A problem with companies becoming ever more aware of and adept at social media is the fact that it’s become hard to whine about some company without instantly having a representative asking you what’s wrong. Some times you just want to whine.
This is roughly what happened after I tweeted my dissatisfaction with the new Cooper website.
Okay, fair enough, I’ll spend some time going over some of the issues I found.
The other day I was playing around with a potential design for a little something I’m working on. After messing about in Photoshop drawing a button that would take the user back to the previous screen, I had to stop and ask myself the million dollar question: “Why?”
Last week I did something I very rarely do. I - together with visual designers, barq - replied to a Request For Proposal. The experience confirmed my suspicion that RFPs are indeed a broken concept.
I was asked on Twitter what feeds I have in my Comics/Humor category in my feed reader. Since 140 characters isn’t enough, the list goes here instead:
One of the many things I try to make my customers realize, is that their web application is never done.
There is always something that can be made easier to use, pages that can be made to load faster, new features that can be implemented, existing features that can be made more powerful, or landing pages that can be optimized.
The following is a short code snippet from my Rails 3 presentation at Community Day last week. I’m putting it here, because it’s such a nifty little piece of code.
It answers an feature request I seem to get fairly often; “please make it possible to download an Excel file of data”. Traditionally I’ve relied on good ole CSV for that, but it’s a bit tricky to get just right with Excel. Besides, the customer explicitly said Excel file, so let’s give her that.
Here’s an idea I had the other day. I am putting it out to the world because I’d love to see it realized. While I could do it myself, I already have enough on my plate - and knowing myself, I’ll never get around to it.
Update: Someone is watching - between me posting this and today (roughly 24 hours later) the domain name has been registered. Sleazy domain-shark register-bot or quick-fire entrepreneur? Your guess is as good as mine.
Being self-employed is hard. Having no one around to tell you what to do brings up a slew of problems, one is that of focus.
Should I start another personal project, learn a new technology, create a (well, another) small game, start working on a long overdue redesign of mentalized.net, build an iApp (what is the common denominator for iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad apps?), write a blog post, something else?
And that list doesn’t even include the important stuff like relax in front of the X-Box, watch a movie, take a walk through the forest with the wife, play with the dog, or make my son laugh.
How does one stay focused in that environment?
Trying to explain progressive enhancement (or graceful degredation, for that matter) to someone that isn’t used to dealing in abstraction layers, interfaces, and presentation formats, is near impossible.
Not surprisingly, most clients fall in that category.
Paul Stanton suggests using games consoles as an analogy for progressive enhancement and while I see the appeal of that analogy, it does have some huge flaws (like any good analogy), so I tend to go another route.
More is better - at least when it comes to lines of CSS. I personally prefer putting each CSS rule on their own line in my CSS files, but some people have advocated the use of putting each of your CSS rules on a single line, like so:
#wrapper {width:800px; margin:0 auto;}
#header {height:100px; position:relative;}
#feature .post {width:490px; float:left;}
#feature .link {width:195px; display:inline; margin:0 10px 0 0; float:right;}
#footer {clear:both; font-size:93%; float:none;}This single line approach makes it easy to scan through a stylesheet and find the selector you want to modify. But that’s also about as far as the benefits go for this approach.