Theodicius

Good. Evil. Bratwurst.

Reactive Layout part 1, The Principles

Filed under: General,Web Design— arlen@ 2:29 pm

I’ve been rethinking my approach to web design starting from First Principles going forward, and I think it’s coherent enough to be exposed to the public.

Before I begin, I think I ought to tell you what it’s not.

  • It’s not a checklist. I don’t believe in checklists for anyone beyond the apprentice stage in any craft. Between our ears is one of the better information processing and decision making engines on the planet; I firmly believe in using it to the fullest extent. If you need a literary allusion for this, try Nero Wolfe’s advice to Archie (on numerous occasions): “Use your intelligence, as guided by experience.”
  • It’s not the be-all and end-all set of engineering principles for the craft. We don’t collectively know enough about the craft to presume to use the term “engineering” for it.
  • While I consider the principles to be logically derived and valid, concrete expressions of these principles can vary, so I am neither prescribing a design/development methodology nor proscribing one.

Continue reading →

MooTools First Impression

Filed under: Technology,Web Design— arlen@ 12:59 pm

I’ve been getting more Joomla work thrown at me these days (one of the nice things, from a professional’s POV, about the Joomla community is there are so many amateurs building Joomla sites there’s never a shortage of installations that need fixed) so I decided I needed to get more familiar with MooTools, the javascript library the dev team chose for Joomla.

This makes the third javascript framework I’ve been working with (prototype/scriptaculous for Rails, and jQuery for my non-Joomla PHP and .NET projects) so while I certainly don’t hold myself up as an expert in frameworks, I’m not fresh from the farm, either. I’d already written the usual “cute effects” in MooTools (such as rearranging layout boxes, hiding boxes and sliding them out, etc.) so for the first “serious” project in MooTools I chose to implement the FontUnstack jQuery plugin. (from an idea by Andy Clarke as implemented by Phil Oye at GitHub.

The journey was interesting, to say the least.
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Newspapers, Google, and Ads

Filed under: General,Technology— arlen@ 2:17 pm

I sit here listening to yet another newspaper struggling with the idea of ceasing to publish the dead-trees version, and I get depressed. Not because I think there’s something noble being lost, or that there’s something special about the feel of newsprint (I do, but that’s not what gets me down).

What depresses me is the future of content generation. Or lack of it. Continue reading →

Jason Nails It

Filed under: General,Technology— arlen@ 1:55 pm

I have to admit, Twitter’s been one of my guilty pleasures. Every time I fire my client up, I ask myself why I’m doing it. But I do it all the same.

It’s not that lots of good information comes in that way. Still less that I get to read deathless prose. Let’s face it, there’s only so much eloquence you can cram into 140 characters.

Then I hit Jason Kottke’s blog post and I celebrated. He nailed it.
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They just don’t get it

Filed under: General,Technology— arlen@ 10:52 am

I’ve been hearing from more people after the new MS ad campaign (you know, the one where MS pays an actress to cleverly make the point that the reason you buy a Windows laptop is because you can’t afford a Mac?) claiming Apple should license OS X to cheap Dell/HP machines for the low end customers. It’s not going to happen without a radical change in the Apple approach to marketing, and as long as they deem OS X important to them, I don’t see Apple making that change. When you look at it from their perspective, there’s just no business case for it.

What is it Apple is selling? The one constant in all the variations is User Experience. Whether you’re talking iPhone, iPod, or iMac, Apple’s big competitive advantage is the consistently excellent user experience. So, what happens when they go for the low end buyer?

They lose money. Don’t believe me? Follow.
Continue reading →

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