Cross domain font woes – part 2
July 4, 2012 § 1 Comment
A few months back we looked at issues related to showing custom fonts in firefox (see Cross domain font woes in Firefox). Since then we have also started hosting more and more sites on heroku where you have no control over nginx. Obviously this makes the previously proposed solution hard to implement…plus who can remember all of that config?
Finally, a legitimate use for 3D CSS
March 28, 2012 § 2 Comments
Production sites using 3D transforms are still quite rare these days. I think one of the reasons is that people can’t find a legitimate reason to use 3D Transforms in their sites. Fair enough. Another reason can be that people think the technique isn’t mature enough yet. Recently I have been working on a website that is making use of 3D CSS, and it’s working!
In this article I want to show you that you can actually use 3D transforms in a production site, and what to expect when you’re thinking of using it in your site.
-webkit isn’t breaking the web. The W3C is
February 14, 2012 § Leave a Comment
In the post Webkit isn’t breaking the web, you are, Scott Gilbertson intimates that it is the developers that are leading us to a new era of browser-wars by only implementing the -webkit prefixed CSS properties. The notion is that Webkit currently dominates the mobile browser market, so much so that other browser vendors are considering implementing the -webkit prefix. I view it differently. I place the blame squarely at the feet of the W3C.
CoffeeScript is Afrikaans Javascript
February 7, 2012 § 16 Comments
A while ago I met a few Afrikaans speaking people, and found out that (being Dutch) I was able to understand them pretty well, despite the fact they were speaking Afrikaans.
Afrikaans is one of the newest West Germanic languages in the world and is primarily spoken in South Africa and Namibia.
The Dutch commander Jan van Riebeeck founded a new colony in 1652 near today’s Cape Town. Since then the Dutch language that the inhabitants spoke started to evolve and developed itself into a new language. This happened because of the influences of other languages that were spoken in South Africa at that time. About 90-95 percent of the Afrikaans vocabulary is of Dutch origin. The other 5-10 percent is copied from languages like Malay, Portuguese, Bantu and Khoisan. Which were the native languages of the inhabitants that were moved to South Africa by the Dutch. It was not until 1925 that Afrikaans was acknowledged as an official language. Before that it was considered to be “kitchen language” for the unlearned and not suitable for use in authorities like government, church and court.
Thinking in Responsive Design
September 23, 2011 § Leave a Comment
The days of clinging to pixel values are petering out slowly, while the rise of percentages is hailed by the masses. With all of this hubbub about the technology, we also have to start shifting our mindsets to build our platforms in a new way. Though changing pixel values to percentages is a start, it doesn’t teach us to handle the more complex problem of making sure the experience of our websites is pleasurable on all devices. It’s like encountering a puzzle where the pieces change shape every hour. Luckily, the puzzle is fun to solve and the result is highly rewarding.
We’re giving away a ticket to RubyConf 2011 in New Orleans!
September 21, 2011 § 15 Comments
At Mint we’re lucky enough to have a fantastic conference policy that gives us the opportunity to go and hear from experts in our respective fields, meet our peers and sometimes even see another part of the world.
One of our favourites is Rubyconf in New Orleans. As well as being one of the best Ruby conferences out there, it takes place in one of the most amazing cities in the U.S.
Can I come?
Yes, we want to share the love and are offering one lucky person a ticket to Rubyconf. All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning is tell us in the comment section why you think we should choose you. The best/funniest answer wins. Easy.
The competition closes Friday at midnight (EST) so get commenting…
*The winner is responsible for their own travel and accommodation.
Ace Invaders
September 19, 2011 § 2 Comments
Ace Invaders is a little internal project we’re working on as a fun way to explore some new things. It’s a basic game which does the following:
- Allows players to control a space invader character and move it around a grid.
- Allows many players to move around the same grid.
- Maintains the game state on the server and push it to all players as soon as it changes.
To get this done we’re using a combination of cool technologies.
Fork jQuery! Introducing ukQuery…
July 26, 2011 § 2 Comments
At Mint Digital we’re always looking for the best tools out there to make our work more streamlined. We use Ruby on Rails to create a solid backend, GitHub for version control, and jQuery as our Javascript framework.
Having come from a company where we mostly used Dojo, I find the latter tool is sometimes quite confusing to work with.
Pragmatic Semantics
June 7, 2011 § Leave a Comment
HTML5, Microformats, ARIA roles, CSS3 and a whole host of other technologies are making our lives as front end developers easier and better.
We usually have to rely on the user’s browser supporting these new technologies. That is fine for a site with fairly technical readers, but we also work on sites for a much broader (and potentially less tech-savvy) audience.
So what can we use now to make our markup more semantic and how can we ensure backwards compatibility for our clients? Let’s run through a list (because the internet loves a list). « Read the rest of this entry »
AssetHat 0.4: Load CSS and JS faster. Your assets are covered.
May 6, 2011 § 7 Comments
You don’t have to read too far through Google’s user experience guidelines before finding this simple principle:
Every millisecond counts. Nothing is more valuable than people’s time.
For front-end developers, this means making CSS, JS, and images load at top speed. “But,” you exclaim, “why should I care, when my 96-core computer with an SSD and fiber optic internet already loads everything ridiculously quickly?!”
Think about the commuter who is loading your website over 3G (or worse, EDGE). Or the coffee shop hipster who is loading your website over slow, unhip public wifi. Or the desk employee who is loading your website with an ancient desktop tower that the company can’t/won’t upgrade. As caring, responsible front-end web devs, we have to help users make the best of their hardware and network connections, which are often beyond their control.
As Google has noted, speeding up your website can improve user experience, reduce operating costs, and boost your Google search rankings. If your website is also selling something, you’ll surely want to move users through checkout swiftly. « Read the rest of this entry »
