Blogging and all that Malarkey

Even within a business culture of openness and transparency, some things are meant to be kept secret. NDAs, non-disclosure agreements, are meant to help with this, but most NDAs are the opposite of open and transparent because they’re written in the same jargon-laden legalese that I avoided in Contract Killer. So I’ve written ‘ Three Wise Monkeys ’, a plain speaking, easy to read, open source NDA.

Good work by Brett Jankord: You can replace, the min–moz-device-pixel-ratio, the -o-min-device-pixel-ratio with a resolution media query. You can also just remove the unprefixed min-device-pixel-ratio.

After I boasted how nice my site looks in IE10 on a Microsoft Surface tablet (it really does), Grant Hutchinson thought he’d put it through its paces on an Apple Newton MessagePad 2100. Turns out it’s not too shabby.

I spent last week in Geneva. Nothing out of the ordinary about that as I’ve been working there fairly regularly over the last couple of years. But last week was my birthday week — Tuesday. 47. A new wallet. Thanks for asking — so they had to be very special people to persuade me to spend the week with them. They were. Good honest folk.

This article looks at the CSS @supports rule, part of the CSS3 Conditional Rules Module Level 3, which provides a perfect mechanism for selectively applying CSS based on feature support. Here we’ll look at basic syntax, along with an applied example. I did not know this.

Yesterday, my friends at ISO and I were discussing the impact that their social media icons have on the performance of their site. (Short story, they add 14 seconds to the rendering time of every page.) Then last night I found SocialCount (via Brad Frost.) SocialCount is a small jQuery plugin for progressively enhanced, lazy loaded, mobile friendly social networking widgets. Funny how the universe works.

After I posted my review of Hammer – the simple to use, GUI app that helps me design with HTML – this week, several people tweeted a few alternatives. Oooh, oooh, let’s go look!

Here’s Luke Wroblewski with notes from Mike Monteiro’s talk this week at the final An Event Apart of the year, in San Francisco. There’s so much wisdom here, so much to like. In particular: Your process is a mystery. Show people what it’s like to work with you on a day to day basis. Let them the sequence of events, when you’ll connect and how often. If you don’t control the process for the start, clients will start telling you how it should go. They’ll fill in voids when they see them. (And if you haven’t already bought Mike’s book, you really should.)

Summary: If you use OSX and write HTML, screw the trial version. Buy Hammer. You’ll earn back what you spent on it during the first hour you use it.

I’ve found that if you want rough indication of a designer’s experience, look at the time they spend on different stages of the design process. Novice designers spend most of their time creating a solution, and maybe 20% refining it. Intermediates split the time roughly evenly. For senior designers, the ratio flips: 20% creating, 80% refining. And the experts realise that creating and refining are actually the same thing. This is a fabulous insight. Next week I’m heading back to Geneva to do exactly this with ISO, because ‘expert’ clients realise it too.