Category: Asides

Interesting links or quick ideas which don’t require any comment from me.

The State of Web Education

A few weeks ago I saw Anna Debenham at London Web Standards give a hugely inspiring talk on the state of web development education. She later gave a briefer version of the talk at the Drumbeat Festival. I urge you to at the very least look at the overview and slides of the shorter talk, but if you can put aside 25 minutes you should really watch the video of the full one.


New jQuery release and Mobile Alpha

A new version of jQuery has quietly been released over the weekend. It’s only a minor point release but has a couple of features which look amazing: some selector functions now work up to 8x faster than the previous release; and there is support – very clever support – for HTML5 data attributes. Take a look at the jQuery 1.4.3 release notes for more.

Also released was the first alpha of jQuery Mobile, a touch-optimised amalgam of jQuery and jQuery UI. It’s actually a little buggy on my Galaxy S Android phone, but as it’s an alpha release that’s perfectly forgiveable. It looks pretty smart and comprehensive.


Web Directions @media 2010

Usually when I attend @media (that is, on two previous occasions) I write a follow-up blog post on what I saw there. Well I attended this year, and I’ve written the post, but it’s on the blog of my employer, Preloaded: HTML5, Mobile, and UCD: what we saw at @media.


An updated studio-style backdrop with CSS3

I’ve updated my post, Create a studio-style backdrop with CSS3, as I realised a way to do the reflection without requiring an extra image – using the scale transformation function to flip the image vertically.

The demo works in Firefox and WebKit.


Help wanted: Webkit multi-columns

I’m writing about the CSS3 Multi-column layout module and I notice that WebKit supports a series of proprietary properties: -webkit-column-break-after, -webkit-column-break-before, and -webkit-column-break-inside. However, despite the documentation saying that they’re implemented in Safari 3+, I can’t seem to get any of them to work.

Has anyone reading this ever seen an example of these in action? I’ve searched for demos but have found nothing. If you know anything about this, please leave me a comment; your help would be gratefully appreciated.


The Uncanny Valley and Realism in UI Design

Last year I began exploring the idea of the uncanny valley as it applies to creating prototypes, using a panel from Understanding Comics as an illustration. Lukas Mathis at UX Magazine has had a similar idea, but explored it in much more depth and with greater clarity.


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Aside

I’ve updated my Speaking page to include more conferences, more videos, and a little on my speaking requirements and preferences. I’m planning to cut down on the number of talks I give in 2014 (twelve is too many), but am always open to interesting offers and opportunities, so please get in touch if you’re organising an event.

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