Last week this jQuery Plugin popped up a lot on different channels. First: Yes, it looks pretty! But quick and easy? Not really.
I could imagine something like this could work for simple select fields, where you have just a handful of options to choose from. Maybe for the order quantity in a checkout process or something like that. But for a date-picker it doesn’t cut it.
Most of the songthaew and tuk-tuk drivers live in villages out of the city and many of them are illiterate. But it’s not written illiteracy which is the issue, it’s map illiteracy. Many drivers have never had to navigate the city using a map, so showing them Google Maps on my phone was completely useless.
In this article, James Turner shared his observations as a UX Designer in Thailand. I had exactly the same experience with maps when i was there a few years ago. Not only in the villages but also in the city. Maps were pretty much useless to show someone where you want to go, which made coming from A to B a quite fascinating experience.
This article in the New York Times from 1985 with predictions about the use of laptops made me smile.
Yes, there are a lot of people who would like to be able to work on a computer at home. But would they really want to carry one back from the office with them? It would be much simpler to take home a few floppy disks tucked into an attache case.
Of course i’d love to take some floppy disks with me, neatly tucked into my attache case.
But the real future of the laptop computer will remain in the specialized niche markets. Because no matter how inexpensive the machines become, and no matter how sophisticated their software, I still can’t imagine the average user taking one along when going fishing.
Sentences like these demonstrate very well how hard it is and how utterly bad we humans are at predicting the future. And those rare people who have big visions often get laughed at in the beginning. Today we may think it’s crazy to think about colonizing mars. But i’m pretty sure in 20 to 30 years we will look back and laugh at some of todays articles and predictions about the future.
“They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”
“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”
…
This is the beginning of short story i really liked, written by Sci-Fi writer Terry Bisson in 1990. You should read the full version.
My portfolio right now gives me kind of an embarrassing feeling every time i look at it. Not because of the work that is actually in there, but the page itself. It was built around three years ago, and as you know three years is a lot of time in our area. I learned a ton in the meantime and i would do so many things different today. Maybe thats a good sign, “if you’re not embarrassed by your past work, you stopped learning” or so they say, right?
I’m hard at work to completely rebuild the site from scratch, but until that is finished i wanted to have some place to link to from various projects and i also wanted to have something in english. So, a couple of days ago i sat down and quickly coded something up which is online now. Oh and yes, the idea is completely stolen from florianziegler.de.
If you work with a lot of images, performance issues can quickly add up and become pretty complicated to tackle. Lazy Loading is one popular technique how we can approach this and with Lazy Load XT there seems to be a new solution which also supports things like srcset, horizontal scrolling or video elements.
Images make up over 60% of an average page’s size, according to HTTP Archive. Images on a web page would be rendered once they are available. Without lazy loading, this could lead to a lot of data traffic that is not immediately necessary (such as images outside of the viewport) and longer waiting times.
Just recently i implemented jQuery Lazy Loading on a portfolio page and we were able to bring the pagesize down to some kilobytes (until first render) from what was around 4MB and even over 16MB on retina screens. The site was built some years ago, so srcset or <picture> elements weren’t an option and we used retina.js which was quite fast, but loads the small version and then the retina version on top. Not ideal, i know.
So, lazy loading was a great help in reducing all that, but when implementing it i struggled not only with some possible negative SEO implications (which i’m still trying to fully understand) but also it was very hard to combine retina.js with the jQuery Lazy Loading.
Lazy Load XT is a new script which uses jQuery, Zepto.js or DomTastic to deliver lazy loading functionality and it includes srcset support as well as many other of the things i missed. Also, i like the modular way it is built which let’s you choose which plugins or extensions you need and thus let you save some more kb’s from your bottom line.
This is what happens when you shoot a Timelapse video with an 80 Megapixel camera. The result is pretty impressive to say the least!
Each shot is comprised of hundreds individual still images, each weighing in at a whopping 80 megapixels. Each individual raw frame measures 10328×7760 pixels.
Would be interesting to know how long it took to render those shots.
If you are into Game of Thrones and as excited as i am for the upcoming season, you should definitely watch this behind the scenes look of the production. How they handle a team of over 1’000 people and shoot with two complete setups simultaneously in different countries to create this epic show just blows my mind.
And – if you’re not interested in GoT, but in WordPress – you should watch it too because they were shooting in Seville, Spain this year and you get a nice little teaser of what’s waiting for us in June at WordCamp Europe.
Can’t wait for both season 5 to start and to meet you all in Seville!
Brian Krogsgard wrote this great post on Post Status about the upcoming WordPress JSON REST API. He did a great job covering all different aspects and the current state of the project as well as what we can expect from it when it finally lands in core.
If you’re going to read one post about WP-API, make it this one.
I use git and GitLab for pretty much everything i’m working on, from the smallest experiments to large client projects, everything gets pushed to a remote repository on our server. The last update for GitLab brought some small UI changes which i really liked. They’ve done some great work with this and it’s one of those improvements where you look at it and recognize that something has changed, but couldn’t tell what it is. Like when someone you know has slightly changed their haircut and you notice that she/he looks a bit different, a bit better, but you don’t see what exactly has changed. I like those kinds of iterative, small redesigns. And i fully agree with their statement about the importance of having a clear plan and a set of goals before you start redesigning anything.
Changes to the interface are always stressful. So you shouldn’t even start to redesign without a list of issues you intent to solve. This way, your users get compensated for the changes with improved usability.
Well done GitLab!