Deadlines rarely align with the amount of time needed to complete work, and so technical compromises are made along the way. There’s a short-term tradeoff to get something working initially. The developer knows the lifetime of the solution and accepts that he or she will have to go back and create the longer-term solution later on. While those looking in from the outside might consider this to be sloppy engineering, it’s actually what allows products to be released on time. And also how tech debt accumulates.
Tag Archives: development
Responsive Layouts, Responsively Wireframed
Made with HTML/CSS (no images, no JS) this is a simple interactive experiment with responsive design techniques. Using simple layout wireframes, this illustrates how a series of pages could work across these different devices, by simulating how the layout of each page would change responsively, to suit the context.
This Man’s Life: Responsive Layouts, Responsively Wireframed
Remote Tilt
Testing motion events was never going to be easy task. You have two options, both of which suck. If you decide to use a mobile device equipped with an accelerometer you’ll be left stranded without your favourite debugging tools. Alternatively, if you decide to develop on your favourite computer you will find yourself up motion event creek without an accelerometer. That’s where Remote-Tilt comes in. By including a single line of JavaScript you can emulate device motion events in your test page which can either be a regular browser or even a mobile emulator.
New For Internet Explorer 10: Compat Inspector
Back in 2011, Microsoft has revealed a Compact Inspector feature for Internet Explorer 9, which allows web developers to quickly notice the IE’s platform changes and tweak sites accordingly.
Now, with the new Metro UI overtaking pretty much everything, the software giant has revealed a tweaked version specifically for IE10 and as you might have guessed, it does use Metro tiles.
IE10 Compat Inspector
Compat Inspector is a JavaScript-based testing tool that analyzes your site while it runs. Compat Inspector reports patterns of interaction which cause issues in recent modes. This allows you to identify problems quickly without memorizing a bunch of documentation or searching through the entirety of your site’s code. We developed Compat Inspector during the course of IE9 to speed up the process of recognizing common issues across different sites and have now updated it for IE10. Along the way, many members of the IE team contributed to the set of test cases that make up the rules in Compat Inspector.
The Colour Bookmark
Drag the Colour Bookmark link to your toolbar to find out the colour palette of the website you’re currently on. Then simply: copy, paste and use the colours you choose. Alternatively, enter a website into the form to retrieve its colour palette.
An Introduction To Object Oriented CSS
Have you ever heard the phrase “Content is King”? Being a Web developer, and therefore having a job that’s often linked to content creation, it’s likely you have. It’s a fairly overused but true statement about what draws visitors to a site.
From a Web developer’s perspective, however, some may argue that speed is king. More and more, I’m starting to favour that stance. In recent years many experienced front-end engineers have offered their suggestions on how we can improve the user experience by means of some performance best practices.
Unfortunately, CSS seems to get somewhat overlooked in this area while many developers (for good reason) focus largely on JavaScript performance and other areas.
In this post, I’ll deal with this often overlooked area by introducing you to the concept of object oriented CSS and how it can help improve both the performance and maintainability of your Web pages.
How to innovate like a startup: use these tools
Here are some paragraphs the enduring constructs / frameworks / brain tools that I keep referencing from the worlds of business, design and tech. Each one is that awesome combination of simple and easy to understand, hugely deep and investigable if that’s your thing, and massively extensible and flexible. Figuring out how and when to mix them together is the key to creating enduring products, services and businesses. When mixed together right, these tools help teams innovate quicker, better and cheaper.
Sidekick Studios: How to innovate like a startup: use these tools