I’ve been an iOS fan for a long time. I was a poor college student when the original iPhone came out, and that was still the case with the 3G and 3GS, but after that I had an iPhone 4, 5, and 6. Despite all of this, I recently started feeling like I wanted to try something different.
My favorite Disney Channel movie when I was a kid was Smart House. I loved watching Smart House and seeing all the crazy things that the Cooper’s house could do. Ever since first seeing the movie, I have been really into the idea of automation.
I was geeking out about No Man’s Sky so much before it came out that I decided to make a digital log to keep track of what I encounter in the game. It’s got this real neat glitchy text effect on it.
A few months ago, Tim Baxter wrote a post for A List Apart titled Meaningful CSS: Style Like You Mean It. In it, he lays out an argument for avoiding the use of classes in markup and instead favoring things like attributes which make your markup more meaningful and elements as CSS selectors. There are parts of his idea that I like, but overall I don’t think it’s all that practical for many projects other than very small websites or apps.
If you’ve been developing for the web in the past couple of years, you have most likely heard of CSS’s Flexible box layout module (also known as flexbox). Maybe you’ve used it, or maybe you’ve shied away from it in favor of more familiar layout methods. I’ve been using flexbox fairly regularly for the past few months and I have to say, it’s pretty amazing. Here are some practical uses that I have found.
JPG images are great. They allow us to show photos on the web while keeping the file size relatively small (compared to a photo saved as a PNG, anyway). But what do you do when you need a photo with transparency and you don’t want to sacrifice file size? Enter CSS masks.
A little over a week ago, I got a new car which came equipped with Apple CarPlay. If you’re not familiar with CarPlay, it’s essentially a platform that allows you to replace your car’s built-in user interface with an interface that runs off your iPhone. I’ve spent some time with it and wanted to share some of my initial thoughts.
I had a bit of downtime at work, so I used Firebase to create an app to keep track of our team blog schedule.
I’ve been looking for a great way to stream live TV over the internet for a while now, and I’ve tried both Sling and PlayStation Vue. Here’s my take on how the two stack up.
A couple weeks ago, I remembered how awesome GitHub pages is. I also had been playing around with gulp for a few days, and I had the idea to redesign my website and host it on GitHub pages. In order to do that, I knew I would have to make the site static.
I asked for an Amazon Echo for Christmas, mainly because I wanted a reliable way to control my Wink-connected lights with my voice. I had pretty high expectations, but I’ve found that the Echo is even better than I expected; and it keeps on getting better.
It’s been a good six or seven months and I totally forgot to write about this, but I made a super simple little web app called Decide For Me. Basically, it’s a pro/con list which allows you to give each item on the list a weight.
Unfixify is a neat little bookmarklet that looks for elements with position: fixed; and converts that to position: absolute;. It will almost certainly break some styles somewhere and make a page look silly, but at least there won’t be any fixed elements anymore.
I am starting a list of common and ridiculous bugs that I’ve found in different browsers along with quick fixes if I know of them. It will most likely grow over time as I find and remember more idiotic bugs.
Turns out, animating inline SVG Line Art with CSS is super easy. Chris Coyier has a great explanation of how it works over on CSS Tricks.
I have noticed on a couple of recent projects that I’ve built, that Symbolset’s keyword replacement doesn’t work as expected on Android devices (specifically, Android version 4.3, but it may affect other versions as well). I don’t think I ever came across any documented fixes for this issue, which I assume is because Symbolset’s website says that keyword replacement works on Android.
The greatest man I ever knew wasn’t famous, although he touched more lives than I can even imagine. He wasn’t proud or boastful even though he could have been; he accomplished a great deal in his life. He was the most generous, loving man I’ve ever met. He was my father-in-law, David Koffman.
It has been too long since I blogged. A lot has happened in the past few months. I redesigned my blog, we had a great “2013 Goals” meeting at Mighty, and my wife and I even had the chance to go to England for a week so that I could go to New Adventures.
I was posting my AEA notes live.
I have been learning web design for a couple of years now. Up until recently, though, I never really understood how important specialization is. For the last few months, I have been moving from one language to another, learning bits and pieces. As a result, I have a pretty basic knowledge of many different web technologies.
My first job was at Target. It was a seasonal position during the Christmas season of my sophomore year of high school. I was really excited to get the job, as it was much more appealing to me than something like working at Arby’s (which I ended up doing a few months later). Looking back, it wasn’t a terrible first job. There were just a couple issues though.
I recently finished a major redesign of my site. I had a lot of fun designing and building this new version and got a chance to experiment a ton with new things. A few of the changes that I made include using CSS3 instead of images, the addition of media queries, and simplifying the entire site to focus more on my blog.
This is just a short note to say that it looks like Firefox will finally be supporting CSS transitions in their next release. I downloaded the beta release of Firefox 4 the other day and was very happy to see that my -moz-transition styles were working.
About three weeks ago, my fiancée (Emily) and I bought a puppy and named it Chanel. She’s probably the cutest dog that has ever lived, but she is also a huge pain. She poops everywhere, chews everything, and barks constantly. I decided to make an iPhone app called “Is Chanel Being Good?” so that I can let Emily see what she’s missing out on while she’s gone.
Last week I had the opportunity to attend An Event Apart Seattle. The conference itself was two days long, followed by a one day workshop on HTML5 and CSS3. I got to hear from experts like Jeffrey Zeldman, Dan Cederholm, Jeremy Keith, Andy Clarke and a lot more. I even got to meet and talk to Andy Clarke at lunch.
This weekend I really wanted to design a quick site and try out some new CSS techniques I’ve been learning, so I made a sandbox site. What’s a sandbox? Basically it’s a place where I’ll post my experiments and little projects that I’ve been playing around with.
It seems like rounded corners are everywhere these days; they’re quickly becoming one of the main ingredients of a lot of sites. I suspect that CSS3’s new border-radius property has something to do with it, but whatever the cause, I think we’re starting to go a little overboard. It’s starting to feel like a fad on the same level as overdone gradients and drop shadows.
A couple of days ago Elliot Jay Stocks posted a tweet about his feelings on web designers who can’t write code. Since then, the web design community has erupted into a debate on whether or not designers should be able to code. I can see valid points on both sides of the argument and I must admit I’m not totally sure where I stand on this subject.
I have worked on a few sites before where I had to develop tooltips. You know what I mean, those little boxes of text that come up when you hover over a link or an image. I used jQuery plugins in the past, but for my site I wanted to try something different. I wanted a solution that used no JavaScript, but still looked good and had some cool effects. Luckily, some pretty standard CSS along with some CSS3 animations were all I needed.
A few months ago I came across a site called Simple Desktops - “a collection of desktop wallpapers curated by Tom Watson designed to make your computer beautiful without distraction.”
There has been a lot of excitement about CSS animation lately, and I’ve been playing around with it. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to use CSS Animation to make an old video game style website.
About a year ago I watched Helvetica. It had a really big impact on the way that I look at the world. I became obsessed with identifying the type face in the wild. One thing that I started to notice, though, was that a lot of websites used Arial as their primary font. I started to look into it more and found that many of these sites put Arial before Helvetica in their font stacks. I was (and still am) really confused by this.
Most web designers know that typographic options on the web are… well, lacking. The list of fonts that are available on all computers is a short one. Luckily, though, we have CSS font stacks. This allows us to specify the font that we want, and then provide a list of backup fonts in case a visitor to our website doesn’t have the one we intended. Font stacking is all well and good, but imagine how great it would be if we could ensure that every visitor to our website saw the font that we wanted them to see every time. How great would that be? No more Arial in place of Helvetica. No more Georgia instead of Hoefler Text.
As my days as a college student draw to a close, I find myself looking forward to beginning my career in the web. I can’t wait to start designing websites for a living, but finding a job is proving difficult. Here’s a rundown of my current experience.
Universities are great places to learn a lot of things. Traditional four-year programs offer a lot of courses that are of huge benefit to students. One program, though, that seems to be out of place in most traditional universities is web design. The reason I say this is because, unfortunately, I chose to major in web design at a traditional college.