Blogging and all that malarkey

Five Simple Steps are holding a Christmas sale, with 30% of all their books in all formats. There’s plenty of gifts for all the family, but you know what everyone wants, don’t you? That’s right. Hardboiled Web Design.

The Hardboiled Web Design Digital Edition (PDF, ePub & mobi) is only £12:00, but there’s nothing quite like the smell of print on Christmas morning. So get the one you love the Paperback & Digital Edition for only £29:00.

Ho, ho, ho.

This year’s been one of my busiest for speaking, teaching and designing for clients. You might not be able to tell that though, because when I deconstructed this site a few months ago, my portfolio was one of the things that didn’t find its way back. I’ll rectify that in the new year, but in the meantime I wanted to share some of the projects I’ve been working on, starting with this — a redesign for ISO, the International Organization for Standardization.

Some quotes from the HP MacBook Pro Envy’s design video (Hat tip to Matt Legend Gemmell):

Bruce Lawson asked:

If I buy a Galaxy Tab 10.1 today, do I get a *timely* over-the-air upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich for free?

Samsung UK replied:

This is not guaranteed. Honeycomb was made specifically for the 10.1, so there are no plans for release at present.

I guess that I just expected, when I bought my Galaxy Tab 10.1 this summer, that I’d get software updates from Samsung the same way I get them for my iOS devices. Sure enough I did get one — one that replaced stock Honeycomb with Samsung’s own TouchWiz variant — an update I didn’t want but was told that if I didn’t update, I wouldn’t get any upgrades in future.

Now it looks like my Galaxy Tab 10.1 — already the most expensive shaving mirror I’ve ever bought — is going to stay stuck in 2011. Does the same go for Tabs still on the shelves of your favourite big box retailer? What about the 10.1N variant I saw in Germany two weeks ago?

Samsung doesn’t get software.

I doubt it’ll come as much of a surprise to learn that I love my iPhone 4S. It was a major upgrade from the 3G I swapped my original iPhone for last September, but I’ve been less impressed with its battery life. Now I think I’ve found the culprit. Foursquare

I’ve turned into a country music nut. What a started as downloading Dolly albums for a road trip has turned into real enthusiasm. Although I look terrible in a cowboy hat and don’t know the difference between a ’coon dog and a corn dog, lately I’ve listened to little else. We could disagree about what classes as real country — Cough. Taylor Swift — but all I really care about is music I like.

.Net magazine published its The top 25 books for web designers and developers after asking a few contributors and yours truly for our recommendations.

There’s been much written about responsive design, but so much of it has focussed on aspects of technical implementation rather than about the design decisions that responsive design demands. So next February (2012), I’ll be travelling down-under to Australia to host four, yes four, ‘Fashionably flexible responsive web design’ workshops.

I’ve become a bit of a LESS junkie these last few months, so I was chuffed when I heard about CodeKit — a new, (free while in beta) toolkit — by LESS.app developer Bryan Jones. I’ve been trying CodeKit out this week.

About two years ago, I tweeted “If your CSS is complicated enough to need a compiler or pre-processor, you’re fucking doing it wrong!” I meant it too. After-all, CSS isn’t hard to learn and it’s easy to write and write quickly. So why would you need a processor like LESS or Sass?

One of the biggest reasons I chose LESS over other CSS pre-processors, was LESS.app. It processes LESS syntax into CSS on my Mac, every time I save a file. No Javascript and most importantly no complicated Terminal, Ruby malarkey. Simpless is a compiler that works on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows. I’m testing it now.

I’ll be writing a proper entry about how and why I use LESS soon.

Joshua Topolsky

We think of The Verge (and its underlying CMS) as something akin to an app. A piece of software that is being constantly developed and updated. Today we’re launching with The Verge 1.0, but 1.1 and 1.2 are just around the corner.

This Is My Next — my favourite tech, gadget site over the last few months — has (right on cue) become The Verge.

If you’ve been reading This Is My Next, you’ll know there’s been a lot to like about the quality of its journalism. There’s a lot to like about the new site’s design too, from the strong layout of its review pages to many of the design details.

I can see myself spending a lot of time on the Apple hub. I love the category/brand tabs in the review sidebar navigation. They’re not unique, they’re not new, but here they just ‘work’. The ‘jump to’ overlay on product review pages, like this one for the iPhone 4S, just works too. It’s obvious that everyone involved in The Verge cares about the details.

Compared to Engadget, Gizmodo or the recent TechCrunch redesign disaster, The Verge’s design is a treat and it looks like a worthy successor to This Is My Next. So far, I love it.

After pushing my redesign live yesterday, I’ve been asked a few times about why I pulled respond.js (and with it, CSS3 Media Query support for older versions on Internet Explorer) from the new site.

I’ve been wanting to create a new look for Stuff & Nonsense for a good, long while, but I felt daunted by how much work I imagined there’d be for a redesign. My work diary is so full that I couldn’t see the time I thought I needed, so the site stagnated and over the last few months I couldn’t bear to look at it. Then a few weeks ago, Elliot spontaneously redesigned his site and inspired me to follow suit.

As Jeremy mentioned yesterday, just before An Event Apart in Seattle, I spent a few hours on a spot of guerrilla testing at an AT&T store. Specifically, I was looking at how Windows Phone 7’s Internet Explorer browser handles ‘responsive sites’.

I gave my first talk of the year at An Event Apart in Seattle. I’m speaking at all six of the events this year (and hosting two workshops ). I called the talk Smoke Gets In Your Eyes after the first episode of Mad Men because I was showing, for the very first time Madmanimation, the Mad Men opening titles recreated using CSS.

Old fashioned causes like that still stand
Gotta rid this prejudice that ties you down
(Ghosts by The Jam)

Friday night is Geek Ninja Battle Night in Brighton and the topic that Aral “Ken” Balkan, Sarah “Cammy” Parmenter, Remy “Cyclops” Sharp and me (Andy “M(alarkey) Bison” Clarke) are fighting over is Mobile – Web vs. Native! I’m taking the unusual step (for me) of speaking without a slide-deck to back me up, but I’ve prepared an outline for my short talk which might be interesting if you’re not attending.

From time to time, I get asked, “Why no index in Hardboiled Web Design?” My usual flippant answer being, “What? You want it even thicker?” Still, I know some people like indexes and the Hardboiled paperback doesn’t have one, (unless you count searching in the PDF version). Steven Milne has taken matters into his own hands with his unofficial Hardboiled Index.

Compare these.

Since Ethan Marcotte first lit the fire at An Event Apart in Seattle last year and later in that article, we’ve gone crazy about Responsive Web Design. But the more I think about what this means, the more CSS3 Media Queries I write, the more I realise something. I just don’t care about Responsive Web Design. I’ll tell you why.

When we created our Hardboiled Web Design workshops, we wanted to work with partners who give our customers something extra. So we can’t be more pleased to have three amazing partners for our workshops in the UK — Microsoft, VPS.NET and Campaign Monitor.

I got different two scarves last Christmas, from two different people. But the difference wasn’t the colour, or the fabric, it was the giving.

It’s a ??????? ?????? ????, this web design design lark. Who’d have thought that learning a bit of code would’ve meant I got travel around the world and to places I never thought I’d see?