts. You’ll see.
Inverse is a beautifully designed web magazine [should Web be capitalized?], a Joshua Topolsky joint alongside a stable of others that I’ve noticed are designwise a cut above what else is out there — Input, which is similar to Inverse and actually the two seem to unhelpfully overlap — and W, a women’s fashion mag also published by Bustle Digital Group that I normally wouldn’t have noticed but am enjoying the design.
Yet outstanding web artisanship notwithstanding, can a magazine survive if it feels ultimately corporate, which seems a danger when the job title changes from co-founder or Editor-in-Chief to Chief Content Officer, Culture & Innovation?
In Inverse the writing itself feels pretty generic, less tours-de-force by expert than relentless plodding coverage. Article after article appears on a single scroll; you never reach the end of the page, and although this is convenient, I’ve never liked this innovation, I feel overwhelmed and exhausted by it.
While the pages as a whole look great, the fact is I am not reading the articles; the san-serif body text looks like it’s less to be read than looked at. Also, it’s too far to the right on the screen. And there’s a little wobble.
From the case study by web shop Code and Theory, it appears Input and Inverse have been merged onto the same content management system, and Input was Topolsky’s technology mag baby but BDG also acquired science and entertainment site Inverse from elsewhere. No wonder the overlap.
They have a rationale for the infinite scroll:
In a world where scrolling through feeds feels second-nature, we designed Input and Inverse without traditional homepages. Upon landing on inputmag.com or inverse.com, readers see an infinite scroll of stories. Each story offers a snippet—the headline, maybe a quote, or a key stat, along with some information. The reader can then expand that story in the feed to read more, or continue scrolling.
When one story finishes, users scroll right back into the infinite stream of stories.
The stream can also be interrupted by rocks—curated content modules, e-commerce breakers and other fun interactive moments for the reader.
Maybe I’m unrepresentative of what most people like to do on the web, but I think this approch misguided. On an infinite scroll, reader becomes skimmer. Now maybe skimming is what you actually want readers to be doing on your site, not really reading the articles, thereby perhaps seeing and acting more on ads? All well and good, but skimming is less valuable and satisfying than reading an article set in a serif where the page ends when the article ends. If I read a piece, I want to feel I’ve read a piece.
One more thing: none of the subtitles has been informative but neither are they witty, rather they demonstrate that what’s leading is design not content.
In Firefox, when CSS’s scroll-snap is turned on, scrolling is broken. Yet the only mention of the problem that I can find is this open bug report at Bugzilla, “Trackpad scrolling gets stuck on containers with ‘scroll-snap-type: x mandatory’” featuring an unambiguous video of the problem. Given that both the Web and laptops are rather popular these days, I’d have thought this problem would have garnered much more attention. For me it has been a showstopper, finally causing me to make Chrome my default browser.
It’s embarrassing but I’ve never really gotten the hang of the service, so I’m glad HN surfaced Tasshin & Brian Hall’s A Guide to Twitter.
Because the Marvel intro music is replaying in my mind’s ear (composed I believe by the great Michael Giacchino), I went to YouTube and found Every Marvel Intro. Turns out the first time we heard this brief yet potent bit was Dr Strange.
At Starter Story, Ed Baldoni, founder of Concrete Countertop Solutions, tells the story of how his business has reached $1.1m in monthly revenue.
I was a developer/ home builder for over 40 years. As a builder, I was always looking to stay ahead of the curve and offer new ideas to my clients … Our Z Counterform System for countertops and Z Poolform System for concrete pool coping are the go-to solutions for cast-in-place concrete forms. With a small but dedicated team, we grew this business from an idea to over $12M in revenue in 10 years.
Exciting story, exciting product.
The best Star Trek starships by Josh Tyler at Giant Freakin Robot.
Nice appreciative review at Cult of Mac of the latest Foundation episode, “The Missing Piece”.
This week’s episode gave him the Lee Paciest showcase any of your finer Lee Paces could hope to deliver. Appearing to be on death’s door yet radiating immortality, staggering through the desert with red, peeling skin and dirty feet, a false messiah nearly killing himself to gain even more power. This is the kind of thing that simply has to be seen.
Lee Pace for James Bond. Or Scaramanga at least.
A note from the MetaCompany:
On October 28th, 2021, Facebook decided to commit trademark infringement and call themselves “Meta”. They couldn’t buy us, so they tried to bury us by force of media. We shouldn’t be surprised by these actions — from a company that continually says one thing and does another. Facebook and its operating officers are deceitful and acting in bad faith, not only towards us, but to all of humanity.
Vue core team member Ben Hong discusses using Nuxt 2 with Notion. Nuxt is the web dev tool I chose, Notion a major new Web platform. Exciting. Then Notion goes down in the middle of the livestream, handled by Hong with aplomb. Code Zen indeed from this “developer / psychologist hybrid”.
I agree: There is something endemic to online communication that exacerbates the dislike of and frustration with people with different values, writes Michelle Goldberg. And there’s nothing like a simple study, as stark as a thought experiment, to sharpen the mind:
[The Polarization Lab] recruited 1,220 Twitter users who identified as either Democrats or Republicans, offering to pay them $11 to follow a particular Twitter account for a month. Though the participants didn’t know it, the Democrats were assigned to follow a bot account that retweeted messages from prominent Republican politicians and thinkers. The Republicans, in turn, followed a bot account that retweeted Democrats.
…
“Nobody became more moderate,” said Bail. “Republicans in particular became much more conservative when they followed the Democratic bot, and Democrats became a little bit more liberal.”
Hiconsumption presents the lovely Lambos.
Londonist visits the two new Tube stations, Battersea Power Station and Nine Elms.
What a great piece on the dysfunctionality of online advertising at the now-defunct The Correspondent, “The new dot com bubble is here: it’s called online advertising” [2019] by Jesse Frederik and Maurits Martijn.
Picture this. Luigi’s Pizzeria hires three teenagers to hand out coupons to passersby. After a few weeks of flyering, one of the three turns out to be a marketing genius. Customers keep showing up with coupons distributed by this particular kid. The other two can’t make any sense of it: how does he do it? When they ask him, he explains: “I stand in the waiting area of the pizzeria.”
Safari in iOS 15 is enough of a redesign to warrant reading a primer. Thanks, TidBits, for Josh Centers’ “Hot New Features in Safari in iOS 15 and iPadOS 15”
Want to close all open tabs so you can start fresh with Tab Groups? Press and hold the Done text label to reveal the secret option. Why Apple hid it there is baffling, and there’s zero indication that “Done” would have any secondary function.
Gordon Brander thinks seriously about the Web vis-a-vis mobile.
By now, the web’s network advantage had evaporated. The iPhone’s native apps were internet apps, sandboxed, and talking HTTP, just like a web app. The iPhone was designed for a world that included the web. The web was not designed for a world that included the iPhone.
Bryan Braun recreated classic Mac screensavers in CSS only! It’s cool that Warp only uses 9 different stars to create that star field. [via Hacker News]
Awesome triangular semi-transparent Japanese sauna by architect Taichi Kuma.
I wanted a way in Apple Mail to list all emails from VIPs to which I’ve not yet replied. After googling, I found a nice solution at MakeUseOf: “4 Mac Mail Productivity Tips All Professionals Must Know” (2019).
So I made a Smart Mailbox “VIP Unreplied” with all the following rules:
- Sender is VIP
- Message was not replied to
- From
does not containdonotreply - Message is not in mailbox “Already Replied”
And in the “Already Replied” Smart Mailbox:
- Message has flag: Green
This second one because sometimes a message is handled in some other way than a reply or doesn’t need one.
I think the author’s almost actually serious in his call to ditch HTML for PDF:
PDFs are page-oriented. This is another fundamental freedom – toknow unambiguously which part of the document you are looking at.Compare to infinite-scroll HTML pages which are disorienting bydesign. This may sound trivial, but seriously: with infinite scrolling,you are fundamentally not in control of the reading experience.
Ha, since he posted the mainfesto as an actual PDF, when I copied that quote it pasted full of triple-spaces and some non-spaces, which I’ve kept for effect — so much for that! Still, the author does bring up many important issues.
Some negative-space logos.
In “How to Structure a Large Scale Vue.js Application”, one piece of advice new to me is to keep a flat components folder. Author Daniel Kelly lists no fewer than 8 reasons to do so. I’m gonna let this cook, as I have indeed found nested folders sometimes problematic for some of the reasons he lists.
For me the worst two bugbears are that when there are many tabs open, their labels all get reduced to a useless homogenous “index.vue”, and that Sublime Text’s superfast all-project search doesn’t provide links to files so I have to hunt them down in my file tree.
Update: Well I never actually tried it because the file paths don’t look like links, but blimmin’ heck, double-click them and the file opens. Sababa! You’ll get my $80 soon, soon, you Ozzie geniuses.
A reminder of the marvel and fragility of the Web by Jonathan Zittrain, law professor and computer science professor at Harvard, and a co-founder of its Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
What a sinking feeling, reading the announcement that Marginal Revolution is launching on Facebook’s Substack ripoff Bulletin”:https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/06/a-more-than-marginal-boost-for-marginal-revolution.html (I get a blank screen in Firefox, and naturally there’s no RSS feed). It’s interesting that trillion-dollar Facebook feels so threatened by Substack.
I just logged on to Facebook for the first time in a while for a few minutes. This piece, full of zingers, captures the feeling of sickly irritation well.
[Facebook] exists as a weird kind of social museum, where I exist as an observer watching people I knew 5, 10, 15 years ago grow up, get married, have children, all the while saying nothing in the silence. Intersperse the family announcements with memes and ads and other nonsense, and my newsfeed is nothing but a wasteland, a place I’ll find maybe one relevant, engaging update from someone I know for every fifty I couldn’t care less about.
To be fair, I have a friend who finds his Facebook feed uplifting and enjoyable.
From Nieman Media Lab, a newsy perspective on Apple’s recent WWDC 2021 announcements:
Will my iPhone’s algorithms decide that a breaking news story from Bloomberg is “urgent,” “important,” or “time-sensitive”? How about something more feature-y pushed by The Atlantic, or a game score notification from ESPN?
Federico Viticci of MacStories tours Apple’s new store on Via del Corso in Rome, saying it’s one of Apple’s most ambitious restoration projects to date.
At CSS Tricks, developer Josh Collinsworth is full of praise for Nuxt which he used to build a hangman game. The article also details how to he made his web app feel like a native app using transitions, vibrations and sounds. And then he discusses how he actually make it an app, explaining the pitfalls of various approaches. Great info.
Witness within a modern miracle, it’s iFixIt’s teardown of the M1 iMac!
Writing in TidBITS, Glenn Fleishman gives us 13 AirTag tracking scenarios.
Elle Griffin is serializing her novel on Substack and here lists others also publishing fiction on the platform.
Sometimes a cool story is strong enough to override my current aversion to The New York Times, and this interactive piece about Oval Office art qualifies.
This Dutch fellow tracked the mailing of an AirTag to his own home. It travelled 120km just go to 500m. Next he’s going to send one to Norway.
A bit mindblowing: put the browser itself in the cloud: Mighty [Hacker News discussion].
MacStories does an AirTag review roundup.
Craig Mod reveals the consolations of we the web-literate as he tinkers with his servers. Plus the man walks and writes rather well and is probably tall to boot.
OK I haven’t actually read this yet but really honestly intend to. Via Robin Rendle on CSS Tricks via Jim Nielsen’s Blog, A Complete Guide To Accessible Front-End Components by Vitaly Friedman in Smashing Magazine.
Andy Bell outlines new CSS functionality in Smashing Magazine.
Dated but still interesting: The Guardian looks at the rather disappointing design of Japanese newspaper websites.
The Basecamp fellows have released a new web development paradigm, Hotwire. I don’t quite get it, but with their pedigree and skill as the makers of Ruby on Rails, this could be big.
Dave Rupert does a nice job (April 2018) listing the pitfalls of card UIs. I’m beginning to think though that for Rupert, a long list of drawbacks is throat-clearing for “I’m going ahead with this.”
Metatags.io, a very nice tool to test your metatags. Bravo, makers.
It falls to Andrew Cunningham to take up the magisterial task of the Ars Technica review of macOS Big Sur.
3D model of Fallingwater by sighty for sale, including a portion of Bear Run, which interestingly gets cuts off even before the bridge that obviously crosses it, making this a model not of the house but of a model of it.
Boy, there are other models too. Here’s an interactive Fallingwater by archimore. It has the interior, even the raised rocks around the fireplace! (Though missing the grand swinging water heater.) The non-Wright dining-table chairs that Mrs Kaufman brought. The portrait of Edgar on the wall! Yet no walkway up to the Guesthouse, and no Guesthouse.
And another Fallingwater by Myles Zhang which does have the Gueshouse and ramp, even the steps into the swimming pool. And a very long stretch of Bear Run. It does have the round red water holer, but no furniture.
Would be good to merge these magnificent efforts to make a more detailed, canonical model.
“Indie developers need protection from monopolistic and anti-competitive practices from larger players in the market through strong government regulation, not a discount on their first $1m in sales.” “Apple’s 15% Deflection Tactic” by John Luxford.
How browsers work by Tali Garsiel.
CEO Chris Best talks Substack with Eric Johnson of Recode. Email as a reading medium, I’m not drawn to it, but maybe because I still live with spam.
Amusing comments at Marginal Revolution on Matthew Yglesias’s migration to Substack.
Head of Learning and Developer Advocate at NuxtJS Debbie O’Brien writes up their dogfooding experience using Nuxt to make the Nuxt web site.
I’m so pleased about the Apple blues.
iPhone 12 Pro Cinematic 4K: New York by Andy To. Make sure to watch at full resolution.
Hacking Apple by Sam Curry. Fascinating and amazing.
There are many utilities for macOS window management (looks like the most hackable and maybe powerful is Jigish Patel’s Slate) but what I personally rely on is a combination of TotalSpaces2 to keep the Spaces functionality that came and I think went with OS X Leopard; SizeUp for the snap functionality most easily found elsewhere (Moom, Spectacle, Cinch, Divvy, Amethyst); and Zooom/2 for moving and resizing windows and toggling sloppy focus, which I’ve not found anywhere else.
The above link to Zooom/2 is not however to its homepage but to a disk image I just posted because Zooom/2 is no longer available, as I realized when setting up a new Mac. You’re welcome.
MacWorld’s list of all the Apple Arcade games that support controllers.
Dave Seminara writes “When Your Favorite Companies Go Woke” in The Wall Street Journal (paywall).
I feel similarly regarding the homepage banners at Node.js (“#BlackLivesMatter”) and Linode (“Black Lives Matter. Linode is committed to social justice and equality.), both of which I rely on for my work. There are substitutes for Linode, but none for Node.
Coincidentally, I’m currently facing this issue myself: “Changes to SameSite Cookie Behavior – A Call to Action for Web Developers” by Mike Conca at Mozilla’s blog.
In wake of Phil Schiller’s ascent, Cult of Mac lists all the Apple Fellows.
Process
Architecture
Before building your site or system, plans are required for both the back and front ends.
Installation & configuration
As well as smarts, what really makes a successful implementation likely is experience.
Recently
Introducing version 3 of painter Juan Carlos Bronstein’s site
This one was a labor of love wherein the background remains dark, the panther pink.
Florida Council of Independent Schools adopts CSF’s Master In-Service system
The system handles re-certification for teachers at over 160 independent Florida schools.
A revamp and redesign for Antidote Europe
The site now features nation-based language selection and a campaign-based layout.
Progress at the Israel Center for Social & Economic Progress
The ICSEP redesign relies on “Goldens”, a CSS grid framework for the golden ratio.
Take Control Books, now with account management
Both the site editor and the 48,000+ userbase get a plethora of AJAXy features.
Come springtime, southeast England’s countryside is powered by ExpressionEngine
Countryside 2010 showcases hundreds of outdoor events and activities.
Get saltEE: salt-co.com retrofitted with ExpressionEngine
The EE-powered site needed to look just as it did when updated manually.
Extend ExpressionEngine’s reach with External Entries v2
Update, select from and insert into any MySQL database directly from an EE template.
Get more next/previous power in ExpressionEngine with Nearby Entries
Amplify the power of ExpressionEngine’s next/previous entries.
Introducing Tied Entries, a new dimension for ExpressionEngine sites
Traverse a site’s various channels via their relationship fields.
Securosis migrates from WordPress to ExpressionEngine
We imported scores of tags, hundreds of posts and members, and thousands of comments.
Schools association adopts web system to manage teacher training
The MIP system is used by hundreds of teachers and dozens of school administrators.
Deploying ExpressionEngine for a French charity gateway
We converted a clutch of HTML/CSS/Javascript files into a content-managed ExpressionEngine site.
Best Network Security switches from Joomla to ExpressionEngine
As a wise man once said, things should be as simple as they can be, but no simpler.
Archaeological Center auction #40 biggest yet
Bidders who could not travel to Tel Aviv for the auction relied on the website to view lots and bid.
products
eeMindBody (Free)
MindBody is a web-based management system widely used by yoga studios. Using MindBody's SOAP-based API, eeMindBody provides an easy way for a studio's ExpressionEngine web site to access its MindBody data.
External SAEF (Free)
Insert a row into any MySQL database table using a form on an ExpressionEngine page.
Tied Entries (Free)
An ExpressionEngine plugin to access content entries further than a single relationship away.
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