Blogging and all that malarkey

Scott and the Filament Group continue to make the web better.

I watched President Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention this morning before work and was captivated. If only our sad bunch of British no-hoper politicians had a fraction of his conviction and charisma. If only I could be one tenth as good a speaker. What’s also amazing is how much the former president deviated from the script.

(Via: Daring Fireball)

Brad Frost (I want his dog. So badly.) and Pon Kattera collect the latest links, news and thinking in responsive web design. There’s some great resources in here already.

Thank-you to everyone who tweeted and emailed about the site. The reaction was overwhelmingly positive. More than I’d hoped for. And I’d hoped for a lot. Some of the comments came with bugs I need to fix and suggestions for improving the site and its performance overall. I’m really grateful for that. A little bit of follow up from yesterday’s site launch.

If you’re reading this in anything other than a browser, open Chrome, Safari or Firefox (if that’s your thing,) because I’ve designed a new website for Stuff & Nonsense.

Some conferences just have ‘that’ special feeling. @media was the first for me in 2005. The An Event Apart in Seattle in 2010 where Ethan Marcotte first talked about responsive design, another. Most recently, the first New Adventures also in 2010.

Adobe announced yesterday that Creative Cloud customers (like me) will receive an upgrade to HiDPI and Retina Display Support. This sounds like great news if you’re a Photoshop or Lightroom user — two apps that will receive the update first — but not if your everyday design app is Fireworks, not Photoshop. There was no mention of when (or more likely if) Fireworks will be upgraded.

“A reuseable collection of carefully-considered Less mixins” from our friends at ClearLeft.

Making screenshots for the some portfolio panels for my new site design — It’s out on Wednesday kids — I came across a problem. I couldn’t get screenshots sharp enough for a retina display because I’m snapping on a plain ol’ Macbook Air.

Damn.

It’s been a mad couple of weeks since I came back from holiday. This week onsite with my friends at STV and the first spent head down on another project. But before I could get back to work, I had to set up our new studio.

I haven’t posted lyrics for a while, but it seemed appropriate this week, both with the news (no pun intended) this week that Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson face charges relating to phone hacking and the fact that I put the final, final, final touches to my design for the upcoming Hillsborough Independent Panel’s report into the Hillsborough Disaster that will be launched in September.

My beloved Fireworks, now in CS6, encountered an error yesterday and refused to save. My only option was to Force Quit the app and lose half an hour’s work. Hey ho.

Then I found out that auto-save might have helped me, maybe lose less work. Here’s what I did.

Sun is a web app designed for the iPhone and iPad. It’s making heavy use of gestures. Rest assured, you’ll be doing a lot of pinching.

Beautiful.

Remember “MICKY,” the world’s cleverest CHIMPANZEE?

Of course you do. Well now, thanks to renowned Liverpool historian Ken Pye, I’ve finally seen a photograph of Micky:

I’ve just come home from a ten hot days in Texas, where I had the honour, again, of speaking at An Event Apart alongside some of the best speakers in the industry. I enjoyed the trip, and especially the conference, enormously.

I’ve spoken at conferences regularly since my first time (again alongside Jeremy and Jeffrey) at @media 2005. (I’d never have guessed then that we’d still be friends, still doing this thing, all these years later.) But in the last couple of years I started to enjoy speaking less and emotional risk/reward ratio that goes with public speaking tipped too much toward risk. So I decided to not speak at all in 2012. That is until Jeffrey persuaded me to speak in Austin.

Unlike Jeremy, this wasn’t my first not-SXSW visit to Austin as Elliot, Simon, Tim and I and a bunch of design globetrotters went there to redesign a bank a few years ago.

I’m glad I went. Every An Event Apart conference feels special, but at this one the (unplanned) recurring themes were spooky. My talk was about designing, design process and particularly how our conventional design tools — drawing tools like Fireworks and Photoshop — are not equipped for designing today’s web. They’re ‘Bringing a knife to a gunfight!’ From the website:

In the mid-nineties, when designers started making their mark on the web, they did it with software tools and processes that they’d brought with them from print. But the web’s a different place now than it was ten, five, even two years ago; the tools and processes we’ve relied on for years are no longer capable of properly designing today’s flexible, responsive web. In this session, we’ll find new ways to design that better serve the needs of today’s responsive web, and investigate better, alternative tools and approaches to design. We’ll learn too how new tools and approaches can improve communication between designers and developers and our clients.

I hear that the talk was well received and I had a great time giving it. In fact, it’s definitely helped me to get my speaking mojo working again.

For everyone not at An Event Apart in Austin:

• I’ve uploaded my slides on Speaker Deck
• Here’s a list of the URLs from the talk too.

Tweetbot for Mac Alpha is notable for a whole bunch of reasons I won’t get into here. Instead, I found something notable about the CSS the Tapbots team used on the page for their alpha release.

From my talk today at An Event Apart in Austin.

In the later part of last year, my good friend and colleague David Roessli and I started a new project together — to redesign ISO, the International Organization for Standardization. I wrote about it a little in November 2011.

CodePen is all about front end code inspiration, education, and sharing.

Like Dribbble for code? I like it. A lot.

File this one under gotchas.

I’m desktop browser testing a series of layout templates for a current project today. Everything was going really well until I encountered some files where my web fonts stubbornly refused to display in Firefox, but rendered perfectly in every other browser. Luckily I found the reason for the problem and a solution to it.

Converts fixed-pixel width layout dimension to percentages. It would be better with padding and box-sizing, but mustn’t grumble.

More about Micky the world’s cleverest chimpanzee. I’ve <mark>ed several parts:

Before she died at the fantastic age of 98, my Nana gave me her boxes of family photographs. She knew I value family histories and would keep her things safe. I’m in the process of organising them and in one box I found a tourism brochure from Liverpool from around 1938/39. In it, an advertisement, for Liverpool Zoological Park caught my interest. In particular, “MICKY,” the world’s cleverest CHIMPANZEE.

Sorry to break into your Diamond Jubilee celebrations, but my Flexible Responsive Web Design workshop on the 19th September in Freiburg in Germany sold out so fast that Smashing Conference and I are hosting a second day. That’s right. We didn’t want disappointed Germans. Especially after Engerlaaand will be beating them in Euro 2012.

This one’s the day before the conference, on the 16th September.

You know the drill.

• Places are limited.
• Found out more.
• Register. Now.