Blogging and all that Malarkey

Thibaut Sailly added an extra dimension to the three-lines responsive navigation icon discussion by suggesting that the three horizontal lines could represent a gesture.

An incredibly useful, and beautifully designed, colour tool by Lea. I can see myself using this all the time. ( Some background to the tool.)

In a fantastic A List Apart double bill, Matt Griffin tackles Responsive Comping: Obtaining Signoff with Mockups: Sending clients in-browser comps is remarkably easy, as it turns out. We just e-mail them a URL. Clients can look at the designs in various browsers and on various devices, resize them, click links and navigation, and check out hover states. Instead of asking our clients to pretend that an image is a website, we show them a website. Keep in mind though, that showing clients a prototype instead of showing them static visuals is about setting realistic expectations and not about designing a browser.

This spot reminds me somewhat of Apple’s iPod ads and I don’t mean that in a bad way. I like the look of the Surface. I like it a lot and will probably pre-order one (for testing) this week. Even as an Apple devotee, I really hope that Microsoft does well with the Surface. I have a Windows Phone 7 phone that I used as my only mobile until I upgraded to the iPhone 4S and I love the we don’ call it Metro no mo’ Windows 8 Style interface. If I had to stop using an iPhone tomorrow, I’d head straight to a Nokia Lumia running Windows Phone 8.

Something strange happened to me on Twitter today.

I’m glad that the three-lines icon I suggested first, back in March is now being established as a sort of standard.

With the help of Tapbots’Netbot client, it looks like App.net might be gathering steam. If App.net’s your thing, you’ll now find me there too although I guess I’m not alone in being unsure when I’ll use App.net instead of Twitter. Follow me on App.net. (Damn that name isn’t getting any easier to say.)

Jordan Moore (who has a name like a country singer, but doesn’t like country and can’t sing): There have been calls recently from Andy Clarke and Jeremy Keith to have a standard icon for revealing navigation in small contexts, and rightly so — this is a new technique and we need to set users’ expectations about the consequence of the reveal action.

The app uses regular expressions to find the parts of the selector which contribute to specificity. It highlights each part with a background colour to help you learn the specificity rules. Then of course, there’s always Star Wars.

Aarron Walter is one of those people I wish I could spend more time with. Every time we’re together, I learn so much from him. Here, Aarron tells the story of how he helped me make my talk at Smashing Conference more balanced and inclusive (he does that to me a lot), particularly when it comes to (so-called) UX. This article is published on On My Mind, Aarron’s email newsletter, which is well worth subscribing to.