Collabify – everyone curates the party playlist
May 10, 2012 § 1 Comment
Last night was the first Music/Tech meetup. It went really well and we had a blast. Lots of interesting folks came down, we had a few drinks, we had a good chat. It was fun. Why am I telling you about this on the Logical Friday technical blog? Because the way we decided to play music is quite interesting.
Because this was the Music/Tech meetup, we had to have music playing, and it had to be done in a needlessly complicated way. To that end, we decided to take a crack at making the playlist selection more egalitarian. Enter Collabify.
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.
Cross domain font woes in Firefox
March 21, 2012 § 5 Comments
We love using custom fonts with CSS @font-face declarations and have done so on a number of our recent projects. One thing has caught us out on a couple of occasions though. Here’s the scenario:
You’re building a site, everything is going well with the styling. Your custom font is looking good on your local version of the site, it’s been checked in staging and looks good there. You launch the site, it looks good everywhere… except Firefox. Your favourite development browser (well, mine at least, apparently some people like Chrome a lot these days) is no longer showing that lovely font. You can’t reproduce this on your own machine, everything seems lost.
You fight like a dairy farmer! Some Twitter whimsy with Ruby
March 14, 2012 § 1 Comment
When I was a kid I used to love playing The Secret of Monkey Island. I played it on my Commodore Amiga 500 and it came on four 3.5″ floppy disks. Those were the days.
My favourite part of the game was the , where, instead of strength, a sharp wit was the only way to overcome your opponent. The insults range from derogatory (“You fight like a dairy farmer!”) to egotistical (“I got this scar on my face during a mighty struggle!”) and you take the lead character, Guybrush Threepwood, through a number of fights to learn them all.
Fast forward to today and with the power of Twitter and a few lines of Ruby we can recreate insult sword fighting for the modern world!
-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.
Monitoring a site after launch (part 1)
February 6, 2012 § Leave a comment
A lot of effort goes into launching a project, but often they can be found neglected after launch. We see this more in client projects with a launch date, than with start-ups or any of our internal proprierty work, but the ideas here should apply to all.
It is niave at best, to assume that once launched the project is done – to this end we always encourage clients to budget for work *after* launch. Sometimes this can be a hard sell, because people assume that once something is launched it is done, however argubly this is the most important work to be done. Before launch you are essentially working on educated guesses and experience (or hopefully user testing), but after launch you can see how real users interact with your work and even ask them for feedback.
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