Published
Weekend Reading – bikeshed.io
Design Objective
Tweetbot changed iPhone user behaviour with one simple gesture. I wish more apps would copy flick-to-dismiss.
Scrolling is easier than clicking. This lesson applies to other interactions as well:
So here is the real difference: scrolling is a continuation; clicking is a decision.
This 1 Neat Trick For Pixel Perfect Web Pages:
Stop wasting time and file space, and just save the P.S.D. as an image and use that as your web page.
Lines of Code
We spent a week making Trello boards load extremely fast. Here’s how we did it: keep your layout and rendering to a minimum.
5 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About: from accessing psuedo element properties to disabling elements with CSS pointer-events.
x-ray is "a script that lets users toggle password visibility in forms." I'm not convinced passwords want to be invisible, but if you're undecided enough to leave it as a user option, try x-ray.
HTML5 Input Types Alternative offers an alternative to some of the new (but not so mature) HTML5 controls.
This one weird trick will settle it once and for all:
$ curl http://bikeshed.io/api/v1.0/color
Tools of the Trade
Backer is a new service from App.net for crowdfunding features. May it stick.
GitRap "allows you to store conversations with your collaborators in your GIT repositories”. It's a Node app, but the entire UI runs in the browser, and the only back-end is the GitHub API. Git as the NoSQL!
The Future of npm. Nodding in agreement:
Relying on proprietary vendors like Fastly and Manta for such an important piece of infrastructure goes against the open source philosophy that built it, leading towards vendor lock-in.
Starting and Stopping Background Services with Homebrew. Super cool.
on Adobe passwords' security. This is just your friendly reminder that 3DES in ECB mode is leaking information.
On Testing Culture in GitHub Projects:
The high social transparency of GitHub supports newcomers in learning the conventions of a project. They might not always read contribution guides; simply watching discussions on pull requests sometimes is enough.
'Automating' comes from the roots 'auto-' meaning 'self-', and 'mating', meaning 'screwing'.
Peopleware
How to screw learning with one simple belief. "Great effort" trumps "you so smart":
The kids who are taught that effort count increase in the number of problems they can solve. Those who are told that they’re smart show a frightening decrease.
Be the bot you want to replace yourself with.
None of the Above
Riots in Ukraine. So Ukraine is on fire. News too busy covering Bieber, so some of us learned about it first from this pull request:
I will take a look later. Much much later. Because I'm Ukrainian and we have revolution right now. Sorry
When companies break the law and people pay: The scary lesson of the Google Bus. TL;DR Google will pay $1 per stop, because they can; you will pay $271 if caught stopping at a Muni bus stop, because.
The U.S. Crackdown on Hackers Is Our New War on Drugs. It's getting out of control.
The 2 Teenagers Who Run the Wildly Popular Twitter Feed @HistoryInPics
Prompt: "Let’s start a conversation about mental health in tech". Kodus EngineYard.
iFixit Macintosh 128K Teardown: "Repairability Score 7 out of 10"
Downworthy: A browser plugin to turn hyperbolic viral headlines into what they really mean. Epic!
Adware vendors buy Chrome Extensions to send ad- and malware-filled updates. This is your friendly reminder to cull the add-ons and extensions you use.