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Jolly good – easy to configure and get going, nice templating, and fast, because it's based on a databased index. Also, it looks like it's very actively maintained. Now added to this blog!
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"Are all these industries in such terminal decline that they’re grasping around for any revenue stream or way out? Or is this the converged future, where business and culture are one and the same? Not only can’t I tell whether things are real or marketing vehicles any more, I can’t even determine what’s being marketed." Chris has a point.
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Which is the sensible way to do things, and this feels about right.
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The title says it all. Proper good, especially the sheer volume of A Lot Of Guys With Drums, and the way the brass replace some of the keyboard and bass parts.
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"One Amish-man told me that the problem with phones, pagers, and PDAs (yes he knew about them) was that "you got messages rather than conversations." That's about as an accurate summation of our times as any." A wonderful quotation in the midst of this dense, fascinating article.
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"…after careful consideration [the editors in charge of style guidelines at the NYT] decided to alter our style. As of now, the spelling whisky will be used not only for Scotch but for Canadian liquor as well. The spelling whiskey will be used for all appropriate liquors from other sources." As it should be.
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"…using these guidelines, and building on the experience of much more knowledgeable type gurus, I have compiled a list of font stacks that will both open up more font possibilities for web designers, and hopefully offer more appropriate substitutes:" That's interesting; not sure how appropriate it is, but they're good uses of the cascade, by and large.
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"Toine Manders, the Dutch liberal MEP who drafted the report, said: "Video games are in most cases not dangerous. We heard evidence from experts on computer games and psychologists from France, the US, Germany and the Netherlands and they told us that video games have a positive contribution to make to the education of minors."" Etcetera.
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A page full of prettiness, and it fills itself up as you go. Art, graphic design, sci-fi book covers; it's all here.
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"It’s a scrolling arcade beat ‘em up in the Final Fight-style based within the Watchmen universe. Just like Alan would have wanted." I know, I know. But: it has charm, it's LittleLoud, and it's not like it's setting out to be canon narrative! It's pretending to be a passable arcade game from a long while ago. So I'm going to give it a break (unlike that horrible 3D beat-em-up that's coming out, that looks like it's trying to be Like The Movie).
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Music video actively exploiting compression artefacts. The transitions are striking; the reaction to something looking this supposedly broken is peculiarly visceral. Digital patina.
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"Red dot fever enforces a precision into your design that the rest must meet to feel coherent. There’s no room for the hereish, nowish, thenish and soonish. The ‘good enough’." Dingdingding. +5 points to Taylor, as usual. Place, not location.
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"TinkerKit is an Arduino-compatible physical computing prototyping toolkit aimed at design professionals. The interest in physical computing as an area in development within the creative industries has been increasing rapidly. In response to this Tinker.it! is developing the TinkerKit to introduce fast iterative physical computing methodologies to newcomers, and particularly design professionals." Standardised modules, standardised connectors, Arduino-compatible. I remember Massimo showing me his keyboard-emulating board ages ago. Nice to see Tinker productising the platform, too.
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"The buttons are designed to look very similar to basic HTML input buttons. But they can handle multiple interactions with one basic design. The buttons we’re using are imageless, and they’re created entirely using HTML and CSS, plus some JavaScript to manage the behavior." Dark, dark voodoo, but very impressive – and excellently explained by Doug Bowman. It's nice to see Doug blogging again.
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"If 2009 is going to see the emergence of high-quality browser-based games, then 2009 is going to be the year of Unity. It has: lots of powerful features; iPhone support; Wii publishing; a developing community; quality developers using it; and an upcoming upcoming PC version. In short, it is about to make a major splash. I feel compelled to jump in with it — the indie license is cheaper than the Flash IDE."
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"bash completion support for core Git." Ooh. This looks really, really nice.
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"An experiment I’ve been running for more than two years now is over: running two Macs is more hassle than it’s worth. I write not to praise synchronisation technology, but to bury it." Roughly what I'd always guessed, but Fraser is careful and detailed, and makes some sensible points. I just hope Aperture doesn't chug as much on the new MBPs as it did on the old ones, for his sake.
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"Yes people use the Internet to do bad thing, and quite possibly Twitter is one of those services that bad people use. But they also plan bad things in coffee house but for the last 300 odd years we’ve realised that trying to legislate against coffee houses is a bad thing for society." I recently finished Markman Ellis' book on coffee houses, and so Tom's post had a special kind of relevance.
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A neat summary of what's available out there; I use Blueprint for prototyping, but it's interesting to see what else is available – particularly the more stripped-down frameworks.
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"A whimsical riff on the bookmobile, Mr. Soriano’s Biblioburro is a small institution: one man and two donkeys. He created it out of the simple belief that the act of taking books to people who do not have them can somehow improve this impoverished region, and perhaps Colombia." Awesome.
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"Flaming Lips vocalist-guitarist Wayne Coyne brought with him what he dubbed the 'Guitar Hero guitar,' an Epiphone double-neck with the lower, six-string neck replaced by a five-button variant and wired to an oscillator. '[It's] because a lot of kids out there think this is actually the way you play guitar…'" Awesome.
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Future Platforms get a company blog, and give it a brilliant name to boot.
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Wilson Miner redesigns again, and it's _gorgeous_. The subtle transparency of the black text in RGBa values, to pick up a hint of the underlying green, is a lovely touch.
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Jaw well and truly on the floor.
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"Thus maintenance would become a punishment for delivery, which may be a hollow joke for some of us working in technology. And every now and then, when reading contracts, I would like to follow Henry VII's lead and pass a law against maintenance."
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"An object provides for [the wants we define ourselves as] through the lack it displays." Jyri Engeström on social objects and the way they create wants, fulfil needs, and they way that drives our behaviour around them. Jolly good.
CSS Redundancy Checker: jQuery edition
11 July 2007
So the CSS Redundnacy Checker has done a fair bit of traffic recently. Wow, etc. I hope it’s turning out to be useful. I’ve committed a few minor fixes, and there could be more improvements to come thanks to some useful feedback. I’ll be getting in touch with people about it over the next few days, I hope.
When I sat down to write the tool, I knew it would only be possible with a decent CSS parser (because you need a proper parser, and can’t do this with regex magic). The two that leaped to mind immediately were Hpricot and jQuery. In the end, I went with the former, because a commandline script seemed a good starting point, and something that could be built open in many ways.
In the comments thread, Tom at WorkingIdea alerted me to his jQuery-powered CSS Redundancy checker. It’s a Greasemonkey script with built-in jQuery that dumps redundant classes either to the Firebug console or to a Javascript console if you don’t have Firebug. Sounds like it might not be quite as fast as the Ruby one – or as flexible – but if you don’t have Ruby installed or just want to run something from your browser, it’s a great idea. And it’s the same principle as my script – harnessing somebody else’s CSS parser in a really simple way.
So now there are two ways into the same usefulness. It only seemed fair to link this up, given what a neat solution it is – and how close I came to doing it myself.
(Incidentally, the reason there’s not an online version of my script is because it is a slow process, and I’d have to write some kind of queueing solution on the frontend, and it could all get messy fast. It’s not for that. Get it yourself, run it locally; there are instructions on setting it up for people who don’t have Ruby in the README).
The CSS Redundancy Checker
06 July 2007
There comes a point in every developer’s life when your realise the problem isn’t your work, but the tools you’ve got to hand. Toolsmithery is an important part of the job, and so I spent a few hours yesterday crafting a tool useful to any front-end developer.
The result is the CSS Redundancy Checker.
When you’re writing HTML, over time, your CSS files begin to fill up a lot. If you’re working on a large project, you might even end up with several people contributing to the CSS file, not to mention refactoring each other’s work. The result is a directory full of HTML files, and a very large CSS file.
What tends to happen is that not ever selector in the CSS file actually applies to your HTML; many are rendered redundant by refactoring, or by changes in HTML. But when you’ve got a 70k+ CSS file, it’s not easy to check precisely which selectors aren’t in use any more.
Enter the CSS Redundancy Checker. It’s a very simple tool, really. You pass in a single css file, and either a directory of HTML files, or a .txt file listing URLs (one to a line). It then proceeds to look at each file in turn, and at the end, list all the selectors in your css file that aren’t used by any of the HTML files.
That’s it. I’m pretty sure it’s accurate, and it should work with most CSS files. Most of the magic isn’t down to me, but down to _why the lucky stiff‘s marvelous Hpricot HTML parser. The script itself is about 50 lines of reasonably tidy Ruby. You’ll need Ruby, and Hpricot, in order to run it. There’s more full documentation over at the Google Code site where I’m hosting it. Please add any issues there, or get in touch if you want to contribute.
Things it doesn’t do: listing line numbers of where the selectors are. I wrote that functionality on the train this morning, but I can’t find a way to make it 100% accurate, so thought it best to leave it out – inaccurate line numbers are of no use to anyone. If you can come up with a way that works, let me know. Also, at some point I might turn it into a Textmate command. All in good time, though.
The need for the tool came out of a large project we’re working on at NPG, but I felt it would be useful to pretty much any HTML developer. So I’ve released it to the world. Let me know what you think, and do spread the word. You can get it via svn checkout, for now:
svn checkout http://css-redundancy-checker.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ css-redundancy-checker
Slides now available for my LRUG talk
11 August 2006
To cut a long story short: the slides for the talk I gave earlier this week are now available. You can find out more about the talk on the talks page of this site, or you can download the PDF (1.5mb). It should be fairly self-explanatory.
(A brief summary for those of you unable to scroll or click: it’s a client-side-developer’s perspective on Rails, and how to integrate client side development into the build process).
Getting Naked
05 April 2006
So apparently it’s Naked Day today. Strip away your CSS, show off your white bits.
It’s only right I join in, given that my day-job now is writing the leanest, most accessible XHTML/CSS I can, and that, more to the point, I spent a fair while trying to make this site vaguely accessible if you can’t see the stylesheet. So here we are. Raggedy-bits and all. The stylesheet will automatically switch back to its “International Klein Blue” look on the 6th April.
(The site is, of course, now back to normal)