Blogging and all that Malarkey

Speaking of proprietary Apple meta elements, here’s a little gem for labelling a site’s home screen icon on iOS.

You might think — because all the talk at the moment is about seven inch tablets, in particular the iPad mini vs Google’s Nexus 7 vs Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD — that a seven inch tablet was a seven inch tablet was a… Right? Wrong.

I spent a couple of hours this afternoon upgrading this site’s iOS ‘Add to Home Screen’ icons and startup screen images.

I’m glad that people like my financial buffer business post the other day. I don’t think people write enough about the business side of what we do and from what I hear, not enough about it gets taught at universities either. I’m not a very good businessman, truth be told, but I have learned a few things over the years, so I thought I’d start sharing them.

After me saying the other day that I won’t buy an iPad mini, James Sherrett has tugged on my wallet. But a desktop site won’t work on a seven-inch iPad Mini. A typical 12-pixel font will be unreadable. The buttons will be unclickable. The form inputs will drive people away. At worst, a desktop website will look broken. At best, a desktop website will be hard to use. My wife (who handles our finances) made me laugh yesterday when I brought this up. She said, “if you want an iPad mini, just hold your regular iPad at arms length.” But designing for tablets isn’t just about what you ‘see’, it’s about what you ‘touch.’ Me ordering an iPad mini tomorrow is looking more likely.

Sergio Nouvel, writing for UX Magazine, about ‘Hi-Fidelity Wireframes.’ This is what most people have in mind when they think of wireframes: a carefully crafted blueprint, which is usually true-to-size and incorporates the highest level of detail previous to the final visual comp. In other words, this is a final comp, minus the look and feel, color palette, and fonts. Sizes, whitespaces, margins, proportions, and line-heights are considered in this kind of wireframing, usually produced in a precision tool such as Fireworks, Illustrator, or OmniGraffle. This document is ready to be dressed by the visual designer with textures and branding. “Dressed?” Dressed? You could of course substitute the word ‘decorated’ because that’s what design is reduced to in a so-called UX, bullshit, workflow where this kind of wireframes play a role. I’m not arguing with Sergio though. This is a great article. Not only should you read, if you work with someone who spends hours in tools like Axure, you should print it out and staple it to their head.

A 64Gb first generation iPad sits by my desk. I bought it on the first day they were available in the US and, like many people I suppose, using it has changed what and how I design.

A friend of mine works as an in-house designer. He emailed me the other day with a question that’s come up a few times recently. It’s a question I’m asked by people at various stages of their careers, from students to those, like my friend, who’ve worked for somebody else for a long time. The question? “What financial advice do I have for anyone who’s planning to go self-employed?” Rather than write that advice in an email, I thought it might be more useful if I wrote it as a short post.

Microsoft launches Windows 8 in just a few days, so now’s a good time to turn our attention to Internet Explorer 10. Here are two links to help you get prepared:

Chris (I so want to say “ Stretch ”) Armstrong: Absolute units like pixels effectively give a layout a sell-by date, locking it to a finite resolution range in which it will “work.” Proportional units (ems, rems, and percentages) enable you to define the important relationships between elements, and are a crucial first step on the road to resolution independence.