Blogging and all that Malarkey

Remote preview is a tiny JavaScript based tool which I built for our test lab. It allows you to preview any URL on large number of mobile devices simultaneously. Just enter a URL, hit Cmd+S, and new URL gets automatically loaded on each device. Remote preview works on platforms like Android, Blackberry, iOS, Maemo, Meego, Symbian, Windows Phone and WebOS. I’ll test Remote Preview for myself later this week. I hope it’ll be another reason for me not to renew my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription next year.

It’s coming up on four years since I published my original Contract Killer over on 24ways. The reaction to it was astonishing and over the last four years the feedback I’ve received has been overwhelmingly positive. I feel very, very happy that so many people have found Contract Killer useful.

Although Adobe have said nothing officially, their silence says it all. Unofficially my little birdies tell me that Fireworks is not being updated for retina displays so the tool I’ve used and loved for a decade or more is effectively dead.

“Prototype iPhone apps with simple HTML, CSS and JS components.” From the fellas that brought you Bootstrap.

Two great reads this week, on connected subjects:

Two things about the iPad mini as I’ve owned one since Friday:

Jordan Moore (who wears crocodile skin shoes) made a handy little tool for “showing what @media features your device can and can’t see.”

Don’t be put off by ‘Windows Store apps’ in the title. There’s lots of really good information about designing for tablets in general here. Aside: I spotted this in the ‘Windows 8 touch posture’ section: Because slates are most often held along the side, the bottom corners and sides are ideal locations for interactive elements. That’s a big difference between iPads and Microsoft’s Surface ‘slate’ (do they actually still call it that?). Microsoft sees the 16:9 Surface as a landscape device, whereas a 4:3 iPad is for use any way up.

The big news here is actually that Internet Explorer 10 on Windows Phone 8 supports web fonts in the standard WOFF format.

A jQuery plugin that: Grabs all your HTML, and resizes it inside the browser when you click the width you want. Potentially useful as a demonstration as well as a development tool. As well as a set of fixed (device derived) widths, I’d love to see the ability to add any width. I’m sure Jeremy would like it written in plain Javascript too.