Jeffrey Zeldman's Blog, page 45
March 27, 2013
140 Characters is a Joke
THERE IS ALWAYS more to the story than what we are told. I am not omniscient. It is better to light a single candle than to join a lynch mob. Other people’s behavior is not my business. Truth is hard, epigrams are easy. Anything worth saying takes more than 140 characters. Blogging’s not dead. F____ the 140 character morality police.
March 26, 2013
Third-party metadata, honest web aesthetics
IN ISSUE No. 72 of A List Apart for people who make websites:
“Like”-able Content: Spread Your Message with Third-Party Metadata
by CLINTON FORRY
Spread your content and control its appearance on Facebook and Twitter. Use third-party metadata tools (Facebook OG, Twitter Cards) without feeling dirty.
Material Honesty on the Web
by KEVIN GOLDMAN
Kevin Goldman forecasts increased longevity for our work and our careers if we apply the principles of material honesty to our digital world.
Illustration by Kevin Cornell for A List Apart
March 18, 2013
Dribbble’s Dan Cederholm on Big Web Show No. 85
DAN CEDERHOLM is my guest on Big Web Show No. 85, sponsored by Lynda.com.
Dan is co-founder and designer of Dribbble, a vibrant community for sharing screenshots of your work, and the founder and principal of SimpleBits, a tiny web design studio. A recognized expert in the field of standards-based web design, he has worked with YouTube, Microsoft, Google, MTV, ESPN, Electronic Arts, Blogger, Fast Company, Inc. Magazine, and others. He also received a TechFellow award for Product Design & Marketing in early 2012.
Dan is the author of four books: CSS3 For Web Designers (A Book Apart), Handcrafted CSS (New Riders), Bulletproof Web Design (New Riders), and Web Standards Solutions (Friends of ED). He’s currently an aspiring clawhammer banjoist and occasionally wears a baseball cap.
Cloudtastrophe
A VIRUS spoofing my return email address has apparently been emailing many people. I know this because some of these viral email messages bounce back to my Gmail account as undeliverable. Mistaking these reports for actual messages sent by me, Gmail has decided I’m too active a user, and forbidden me to send any more mail today.
I’m a Google Apps user with a multi-gigabyte Gmail account and I’ve sent less than a dozen actual messages today because I am home sick with a cold. But Gmail doesn’t know that. And Gmail doesn’t care. Because Gmail isn’t real, not even in the David Sleight sense. It’s a set of equations programmed by fallible human beings, and it controls my life and yours.
There is no one to talk to at Google about my service problem because there is no there there. The services I pay for are delivered by robot magic in the cloud. When something goes wrong, it just goes wrong. There’s nobody to track down the virus’s origin and make it stop. There’s nobody to say, “This user hasn’t actually sent these messages.” (I keep marking the returned mails as “spam,” but Google hasn’t caught on, probably because customer service problems aren’t supposed to be reported by inference.)
My friend wears a shirt that says “The Cloud Is A Lie,” but that isn’t quite the truth. More like, the cloud is a customer service problem. One I just found myself on the wrong end of.
Google to customer: Go fuck yourself. In the cloud.
March 12, 2013
ALA 371: Performance is All
IMPROVE UX through front-end performance, and front-end performance through symbol fonts, in Issue No. 371 of A List Apart:
Improving UX Through Front-End Performance
by LARA SWANSON
Adding half a second to a search results page can decrease traffic and ad revenues by 20 percent, says a Google study. For every additional 100 milliseconds of load time, sales decrease by 1 percent, Amazon finds. Users expect pages to load in two seconds—and after three seconds, up to 40 percent will simply leave. The message is clear: we must make performance optimization a fundamental part of how we design, build, and test every site we create—for every device. Design for performance; measure the results.
The Era of Symbol Fonts
by BRIAN SUDA
Welcome to the third epoch in web performance optimization: symbol fonts. Everything from bullets and arrows to feed and social media icons can now be bundled into a single, tiny font file that can be cached and rendered at various sizes without needing multiple images or colors. This has the same caching and file size benefits as a CSS sprite, plus additional benefits we’re only now realizing with high-resolution displays. Discover the advantages and explore the challenges you’ll encounter when using a symbol font.
More From A List Apart
Better Navigation Through Proprioception – CENNYDD BOWLES on UX & DESIGN
W3C is Getting Some Work Done – THE W3C on WEB STANDARDS
Give a crap. Don’t give a fuck. – KAREN MCGRANE on CONTENT
Font Hinting and the Future of Responsive Typography – NICK SHERMAN on TYPOGRAPHY
The Flirty Medium – FERTILE MEDIUM by DEREK POWAZEK
W3C in the Wild – THE W3C on WEB STANDARDS
The Future is Unevenly Superdistributed – DAVID SLEIGHT on NEW-SCHOOL PUBLISHING
Looking Beyond User-Centered Design – CENNYDD BOWLES on UX & DESIGN
…and of course A BLOG APART
As Always…
Work Life
“‘My mom launched a company,’ it read in her inventive spelling.” A moving, empowering true story on business, motherhood, and making a difference.
March 7, 2013
App.net CEO Dalton Caldwell on The Big Web Show
DALTON CALDWELL is my guest on today’s Big Web Show, sponsored by Happy Cog™. In one of the most interesting discussions we’ve ever had on the show, we go deep on the essence of social software, ponder if everything that starts out great on the web turns to crap, explore how different business models inevitably shape digital experiences, get the real story behind some of the most popular software in internet history, and overturn more than a few canards.
Dalton is the CEO and co-founder of App.net, an ad-free social platform and API. App.net aims to be the backbone of the social web through infrastructure that developers can use to build applications and that members can use for meaningful interactions.
Previously, Dalton founded the music-sharing service imeem in 2003, serving as CEO until its acquisition by MySpace in 2009. Dalton graduated with honors from Stanford University in 2003 with a a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and B.A. in Psychology.
March 2, 2013
Curse of the Zeldman Curse
I HAVEN’T GRIPED about a run of bad luck with Apple products for some time, because I haven’t experienced such a run in years. So I was due. So pretty much all the Apple products I own are now malfunctioning, each in its own special way—a way that interacts cunningly with the malfunction in another Apple product I own to prevent me from, say, accessing internet content, or getting photos out of my camera and onto a device where I can view and edit them.
The interlocking details of these curiously synchronous malfunctions are of little general interest, but the cultural assumptions surrounding their discussion may merit some small call on your attention.
People used to talk about the Zeldman Curse, meaning things went wrong with my Apple software or hardware that didn’t go wrong with anyone else’s. But that was never true, of course. Google any problem I wrote about back then, and you’d find lots of other people having the same problem, usually quietly, on an out-of-the-way Apple message board, which only rarely contained an actual, working solution.
Media-wise, Apple was always mum on these subjects—the one exception being 2010′s notorious iPhone 4 antenna problem which supposedly doomed Apple and the iPhone and of course did neither because it wasn’t really a big problem and it was easy to fix.
But those other things that sometimes went wildly wrong for some users of some Apple products? Those things, nice people didn’t talk about. As a community, Apple fans were Victorians when it came to malfunctions of the hardware or software body, and those who complained—like Victorians seeking sexual information—were to be shunned.
This ban on complaint never stopped me because my filters are different from yours, and because I needed the psychological release that came with writing more than I needed your approval.
The real meaning of Apple design
Now, we all know Apple is smart. Their sales pitch is design, but not in the “pretty” sense people who don’t know what design is think I mean when I say the word “design.”
Their stuff is pretty, but that surface prettiness is merely an objective correlative—an indicator, if you will—for the beauty and emotional satisfaction of a generally seamless computing experience. It’s the comparative ease of creating and managing a music library, not the attractiveness of the surrounding chrome, that makes people connect personally with iTunes. Like the best websites, Apple products anticipate what you will need to do, and make it easy for you to do it, thereby enabling you to focus your attention on the content with which you are engaged, instead of on the interface that facilitates your interaction. Interaction design. Experience design. That’s what Apple is brilliant at.
And even when the hardware is visually gorgeous—like the MacBook Air, my road machine as a frequent speaker—the real selling point isn’t that visual beauty; it’s the fact that this powerful computer weighs little more than a pad of paper. You can toss it in your handbag or backpack and run out the door. That whole deskbound computing experience? The Air freed you from it even before the iPad came along.
Ingenious
If a brand’s whole essence is bound up with good experience, it makes sense for the brand to handle bad experiences quietly and with skill. This Apple does in its stores. If something goes wrong with a piece of hardware, or if an individual piece of software is malfunctioning in ways you can’t fix after fifteen minutes with the Googles, you walk into the Apple store, and a smiling initiate fixes the software for you, or replaces your bum iPhone with a free new one. Walking out with a free new iPhone kind of makes you forget that you were angry at Apple for the problems of the iPhone you walked in with.
The house that Jack wired
But you can’t lug your apartment or your whole network routing setup to the Apple store when your MacBook Air says it can’t connect to the internet because another device is using its IP address (even though no device is). And you can’t plug into ethernet because the Air doesn’t support it. And if you bought that ethernet converter enabling you to plug an ethernet cable into your Air, that’s when you find out that most ethernet cables don’t actually fit into that thing Apple sold you for $50. You can’t bring the Air into the Apple store to be diagnosed and fixed because it connects beautifully to the internet over Wi-Fi everywhere but in your home. And that happened suddenly, after you hadn’t changed anything about your network.
And it’s not just you, because your colleague gets the same error message on his Apple computer in the design studio you share. And it isn’t the way you configured your networks, because you hired a guy to configure the one in your studio, while you configured the home one yourself, using only Apple hardware and software. And the guy you hired to wire your studio is competent, because that is what he does for a living, and has done for 20 years, as his bald head attests.
And you want the Air to connect to the internet because you want to get photos off your camera, and you can’t do that with your desktop Apple computer (an iMac) because iPhoto will not open in that computer. iPhoto will not open in that computer because your iPhoto library is corrupted, and the usual secret fixes for that problem (Command-Option open) do not work. Besides, the iPhoto library on your MacBook Air is also corrupted.
Your iMac is set to open Aperture when you connect your camera to it, but Aperture shares iPhoto’s library, so if you plug your camera into your iMac, Aperture spins uselessly and stops responding, just like iPhoto does.
You can sometimes force iPhoto to open on the Air by holding down Command-Option on launch, but if you did that, the photos would just sit there, because the Air cannot connect to the internet in your home. So you couldn’t share the photos on Flickr or Instagram or Facebook, and what would be the point of having taken them? And besides, the Air has no room for photos because the Air has no room on its little bitty drive. And you can’t edit photos on your Air because it’s a “light” computer by design. So even if iPhoto wasn’t broken on your Air, and even if it had room on its itty bitty drive, the best you could hope to do would be dump a bunch of photos into it and then not edit or share them.
The iMac has internet access, but neither Aperture nor iPhoto will work on it because of the aforesaid corruption problem.
So I’ve bought iPhoto Library Manager to fix the corruption in my library, and I believe it will do that, but it’s been working on the problem for fourteen hours so far and it is not even halfway finished. Yes, I have a large library. By tomorrow night, if the software has worked, I may be able to access my photos—although there is the very strong possibility that when I connect the camera, Aperture will open, and will freeze, because it doesn’t know that iPhoto Library Manager has built an entirely new photo library, because that’s how iPhoto Library Manager solves the problem. So tomorrow night, when iPhoto Library Manager finally stops grinding away at my corrupted photo library, I may need to uninstall Aperture just to get the photos off my camera.
I also can’t access internet content outside my living room because my walls are thick and my network no longer recognizes my Airport Extreme (so I’m waiting for Apple to deliver another one) but that would be a third kvetch in the same post, and two is all you get.
So I think maybe Apple is telling me to go out and spend time with my friends on this cold but sunny morning, and to only use computers in my studio, where they and the internet magically work. Only, why would Apple tell me that? How does that message get me to buy more of their stuff? It doesn’t, logically. And yet I know I will buy more and more of their stuff. I’m probably buying some right now.
I should get an unfaithful mistress and lavish her with jewelry I can’t afford. At least then people would understand.
February 28, 2013
Big Web Show 83: Scott Jehl of Filament Group
SCOTT JEHL of jQuery and Filament Group fame is my guest in today’s Big Web Show podcast.
We discuss Scott’s latest thinking about “responsible responsive design,” whether responsive design is destroying creativity on the web, working with CSS flexbox, what’s new with the jQuery Mobile project, why people fear JavaScript and love jQuery, the size and management of Filament Group’s multi-device test suite, the secret history of the jQuery logo, and much more.
[And for more Scott Jehl design and development wisdom and wizardry, please enjoy today's Full-Length Friday Web Design Video at An Event Apart. Scott Jehl: Interacting Responsibly (and Responsively!) is a brilliant 60-minute exploration on how to improve the responsiveness (if you will) of responsive web design.]
Thanks For The Pepperoni
This episode of The Big Web Show is sponsored by Lynda.com, an online learning company with more than 77,000 video tutorials that teach software, creative, and business skills. Try lynda.com free for 7 days by visiting lynda.com/bigwebshow.
About Scott Jehl
Scott is a web designer and developer at Filament Group, a smart studio that creates sites and applications for a range of clients and commonly contributes ideas and code to the open source community. He co-authored Designing with Progressive Enhancement, has written for A List Apart, and 24 Ways, and speaks at conferences including An Event Apart, Breaking Dev, and Mobilism.
Scott is also a jQuery team member, most recently leading the development of the jQuery Mobile project. Follow him on Twitter at @scottjehl and on Github at scottjehl.
February 21, 2013
Big Web Show 82: Creative Director Cindy Chastain
CINDY CHASTAIN, Creative Director & Experience Strategist at R/GA—plus actress, screenwriter, and freelance strategist—is my guest in today’s Big Web Show podcast, sponsored by Happy Cog.
@cchastain
R/GA
slideshare
Lanyrd: bio
Lanyrd: past speaking engagements
Loveless – the movie
Loveless – IFC review
Happy Cog
