Daniel Pietzsch

Personal blog. Mostly photos.

CSS3 + Progressive Enhancement = Smart Design

perishablepress.com

Support all browsers to some degree – focus first on the latest and greatest browsers, and then go back and make sure that older browsers look and work reasonably well.

This reflects precisely my approach to creating a website/webapp. I love the new features of CSS3 so much, because they enable me - as a developer - to create a decent UI without having to mess around in Photoshop or write tedious, non-semantic markup just to create good looking buttons, rounded corners etc. The design is implemented quicker, is flexible and the site loads faster, too.

The idea here is to begin with a nice, well-styled presentation that looks good in even archaic browsers like IE6. This is a good thing because even visitors using crappy browsers will be able to read and interact with your content. But instead of stopping there, progressive enhancement says, “let’s provide some additional features for people using better browsers.” After all, people using awesome browsers like Firefox, Safari, and Opera want the best experience possible from the Web. Progressive enhancement says, “let’s give it to them, but only after the less-capable crowd has been taken care of first.”

Unfortunately, when you have a lot of IE users and want to present your site in the best possible way, you have to bite the bullet and create all those buttons and rounded corners in Photoshop.
But I think the ‘progressive enhancement’ method is the best thing you can do. You can offer the best possible visual experience for those who use the latest and most advanced browsers at relative low costs. And for those who use older browsers - well, they probably do not care that much about having the best possible experience on the web anyway.

Altogether, the article is a good read and also provides practical information on the new CSS3 techniques - some of which you might not have heard of yet.

“Restraint is hard. Complication and elaboration are easy…and are common.”
– Presentation Zen: Gates, Jobs, & the Zen aesthetic
“It always takes longer than you expect; even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
– [Douglas] Hofstadter’s Law. That is what I am really experiencing right now! (via merlin)
“It is your responsibility as a professional developer to properly document software that is intended for use by others. Managing software complexity is a hugely important part of keeping a project efficient, and that’s hard to do if nobody knows how to use your software, or what methods are safe to call.”
– Tom Preston-Werner in Semantic Versioning
Turning Torso (Malmö, Sweden) : Travellerspoint Travel Photography (Architect: Santiago Calatrava) “ The tower’s design is based on a sculpture by Calatrava called Twisting Torso.[1] It uses nine segments of five-story pentagons that twist as it...

Turning Torso (Malmö, Sweden) : Travellerspoint Travel Photography (Architect: Santiago Calatrava)

The tower’s design is based on a sculpture by Calatrava called Twisting Torso.[1] It uses nine segments of five-story pentagons that twist as it rises; the topmost segment is twisted ninety degrees clockwise with respect to the ground floor. Each floor consists of an irregular pentagonal shape rotating around the vertical core, which is supported by an exterior steel framework.

Turning Torso on Wikipedia

How great is that? I am impressed!

“User experience is everything. It always has been, but it’s still undervalued and under-invested in. If you don’t know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board. Better to iterate a hundred times to get the right feature right than to add a hundred more. The point of Ajax is that it can make a site more responsive, not that it’s sexy. Tags can make things easier to find and classify, but maybe not in your application. The point of an API is so developers can add value for users, not to impress the geeks.”
– Evan Williams | evhead: Ten Rules for Web Startups
The Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. Mouse (via The Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. Mouse Is Jonathan Ive’s Antichrist - Mad catz cyborg - Gizmodo) (via Jeff Atwood) I think this is not as bad as the Open Office mouse. I appreciate the superior design, but it’s...

The Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. Mouse (via The Mad Catz Cyborg R.A.T. Mouse Is Jonathan Ive’s Antichrist - Mad catz cyborg - Gizmodo) (via Jeff Atwood)

I think this is not as bad as the Open Office mouse. I appreciate the superior design, but it’s definitely not my cup of tea.
This mouse might appeal to the same people that like the Level 10 PC chassis.

“[Paul] Feldman has also reached some of his own conclusions about honesty, based on more on his experience than the [sales] data [he collected]. He has come to believe that morale is a big factor - that an office is more honest when the employees like their boss and their work. He also believes that employees further up the corporate ladder cheat more than those down below. He got this idea after delivering [bagels] for years to one company spread out over three floors - an executive floor on top and two lower floors with sales, service, and administrative employees. (Feldman wondered, if perhaps the executives cheated out of an overdeveloped sense of entitlement. What he didn’t consider is that perhaps cheating was how they got to be executives.)”
–

Stephen J. Dubner & Steven D. Levitt in “Freakonomics”

Paul Feldman collected the money for the bagels by leaving a box in the office which he collected later that day.

Here’s the whole story of Paul Feldman, a.k.a. the “Bagelman”.

My mother just sent me this picture she took of the Dubai skyline. Well done, Mom!

My mother just sent me this picture she took of the Dubai skyline.
Well done, Mom!

Bubble Pop: Reflection Perfection (via richard.heeks) (via Your Best Shot 2009: Bubbles) “ I think this is approaching perfection, in terms of what I set out to capture. Maybe nail varnish would complete this. ;-) There’s something so satisfying...

Bubble Pop: Reflection Perfection (via richard.heeks) (via Your Best Shot 2009: Bubbles)

I think this is approaching perfection, in terms of what I set out to capture. Maybe nail varnish would complete this. ;-) There’s something so satisfying about picturing something in your head and then finally seeing it on the camera!
The weather conditions this morning were absolutely perfect. There was absolutely no wind, the bubbles just hung in the air, and there was even cloud cover - like a giant diffuser created just for me.
The lighting of this shot is natural - sunlight through cloud. The Nikon D90 is great for giving clear images at high ISO (here ISO 800); making this shot possible.
N.B. This is a real photo of a soap bubble bursting. I’ve made slight edits to raise colour and light, but this is just to add some punch. This is not a Photoshop creation!

Stunning! Here’s the bigger version.

(1/500, f/5.6, ISO 800)

Rails Model, View, Controller, and Helper: what goes where? - Stack Overflow

Rails Model, View, Controller, and Helper: what goes where? - Stack Overflow

“Too many wrongly characterize the debate as “security versus privacy.” The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that’s why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.”
– Bruce Schneier, real American hero, from a 2006 post about privacy, resurfaced in rebuttal to Eric Schmidt’s comment that “if you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place”. (via jimray) (via whiskyvangoghgo)
“In a world with zombies you better fucking carpe diem. There’s no time to be depressed, to contemplate the fair­ness of life or to write inane blog posts. Zombies are a personification of our mortality. The danger that you or someone you love just isn’t there any more tomorrow. Or in an hour.
Zombies force people to set priorities. I never saw anyone in a zombie movie using a GTD app.”
–

Why I love the Zombocalypse

(Speaking of being back from the grave) ;-)

The Crown: Back from the grave (via couch8085)

The Crown are back from the grave.
I’m very pleased, because it’s one of my favorite bands: killer riffs, killer drumming, awesome voice… especially on this album!

Check it out - if you dare!

instapaper: “Check out the new Extras page. I bet there’s at least one feature on there that you didn’t know about. ” That’s great. I didn’t know about this: “ Google Reader Send items directly from Google Reader simply by clicking the Instapaper...

instapaper:

Check out the new Extras page. I bet there’s at least one feature on there that you didn’t know about.

That’s great. I didn’t know about this:

Google Reader

Send items directly from Google Reader simply by clicking the Instapaper Read Later >bookmarklet with an item selected.

I always used the ‘Send to’ option, which requires more clicks.

And I also wasn’t aware of the the Readability-like functionality.

Instapaper Text bookmarklet

Install this bookmarklet to instantly view any compatible web page in Instapaper’s >Text view, right in your browser.

If you are not using Instapaper, I can just encourage you to try it out. It makes reading on the web a joy. You can save pages to read later and can also read these articles without the clutter of ads and other distracting things. It also presents them in a serif font at an easy to read size.
It’s one of my favorite and most-used apps!