Touché, a New Touch Technology by… Disney
Most of this stuff isn’t discoverable enough to be of much use in the everyday arsenal of gesture input, but it still has a few very interesting nuggets and ideas. I especially like the idea of the body as a simple input device, which begs to be enhance the capabilities of Siri.
A Better Keyboard: The Next Generation of iOS Text Editing
Intriguing idea. Also, the way to astroturf a feature request to apple is… interesting. :)
Who Needs Objective-C?
This is the most enticing non-official-IDE project for iOS apps I’ve seen to date. Also, It positions Ruby in a very interesting role: One language to rule web dev, mobile apps and everything in between.
Why You Should Care About CSS Performance and How Easy It Really Is
I always thought that optimizing shouldn’t be an afterthought. Yes, tough deadlines make it alluring to skip some steps. Which actually makes it so much more important to know-thy-trade, so that doing it right becomes effortless.
Update: Here is another good article on this from Jeremy Keith (@adactio): dConstruct optimisation
Sketch 2 – The Designers Toolbox
Sketch 2 is really a remarkable step forward. Although Photoshop 6 is a big improvement in the arena of screen design, it’s price tag (even as a SaaS) is still a bit steep. Between Pixelmator and Sketch, you get about 95% of the relevant features for 5% of the price.
Maybe I’m a minority on this, but I would love a general purpose tool for screen design, something like a combination of Pixelmator, Sketch and Hype.
Starbucks Responsive Redesign Styleguide
This starts to become a trend, which I very much like.
Anything can be forced to converge, but the problem is about trade-offs, and you end up with trade-offs that don’t please anyone.
All You Ever Wanted To Know About The WebKit Inspector, But Never Came Around To Ask.
This is a really thorough and well written introduction to the Inspector and a perfect starting point for http://javascriptrocks.com/performance/
The Written Communication Conundrum
Today I read Dan Moren’s article on iMessage, followed by Scott Allen’s more sensible approach to this and finally Adii’s tweet: “The future of email? fluent.io”
I think Dan Moren is partly right: Written communication may technically be much alike, but conceptually there are vast differences between e-mail, chat and sms. On the other hand, I think the Scott Allen is closer to the solution then Dan. Let me explain.
Since Apple’s update to their Mail app in Mac OS X Lion (and the coming Mountain Lion), this topic frequently occupied my mind. During the last year, I observed my own communication behavior closely and learned that I wrote and received some 25k e-mails, had some 6k chat conversations and sent maybe 300 text messages.
I could have saved a lot of time, if many of those e-mail conversations would have been as short and simple as chat usually dictates it. I would have preferred many chats to be as rare as the text messages I sent. And I would have loved to expand on some of the text message conversations I had.
Separating each mental model of communication into it’s own app only reinforces the boundaries around that model and makes it harder for those “edge” cases of communication where something is neither this nor that.
If you communicate in less volume, or are a very structured person, separating communication that way actually works. That’s what I did in my previous live, where I got something like 1k e-mails a year. But if you communicate in high volume, what you actually need is a command center that helps you communicate, not forces you through additional hoops.
My ideal “communication”-client would actually incorporate ux concepts from all forms of communication and present each conversation the way it is most easily consumed. Many e-mail conversations can be handled exactly like fluent.io is doing it, there are even some where I would prefer it chat style. And then there are some conversations which consists of mutiple threads that actually require it to be more like a forum, or comments.
I think it’s fine that stuff like sender pictures, smart folders oriented around common communication partners, threaded conversations and reduced presentations of post-and-reply are finding their way into e-mail clients. But in the end, it needs more then the evolution of e-mail clients. Written communication needs a communication center, much like notifications need a notification center.1
1 And a more clever way to direct which notification goes when where and what it does there.
CoffeeConsole: A CoffeeScript Browser Console
The ever amazing Mr. @snookca just whipped up this Chrome extension for CoffeeScript. I love this kind of mini side projects.
