Wolfram has been tracking his emails, keystrokes, meetings, phone calls and even steps per day, in some cases for 23 years. Released in aggregate here.
Great article by Chris Coyier on asynchronous loading of external scripts
JS based charting
Gridset is a tool for making grids. It lets you create whatever type of grid you want: columnar, asymmetrical, ratio, compound, fixed, fluid, responsive and more. It serves multiple grids to your site based on breakpoints for different devices. Using it is as simple as embedding a link.
Great summary by Brad Frost
Developers who work with PHP applications that upload files commonly struggle with providing user feedback on the upload progress, usually using flash and javascript solutions like uploadify. In PHP 5.4 there is now integrated functionality to allow file upload progress to be passed back to the browser.
Great read here about responsive design. The takeaway is that with CSS media queries, JS media queries for changing content and soon a responsive image element in HTML for changing image size on page load, we will have to edit 3 (or more) different layers of the site for any design edit. We need a way to standardize this.
When we talk about supporting legacy browsers typically we use language which is all or nothing. “Yes, we support IE7.” But in reality, we all employ techniques of support that span a wide range. This seems to capture the different levels of support I normally see:
a) never looked at my site in it (e.g. IE7), don’t care
b) i gave it some fallback styling that should help ever so little, but beyond that i’ve forgotten it.
c) i have defined a lo-fi experience for it (like Print Edition) and make sure it’s decent, even in its lo-fi state
d) it gets some “medium” experience.. like it keeps background images, and general sense of layout. some features of the site are just not presented to this browser’s users, as i follow the recommendations from html5please.com
e) i designed my site so all functionality is equivalent everywhere. visually things may degrade. i have square corners in ie7.
f) i make it all look the same. i have round corners in ie7. everything is “the same” and my site takes 20sec to load.
Personally, I don’t care too much if people see what I’m doing online since the whole point of a lot of what I do is to … let people see what I’m doing online. But I certainly don’t subscribe to the dangerous idea that “only criminals have things to hide”; everyone deserves the right to personal privacy. And there are lots of repressive governments out there who wouldn’t hesitate at the chance to spy on what their citizens do online, or worse. Much, much worse. Why not improve the Internet for all of them at once?
52weeksofUX is back!
Constraints drive and shape the design of any product. They are foundation of a good decision-making framework, allowing multiple people to work in unison with a shared understanding. […] as a project goes on and more people get involved, decisions continue to be made based on patterns that were informed by constraints that existed at one point in the process but either no longer exist or have changed in such a way that they are virtually unrecognizable.
