everything flows » web and tech

North Korea is

Luke Rodgers — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 17:11:07 +0000

View source. Also, check out the visualization of the page’s DOM.

Testing your websites on Android phones

Luke Rodgers — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 20:50:26 +0000

Been reading up on web development/design for mobile devices recently, and came across some helpful instructions on testing websites on Google Android. Turns out it’s pretty easy, but I thought I’d write up these instructions for OSX since the steps seem to have changed a bit since the above article was written. You will need JDK 1.5 or higher to begin. Type “java -version” into your Terminal (Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal.app) to see what version you have.

You will also obviously need the Android SDK. If you just want to play around with the emulator or test websites, ignore the stuff on the installation instructions about Eclipse or other IDEs. If you meet the system requirements, download the right SDK version for your computer.

Once it’s downloaded, unzip it wherever is convenient for you (into a /code or /development directory, or just in your home directory).

Next, you will probably want to add the directory where android is to your system PATH. You can see what your path is by typing in your terminal “echo $PATH”. You will want to go to your home directory /Users/ and edit your .profile file. If it already has something that looks like this:

export PATH=/opt/local/bin:$PATH

Then just add the android directory onto the end like so:

export PATH=/opt/local/bin:$PATH:/Users//android-sdk-mac_86/tools

When that’s done, close Terminal.app, restart it and type “android.” This will start the SDK and AVD (Android Virtual Device) Manager. You will not have any virtual devices downloaded/installed yet, so that will be your first step.

Click on “Available Packages” on the menu on the left side, and you will get a list of SDKs to download.

Check the box next to the latest one (in this case, SDK Platform Android 2.2, API 8, revision 2). Click “Install Selected” then click “Install”. The SDK will probably take a few minutes to download and install.

When it’s done installing, click on “Virtual Devices” then click the button “New” to create a new virtual device. Call it something like android2.2HVGA for the SDK and screen resolution (HVGA is for Half VGA). The size of the SD card doesn’t matter much for our purposes here, but it must be at least 9 MB. There are other configuration options you can tweak, but again we don’t need to worry about them now. If you want, you can change the skin to WVGA 800 or 854, which are common on the latest generation of Android phones.

Click the button to create the AVD, then select it from the Virtual Devices manager and click “Start…”, leaving the options at their default before you click “Launch”.

It will take anywhere from 30 seconds to a couple minutes to start (takes me a couple minutes on a MBP 2.53 ghz core 2 duo), during which you will see the following screens:

Eventually, you’ll see the home screen and you’re ready to go.

Two interesting fonts

Luke Rodgers — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 03:09:15 +0000

Typography is somewhere between a passing interest and a form of professional dilettantism. I like the Myfonts newsletter, the most recent edition of which highlights a couple particularly outstanding fonts. Lady René

Vow

Vow also has extended glyph and European character support. Too bad I’m too poor to pay the (eminently reasonable) ~$50 for each one

Updated RSS feeds

Luke Rodgers — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 20:46:25 +0000

I’d been using Google reader pretty heavily for a few years, then abandoned it pretty heavily since I began school last fall. Now that I’m getting back to it, I’ve culled my list pretty ruthlessly. Here are (most) of the ones I kept:

456 Berea Street

Adactio

Adaptive Path

Cameron Moll’s Authentic Boredom

Bokardo

Boxes and Arrows

Dave Shea’s Mezzoblue

FactoryCity

Hoefler & Frere-Jones

Nice Web Type

Noise Between Stations

phpied

Signal vs. Noise

Simplebits

Snook.ca

StopDesign

Tantek’s Updates

The Paciello Group Blog, which does good work on web accessibility

Thoughts from Eric (Meyer)

UIE Brain Sparks

Unstoppable Robot Ninja (aka Ethan Marcotte)

UXMatters

Web Strategy by Jeremiah

Wordpress Development

Jon Tan

Zeldman.com

Got rid of Smashing Magazine, which suffers from a poor signal:noise ratio, and Surfin’ Safari, which was mostly just Webkit reviewer notifications. Dropped a few others that basically just re-posted their tweets and/or too frequently mixed in ill-informed political opinion.

Paragraph-level commenting for Wordpress

Luke Rodgers — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:15:17 +0000

The team from the Institute for the Future of the Book team have announced the release of digress.it, a completely overhauled version of the old Commentpress theme for Wordpress, which allowed paragraph-level commenting. Digress.it is a plugin which

offers paragraph-level commenting in the margins of a text. digress.it is based on the architecture of weblogs, but is geared toward in-depth discussions of longer documents: article, essay or even book-length. With digress.it, you can annotate, gloss, workshop and debate on a fine-grained level, turning a document into a conversation.

I worked on the old Commentpress platform to get it running in English and French, and contributed some minor bug fixes, and really liked the idea behind the project, so this is an exciting development to see. I haven’t explored the plugin yet, but hopefully it will make the functionality much easier to integrate into an existing Wordpress installation.

Facebook uses browser-specific body classes

Luke Rodgers — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 04:00:53 +0000

Having recently worked on a website for which page load and performance was really important, I’ve found myself viewing the source code for more and more sites. Taking a look at Facebook recently revealed that they use browser-specific classes on the body element, so that if you’re browsing with Safari 4, you’ll see something like:

If you’re already browser sniffing, this might be a better idea for applying targeted CSS rules than including an extra stylesheet with conditional comments (which means an extra HTTP request), or using the underscore hack (IE6), or star hack (IE7) which cause invalid CSS.

Google doesn’t like twitter

Luke Rodgers — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:21:38 +0000

View Source

Luke Rodgers — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 22:15:13 +0000

http://www.fujinonbinos.com/

Ctrl+u in Firefox, menu View > Source in IE.

HTML5 Canvas Experimentation

Luke Rodgers — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:46:31 +0000

If you are in any way involved in the crafting of websites, you’ve probably already seen this HTML5 Canvas element experiment circulating the interwebs. If you haven’t, enjoy. Too bad most of us will have to wait till IE6 hits less than 1% market share before we can actually start using this stuff on mainstream websites.

Printer is on fire

Luke Rodgers — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:32:01 +0000

Part of me wishes this could still happen.