zakness

• 2012-02-14

  A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

  — 

  L.P. Jacks from his Education Through Recreation, published in 1932.

  Eloquent and profound. It is much better to think of living as a pursuit of your “vision of excellence” than as the management of balance between arbitrary distinctions of work and play.

  Like Frank, I cannot claim to be “a master in the art of living”. (The term “master” is interesting. True mastery in ones own eyes means the death of curiosity, learning, and growth. A false concept, I think. But then, if we are not so harshly literal, “mastery” could simply mean “possessing exceptional knowledge and talent”. I like that definition more.) I am so so far from mastering the art of living, but I strive to close the gap. This message from Jacks moves the progress bar a little further.

  (via viafrank-deactivated20120702)

• 2011-01-20

  Native CSS Variables == Yes

  This is only a good thing. There is absolutely nothing bad about this. While many designers may not be programmers, CSS is code. After writing enough of it, even a “non-programmer” will understand that the benefits—succinctness and flexibility—far outweigh the cost of learning additional syntax.

  I believe the verbosity of the proposed syntax is there by necessity. CSS must be efficient: the more hints you can give the parser the more efficient it will be. Plus, it needs to be safely ignored by browsers that don’t support it, so it can’t “overlap” with the normal syntax.

  Anyway, typed variables will be a godsend. Can’t wait for five years from now when it will be practical to use this instead of a preprocessor like Less.

• 2010-11-16

  AIGA talk by Jonathan Harris: Cold : Bold

  Harris thinks that working intimately with code depletes your ability to be intimate with humanity. The reason: filling your brain with a complete understanding of complex digital systems decreases the amount of space available for understanding the complexities of personal relationships. In other words, either you can be a good programmer or you can be an emotional human being, not both.

  “Computer geeks are socially awkward? You don’t say.” Yes, yes, but this “outpouring of thought” is much more than that. Harris is intensely thoughtful and introspective. As someone who constantly phases between the worlds of art, code, and design, I found myself empathizing with everything he said.

• 2010-10-12

  

  (via zachklein)

• For some people, work is personal.

  Ben Pieratt’s post “In Praise of Quitting Your Job” is full of honesty and clarity. I especially like this bit:

  As a creative person, you’ve been given the ability to build things from nothing by way of hard work over long periods of time. Creation is a deeply personal and rewarding activity, which means that your Work should also be deeply personal and rewarding.

  I ask myself a lot if it’s okay that I spend so much time working. The word “work” has this ugly connotation, like it’s something that people have to put up with—never enjoy. I like that Ben’s alternate title for his post is “The New Work Ethic”. It’s encouraging.

  Not everyone is willing to spend stupid amounts of hours on a project simply because they believe in it. This is worth recognizing.

  Amen.

• 2010-08-14

  HTML5 Boilerplate hooks you the eff up

  It’s been a while since I’ve made a regular ‘ol website. Every once in a while I get this nagging feeling that I’m out of the loop: tricks and techniques are discovered, best practices are replaced with bester ones, frameworks are adopted and abandoned. All this has been passing me by while I toil away in Sorta-Java Land (albeit a happy toiling). Just how far and how quickly am I falling behind?

  A few nights ago, Paul Irish and Divya Manian answered that question with profound clarity by releasing HTML5 Boilerplate into the world:

  

  HTML5 Boilerplate is The Grail, a rock concert, a mother’s embrace, Frankenstein’s monster, a speeding train, a panacea, and a motherfucker of a website template. I mean, yes please:

  1. Cross-browser compatible (IE6, yeah we got that.)
  2. HTML5 ready. Use the new tags with certainty.
  3. Optimal caching and compression rules for grade-A performance
  4. Best practice site configuration defaults
  5. Think there’s too much? The HTML5 Boilerplate is delete-key friendly. :)
  6. Mobile browser optimizations
  7. Progressive enhancement graceful degredation …….. yeah yeah we got that
  8. IE specific classes for maximum cross-browser control
  9. Want to write unit tests but lazy? A full, hooked up test suite is waiting for you.
  10. Javascript profiling.. in IE6 and IE7? Sure, no problem.
  11. Console.log nerfing so you won’t break anyone by mistake.
  12. Never go wrong with your doctype or markup!
  13. An optimal print stylesheet, performance optimized
  14. iOS, Android, Opera Mobile-adaptable markup and CSS skeleton.
  15. IE6 pngfix baked in.
  16. jQuery, waiting for you

  Not to mention that the site is as gorgeous as it is functional. Love that hot pink text selection.

  The Boilerplate revealed to me how much my knowledge is lacking, but at the same time promised me that everything is going to be okay. I now have a home base from which I can launch myself through hyperspace and hypertext, amassing the latest and greatest weapons for my web design arsenal.

  Every front-end developer in the world needs to watch this project closely. Even if you don’t need it as a template, think of it as a centralized, constantly updated repository of absolutely essential development techniques.

• 2010-07-30

  

  Check out my new Macbook Bro, courtesy of Stick with me, baby! Even if you’re not into defaming your pristine Apple product, check out their suave and unabashed website design. It’ll make you smile.

  In case you are looking, pay no attention my particular sticker’s name or tag-line; I prefer to think of him as a minimalist rendition of Yellow Submarine Ringo Starr, not “The Swinger”.

• 2010-05-24

  Features, not Applications

  I recently had a discussion about document-centric computing with my good buddy Jeremy. He proposed the concepts and I tried my darndest to poke holes in his thesis, arguing that the current application-centric model results in a better user experience. John Nack of Adobe posted about this in 2009 when he asked for feedback on a unified “Adobe App” interface. In his post he gave a pretty good summary of the differences between the application- and document-centric approaches:

  In application-centric computing, you move your data from app to app. In the real world, this would be like schlepping a woodworking project from shop to shop to perform different tasks.
  
  In document-centric computing, you keep your data in front of you, and the computer interface pivots around the data. Using the woodworking metaphor, a document-centric approach would be like putting the project on a bench and moving tools to & from the work area as needed.

  Application-centric computing results in users requesting that more and more features be added to their favorite apps. This results in applications becoming more and more complex, making it harder for application designers to make them easier to use.

  The jist of Jeremy’s proposal is that software developers should compete with features, not with applications that tightly bind a bunch of features together. The core operating system would be file-based (documents, images, video, presentations, music, etc.) and provide two basic views: file navigator and file editor. Software developers would create features that enhance either view. Users have the freedom to mix and match features as they see fit.

  That last bit is where it gets a little shaky. Giving users freedom and control also means giving them work to do that isn’t completing whatever tasks they bought their computer for. To address this problem, developers can release groups of features bundled together such that their configuration is—what the developer believes to be—optimal. The difference between this bundle of features and current-day applications is that the OS guarantees that features can only make themselves accessible in open-standards-defined contexts.

  I would love to see this become a reality. Perhaps Microsoft can save themselves from irrelevance by creating a document-centric OS for tablets. Or! Or! Adobe could make some sweet document-centric HTML5 tools. That would be really impressive. I wonder what John did with his feedback…

• 2010-05-19

  Whitelines stationary

  While preparing to leave for India with my beautiful girlfriend, I came across my pad of Whitelines grid paper. The name explains its ingenious design. If you do any serious paper sketching, you owe it to yourself to use this stuff. From their website:

  Why would you not choose to use paper without distracting lines, if you could? It’s nicer to write on and easier to read from. The lines don’t show up on photocopies, there’s less glare in strong light, and people with dyslexia are helped with it, and more…

  If you’re interested, Jon Hicks wrote an informative post about the state of sketching stationary on The Hickensian.

• 2010-05-14

  Marco.org: Feature removal

  Making a product better often requires removing features.

  This came up at work today. We have a feature in our app that really benefits our users… except those using Internet Explorer. In IE the feature performs so poorly that we’ve decided to remove it. 

  We probably should have realized it was so bad before releasing, but still!