On Daring Fireball John Gruber proposes that the current enthusiasm for “flat” interface design can be explained by the introduction of retina displays. Gruber argues that high resolution screens are a natural fit for clean, typographic interfaces, whereas crude low resolution screens need skeuomorphism’s visual “parlor tricks” to disguise their inferior pixel density:
The trend away from skeuomorphic special effects in UI design is the beginning of the retina-resolution design era. Our designs no longer need to accommodate for crude pixels. Glossy/glassy surfaces, heavy-handed transparency, glaring drop shadows, embossed text, textured material surfaces [...] work on sub-retina displays because sub-retina displays are so crude. On retina displays, as with high quality print output, these techniques are revealed for what they truly are: an assortment of parlor tricks that fool our eyes into thinking we see something that looks good on a display that is technically incapable of rendering graphic design that truly looks good.
If Gruber’s hypothesis is correct, then how can we explain the fact that highly skeuomorphic interfaces only started to appear en masse around 2008, when the iOS app store launched? UI designers have had to accomodate low resolution displays for decades, yet for the most part the dominant design styles have been “flat” rather than heavily textured or skeuomorphic. Even in recent years that has been the case, at least in the field of web design. The web design gallery siteInspire, launched in 2008, has showcased thousands of interfaces that are (mostly) devoid of decorative embellishments, which is a testament to the enduring popularity of minimalist design.
When working with the Big Cartel ecommerce platform it is common to map a custom domain to your store. For example, you might like to use the domain mysite.com instead of your default Big Cartel subdomain mysite.bigcartel.com.
Big Cartel provide instructions for configuring domain mapping using a CNAME record, so that www.mysite.com becomes an alias for mysite.bigcartel.com. This works great except for one thing: if a customer omits the www prefix from your store’s URL they will get a big fat 404 error. This is because your CNAME record only matches the www subdomain.
Smashing Magazine recently published Dear Web User: Please Upgrade Your Browser, an article by Louis Lazaris encouraging regular Internet users to abandon Internet Explorer and upgrade to a modern web browser. After reading the piece, I tweeted that while I appreciate the sentiment, trying to convince stubborn IE users to upgrade is like whistling in the wind. By which I mean that those users are a) never going to read an article on Smashing Magazine and b) not going to upgrade their browser until they upgrade their computer. Hardly anyone chooses Internet Explorer as their web browser – they use it because it came pre-installed on their computer, and will continue using it for the lifespan of the computer. Any number of articles on Smashing Magazine won’t change that fact.
Yesterday I bought myself a copy of Jeff Atwood’s new ebook Effective Programming: More Than Writing Code, which collects some of the best articles from his popular blog Coding Horror. Sure, I can read all the articles in Effective Programming for free on Coding Horror, but I chose to buy the book anyway, and if you enjoy Jeff’s writing then you should too.
When Rdio rolled out their redesigned application recently, I was intrigued by the app’s scrolling implementation. There are no conventional browser scrollbars in Rdio, and instead scrollbars appear on-demand when the user’s mouse enters a scrollable portion of the interface, or when the user performs a mousewheel or trackpad scroll. Rdio’s implementation mimics the experience of scrolling in OSX Lion using a trackpad pointing device, except that it works for any user, on any platform.
Inspired by Rdio’s scrollbars I have created a jQuery plugin that emulates Lion’s trackpad-style scrolling, regardless of the user’s pointing device, browser, or platform.
I created this boilerplate for a jQuery plugin I’m working on, and you can use it to kick start your own jQuery plugin development. The features of my boilerplate are:
I recently discovered js-assessment, a “test-driven approach to assessing JavaScript skills” created by Rebecca Murphey. The js-assessment application contains a series of tests designed to assess a job candidate’s grasp of JavaScript, but it can also be used to gauge your own knowledge of the language. Think of it as a mini Project Euler for JavaScript.
The questions are divided into five topics covering different aspects of the language: arrays, objects and context, functions, asynchronous behavior and Backbone views. If, like me, you have a decent grasp of JavaScript, but wouldn’t feel confident writing “JavaScript programmer” on your curriculum vitae, then I think you’ll find the tests an enjoyable challenge. None of the questions are super difficult, though I confess to needing help from MDN to arrive at a few of the solutions. I definitely learned a thing or two about JavaScript along the way.
This week I came across a new JavaScript framework, called Meteor, which promises to simplify the process of developing web applications. It looks like an interesting project, run by some very smart and talented people, but something about the Meteor marketing pitch rubbed me the wrong way.
The Meteor website is full of claims about how amazingly easy the framework will make web developer’s lives. It will allow us to build “top-quality web apps in a fraction of the time.” Its demo applications require “no programming knowledge.” What “once took weeks, even with the best tools, now takes hours.” In fact, you can “build a complete application in a weekend.”
If building Facebook or Twitter was really something that could be done in a weekend, wouldn’t everyone and their dog be CEO of their own Internet startup? If the barrier to entry was as low as the Meteor team would have us believe, then business owners would have no need for developers at all – a few hours of training and they’d have all the skills required to build their own app or website.
A few days ago I posted about my experiences setting up XAMPP on OSX. Here’s another little XAMPP tip…
By default XAMPP won’t start the Apache and MySQL services at system startup, so every time you reboot your computer you’ll need to restart them. Wouldn’t it be nice if those services started automatically? One way of doing that is to create a Launch Daemon that runs at system startup and have it start XAMPP for us.
Fire up Terminal, and run the following command:
cd /Library/LaunchDaemons
sudo nano apachefriends.xampp.apache.start.plist
Enter your OSX password when prompted, then in nano paste the following into your new plist:
Save the file and exit nano (control+o, return, control+x).
When you restart your computer the XAMPP Apache and MySQL services should start automatically. You can check this by launching XAMPP Control and checking that Apache and MySQL have green lights displayed next to them.
A note about security
If you’re concerned about the security of your system while running XAMPP, the safest approach is not to run Apache or MySQL at all, in which case you might not want to have those services running while you’re not using them. However, I’m fairly certain that unless you intentionally open up port 80 in your hardware/software firewall your XAMPP server should be invisible outside your local network.
Credit
A hat tip to ‘cwd’, who posted this solution on Superuser. I tried a couple of other approaches before I stumbled upon this one which actually works.
A few weeks back I rejoined the “Cult of Mac” when I replaced my old Asus notebook with a MacBook Pro, and since then I’ve been busy settling into my new OSX workflow. I do all my development locally, so one of the first applications I installed was XAMPP, a cross platform Apache/MySQL/PHP stack. While I know that MAMP is very popular on Mac, I have been using XAMPP for many years so I thought I’d stick with what I know.
Installing XAMPP was a snap, but when I came to create my own Apache VirtualHosts things started getting fiddly. Here are the steps I followed to get everything running smoothly.
