Published
Weekend Reading – Code review by Congress
Design Objective
SketchMine is a wonderful collection of SketchApp files from the design community.
Smart Transitions In User Experience Design – a few ways of using transitions to improve the user experience.
Make My Design Flat, the simplest "flat design" tutorial on the web!
By forcing ourselves not to fall back on a catch-all term, and choosing names that call out the motivations behind the use of our product, we’re constantly reminded of what brings people to us. And how we can better serve them. We don’t have ‘users’, and neither should you.
Problem is, we see dark things and assume they are black things. When, in reality, it’s very hard to find something that is pure black. Roads aren’t black. Your office chair isn’t black. The sidebar in Sparrow isn’t black. Words on web pages aren’t black.
Was iOS 7 created in Microsoft Word? Vaclav Krejci recreated the entire iOS 7 home screen using Microsoft Word. What have you done this week?
Design Principles FTW, a collection of design principles. For example, Elegant, efficient and sophisticated:
Elegant Elegance covers the smoothness, coolness and appropriateness of the aesthetics of the experience.
Efficient Use only the exact amount of steps necessary to complete a task and no more.
Sophisticated This is the technology portion of the equation. Build experiences that learn and understand your users.
Lines of Code
Hidden Productivity Secrets With Alfred – how to use Alfred with Dash, GitHub, Sublime Text, package managers, more.
CodeClimate – quality & security analysis for Ruby on Rails and Javascript. Free for open source projects, solo plan at $24/month and teams starting at $99/month.
TenXer - using data to make your software engineering team better. These are more process metrics – issues closed, commits logged, net lines of code. If you can get over the "10x" reference in the product name.
Font Awsome goes 4.0, that's 25% more awesome! Do note, all class names have changed for performance reasons.
offline – Automatically display online/offline indication to your users.
LinkedIn Intro: Doing the Impossible on iOS – creativily enhancing your email client, and bypassing the Exchange overlords IT department. I expect we'll see a more IMAP proxy apps like that. Note: Intro will hijack your email signature, and many passionately hate it.
Think your code review sucks? HaunTed Han:
oh god, Congress is showing source code on a screen, and demanding comments on particular lines of code. Please kill me.
Pessimal Algorithms and Simplexity explores slowsort and other reluctant algorithms:
For a long time theoretical Computer Science was concerned only with the analysis of either the worst
case or the average case behavior of algorithms. This paper is the first to try to remedy the obvious
discrimination against the study of the best case behavior, and we can only hope that it will be followed
by many others.
Serf is "a decentralized solution for service discovery and orchestration that is lightweight, highly available, and fault tolerant". Competes with ZooKeeper and Doozer, but I do like this approach better.
Snap.svg, a "JavaScript library [that] makes working with your SVG assets as easy as jQuery makes working with the DOM".
Startup Life
Entrepreneur PSA – Advertising Businesses are Hard: you'll need volume, suffer through long sales cycles, and most will not be repeat customers.
@kvnsmth captures what software startups are like, circa 2013:
“I’m going to spin up another company soon.”
None of the Above
Creative Mom Turns Her Baby’s Naptime Into Dream Adventures. Amazeballs!
The Honest Business Card Exchange. Just so we're clear, this is exactly what happens when you give me your business card!
Why Pinterest is Seriously Valuable (and What It’s Teaching Men in Power):
In other words, just because you’re not the target market doesn’t mean there is no target market. Let’s stop confusing the two.
The Married Kama Sutra: The World's Least Erotic Sex Manual
Rather than asking how Apple can keep selling the relatively ancient iPad 2 at just 20% less than its original price, maybe we should be asking why all tablets aren’t expected to be fully useful for over three years after their launch.
Gzip compresses by replacing text with pointers to earlier parts of the text. Here’s a visualization of what actually happens when you decompress “The Raven”. It highlights the bits of text that are copied from previously in the poem.
A (relatively easy to understand) primer on elliptic curve cryptography | Ars Technica
Automatic crash alert – their dongle can now detect when you've crashed and use your phone to make an emergency call.