Link archive: January, 2020

PastWindow - outdoor installation on Behance

This is a pretty close approximation Bob Shaw’s slow glass.

The monitor shows what’s behind it, with 6 months delay.

Thoughts on Writing: What They Say · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

We all want to create successful work. We want our voices to be heard. We all want to be recognized or, at least, respected. But instead of trying to please everyone, you should deep down inside of you accept the fact that it is not yours to decide if others like your work. This will give you immense freedom. Suddenly, you can start to just write, without worrying whether your readers like what you’re saying or how you are saying it.

Strong agree.

Spoiled by the Web - Cloud Four

The web is far from perfect, but I think we underrate how resilient it can be.

If you thought maintaining a web project was hard, just wait till you try keeping an app in the app store…

Just before the 2019 holidays, I received an email from Apple notifying me that the app “does not follow one or more of the App Store Review Guidelines.” I signed in to Apple’s Resource Center, where it elaborated that the app had gone too long without an update. There were no greater specifics, no broken rules or deprecated dependencies, they just wanted some sort of update to prove that it was still being maintained or they’d pull the app from the store in December.

Here’s what it took to keep that project up and running…

Diary of an Engine Diversity Absolutist – Dan’s Blog

Dan responds to an extremely worrying sentiment from Alex:

The sentiment about “engine diversity” points to a growing mindset among (primarily) Google employees that are involved with the Chromium project that puts an emphasis on getting new features into Chromium as a much higher priority than working with other implementations.

Needless to say, I agree with this:

Proponents of a “move fast and break things” approach to the web tend to defend their approach as defending the web from the dominance of native applications. I absolutely think that situation would be worse right now if it weren’t for the pressure for wide review that multiple implementations has put on the web.

The web’s key differentiator is that it is a part of the commons and that it is multi-stakeholder in nature.

HTML attributes to improve your users’ two factor authentication experience - Twilio

The many ways of improving a single form field in HTML.

I love these kinds of deep dives into markup!

Draw all roads in a city at once

A lovely little bit of urban cartography.

A Tale of Two Clocks

Doomsday vs. the Long Now.

Train of thought

Like Bastian, I’m making a concerted effort now to fly less—offsetting the flights I do take—and to take the train instead. Here’s a description of a train journey to Nottingham for New Adventures, all the way from Germany.

Infovore » Not Like A Road To Follow

Books are machines for generating empathy.

Read fiction. I don’t mean “read sf to have ideas about the future.” I mean “read any form of fiction, genre or no”. Fiction allows us to have other ideas, live other lives, see other perspectives. It allows us to escape and re-consider the world from outside ourselves. It allows us to think at lengths and timescales that we may not from day-to-day. It is a shortcut to containing multitudes; to other minds.

This Page is Designed to Last | CSS-Tricks

I feel there is something beyond the technological that is the real trick to a site that lasts: you need to have some stake in the game. You don’t let your URLs die because you don’t want them to. They matter to you. You’ll tend to them if you have to. They benefit you in some way, so you’re incentivized to keep them around. That’s what makes a page last.

Lightning-Fast Web Performance: an online lecture series from Scott Jehl

You know that this online course from Scott is going to be excellent—get in there!

The CSS Cascade

This is a wonderful interactive explanation of the way CSS hierarchy works—beautiful!

28c3: The Science of Insecurity - YouTube

I understand less than half of this great talk by Meredith L. Patterson, but it ticks all my boxes: Leibniz, Turing, Borges, and Postel’s Law.

(via Tim Berners-Lee)

Living in Alan Turing’s Future | The New Yorker

Portrait of the genius as a young man.

It is fortifying to remember that the very idea of artificial intelligence was conceived by one of the more unquantifiably original minds of the twentieth century. It is hard to imagine a computer being able to do what Alan Turing did.

Kinopio

I’m finding this tool to be very useful for the kind of chaotic mind-mapping I do when I’m preparing a conference talk.

Software disenchantment @ tonsky.me

I want to deliver working, stable things. To do that, we need to understand what we are building, in and out, and that’s impossible to do in bloated, over-engineered systems.

This pairs nicely with Craig’s post on fast software.

Everyone is busy building stuff for right now, today, rarely for tomorrow. But it would be nice to also have stuff that lasts a little longer than that.

I just got a new laptop and I decided to go with fresh installs rather than a migration. This really resonates:

It just seems that nobody is interested in building quality, fast, efficient, lasting, foundational stuff anymore. Even when efficient solutions have been known for ages, we still struggle with the same problems: package management, build systems, compilers, language design, IDEs.

Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

A Cataloged Archive of Information Relating to the Now Closed Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

Redesigning in public ･ Robin Rendle

I feel like my problem with design in general today is that folks want to burn everything to the ground and start again all the time. Whether that’s with a website, or a new web standard, or a political policy. They don’t want to fix what’s wrong with things bit by bit, everyone wants Thing 2.0 whilst jumping over all the small improvements that are required to get there.

Demos, Prototypes, and MVPs | Jacob Kaplan-Moss

I’m usually building one of three things: a demo, a prototype, or a minimum viable product (MVP).

I’ve seen some confusion over these terms — some people seem to use them somewhat interchangeable. But they’re not the same thing, and building one when you need another can cause problems.

This is a very useful distinction!

The last tracker was just removed from Basecamp.com - Signal v. Noise

Can you believe we used to willingly tell Google about every single visitor to basecamp.com by way of Google Analytics? Letting them collect every last byte of information possible through the spying eye of their tracking pixel. Ugh.

👏

In this new world, it feels like an obligation to make sure we’re not aiding and abetting those who seek to exploit our data. Those who hoard every little clue in order to piece of together a puzzle that’ll ultimately reveal all our weakest points and moments, then sell that picture to the highest bidder.

Thinking about the past, present, and future of web development – Baldur Bjarnason

The divide between what you read in developer social media and what you see on web dev websites, blogs, and actual practice has never in my recollection been this wide. I’ve never before seen web dev social media and forum discourse so dominated by the US west coast enterprise tech company bubble, and I’ve been doing this for a couple of decades now.

Baldur is really feeling the dev perception.

Web dev driven by npm packages, frameworks, and bundling is to the field of web design what Java and C# in 2010s was to web servers. If you work in enterprise software it’s all you can see. Web developers working on CMS themes (or on Rails-based projects) using jQuery and plain old JS—maybe with a couple of libraries imported directly via a script tag—are the unseen dark matter of the web dev community.

Intent to Deprecate and Freeze: The User-Agent string - Google Groups

Excellent news! All the major browsers have agreed to freeze their user-agent strings, effectively making them a relic (which they kinda always were).

For many (most?) uses of UA sniffing today, a better tool for the job would be to use feature detection.

Smaller HTML Payloads with Service Workers — Philip Walton

This is a great progressive enhancement for performance that uses a service worker to combine reusable bits of a page with fresh content. The numbers are very convincing!

Alas, the code is using the Workbox library, but figuring out the vanilla code to write shouldn’t be too tricky seeing as Philip talks through his logic step by step.

Listen To Me And Not Google: HeydonWorks

We have to stop confusing the excesses of capitalism with the hallmarks of quality. Sometimes Google aren’t better, they’re just more pervasive.

cough AMP cough

On Design Fiction: Close, But No Cigar - Near Future Laboratory

If you end up with a draft of a short story or a few paragraphs of a typical UX interaction scenario, or a storyboard, or a little film of someone swiping on a screen to show how your App idea would work — you have not done Design Fiction.

What you’ve done is write a short story, which can only possibly be read as a short story.

What you should ideally produce is something a casual observer may mistake for a contemporary artefact, but which only reveals itself as a fiction on closer inspection. It should be very much “as if..” this thing really existed. It should feel real, normal, not some fantasy.

Performance Budgets, Pragmatically – CSS Wizardry

Smart advice from Harry on setting performance budgets:

They shouldn’t be aspirational, they should be preventative … my suggestion for setting a budget for any trackable metric is to take the worst data point in the past two weeks and use that as your limit

Adding Response Metadata to Cache API Explainer by Aaron Gustafson and Jungkee Song

This is a great proposal that would make the Cache API even more powerful by adding metadata to cached items, like when it was cached, how big it is, and how many times it’s been retrieved.

This is Not my Beautiful House: Examining the Desktop Metaphor, 1980-1995 | continent.

From Xerox PARC to the World Wide Web:

The internet did not use a visual spatial metaphor. Despite being accessed through and often encompassed by the desktop environment, the internet felt well and truly placeless (or perhaps everywhere). Hyperlinks were wormholes through the spatial metaphor, allowing a user to skip laterally across directories stored on disparate servers, as well as horizontally, deep into a file system without having to access the intermediate steps. Multiple windows could be open to the same website at once, shattering the illusion of a “single file” that functioned as a piece of paper that only one person could hold. The icons that a user could arrange on the desktop didn’t have a parallel in online space at all.

Guide to Internal Communication, the Basecamp Way

Writing solidifies, chat dissolves. Substantial decisions start and end with an exchange of complete thoughts, not one-line-at-a-time jousts. If it’s important, critical, or fundamental, write it up, don’t chat it down.

This one feels like it should be Somebody’s Law:

If your words can be perceived in different ways, they’ll be understood in the way which does the most harm.

The Decade in Cheer - Reasons to be Cheerful

Since 2010

• The developed world used less water, despite population growth
• The (whole) world became less transphobic than it once was
• The ozone layer started healing
• Investment in green energy far, far exceeded investment in fossil fuels
• The world got greener
• Homicide rates fell worldwide
• Weather forecasting became a lot more accurate
• The number of people without electricity fell below one billion
• Universal health care went from privileged ideal to global ambition

Life Under The Ice

Here’s the latest wonderful project from Ariel—explore microscopic specimens from Antarctica:

The collected Antarctic microbes were found living within glaciers, under the sea ice, next to frozen lakes, and in subglacial ponds.

Beautiful!

When Public Speaking Goes Wrong - daverupert.com

Dave shares some of his personal horror stories from public speaking, but also some of his practical tips for avoiding those kinds of situations.

[css-grid-2] Masonry layout · Issue #4650 · w3c/csswg-drafts

This is an interesting looking proposal for CSS grid to be ever so slightly extended to enable Masonry-style auto placement—something’s that tantalisingly close right now, but still requires some JavaScript to do calculations.

Y2K @ 20 - The New York Times

This is quite remarkable. On the surface, it’s a short article about the Y2K bug, but the hypertextual footnotes go deeper and deeper into memory, loss, grief …I’m very moved by the rawness and honesty nested within.

A Scandal in Bohemia

Well, this is rather lovely! The Paravel gang have made an atmospheric web book out of a Sherlock Holmes story (yay for the public domain!).

Frank Chimero · Redesign: Wants and Needs

Websites sit on a design spectrum. On one end are applications, with their conditional logic, states, and flows—they’re software.

On the other end of the design spectrum are documents; sweet, modest documents with their pleasing knowableness and clear edges.

For better or worse, I am a document lover.

This is the context where I fell in love with design and the web. It is a love story, but it is also a ghost story.

w/e 2020-01-05 (Phil Gyford’s website)

While being driven around England it struck me that humans are currently like the filling in a sandwich between one slice of machine — the satnav — and another — the car. Before the invention of sandwiches the vehicle was simply a slice of machine with a human topping. But now it’s a sandwich, and the two machine slices are slowly squeezing out the human filling and will eventually be stuck directly together with nothing but a thin layer of API butter. Then the human will be a superfluous thing, perhaps a little gherkin on the side of the plate.

20/20 Visions Review - Brighton Source

Here’s a write-up (with great photos) from the truly excellent gig that Salter Cane headlined on Saturday night.

The high praise for all the bands is not hyperbole—I was blown away by how good they all were!

Blade Runner Sketchbook (PDF)

I was sad to hear of the passing of Syd Mead last week. Here’s a sketchbook of his remarkable work for Blade Runner.

A short history of body copy sizes on the Web

A look at the trend towards larger and larger font sizes for body copy on the web, culminating with Resilient Web Design.

There are some good arguments here for the upper limit on the font size there being too high, so I’ve adjusted it slightly. Now on large screens, the body copy on Resilient Web Design is 32px (2 times 1em), down from 40px (2.5 times 1em).

Frank Chimero · Redesign: On This Design

Most experienced designers want concision—clear, robust, consistent, elegant systems that avoid redundancy. Concise designs are smoother to implement, faster to render, quicker to understand, and easier to hand-off and maintain. Achieving a simplicity with clarity means that you’re engaging with the fundamentals of the problem (and of your craft) at the correct fidelity. You’ve cut through complexity with insight, understanding, and committed decision-making. That third one is critical. A lot of complexity comes from an unwillingness to commit to the things that insight and understanding surface.

Making a ‘post-it game’ PWA with mobile accelerometer API’s | Trys Mudford

I made an offhand remark at the Clearleft Christmas party and Trys ran with it…

B612 – The font family

B612 is an highly legible open source font family designed and tested to be used on aircraft cockpit screens.

Available as a web font.

Systems, Mistakes, and the Sea › Robin Rendle

Robin contemplates design systems as hyperobjects.

He also makes the uncomfortable observation that design systems work is not just hard, it’s inherently demoralising and soul-crushing.

My hunch is this: folks can’t talk about real design systems problems because it will show their company as being dysfunctional and broken in some way. This looks bad for their company and hence looks bad for them. But hiding those mistakes and shortcomings by glossing over everything doesn’t just make it harder for us personally, it hinders progress within the field itself.

Bound in Shallows: Space Exploration and Institutional Drift

If a human civilization beyond Earth ever comes into being, this will be unprecedented in any historical context we might care to invoke—unprecedented in recorded history, unprecedented in human history, unprecedented in terrestrial history, and so on. There have been many human civilizations, but all of these civilizations have arisen and developed on the surface of Earth, so that a civilization that arises or develops away from the surface of Earth would be unprecedented and in this sense absolutely novel even if the institutional structure of a spacefaring civilization were the same as the institutional structure of every civilization that has existed on Earth. For this civilizational novelty, some human novelty is a prerequisite, and this human novelty will be expressed in the mythology that motivates and sustains a spacefaring civilization.

A deep dive into deep time:

Record-keeping technologies introduce an asymmetry into history. First language, then written language, then printed books, and so and so forth. Should human history extend as far into the deep future as it now extends into the deep past, the documentary evidence of past beliefs will be a daunting archive, but in an archive so vast there would be a superfluity of resources to trace the development of human mythologies in a way that we cannot now trace them in our past. We are today creating that archive by inventing the technologies that allow us to preserve an ever-greater proportion of our activities in a way that can be transmitted to our posterity.