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Adaptive Images for Responsive Web Design

February 2, 2013 By Leave a Comment



by Christopher Schmitt at HTML5 Texas Conference, Austin, Texas (Deck)

“The open web doesn’t stop at our desktop. Smart phones and tablets not only contain more computing power and better browsers than the computers that started the Internet economy, they have better displays.In this session presented by Christopher Schmitt, we will work through tips and tricks to develop future friendly images in our sites and apps.”

Adaptive Images in Responsive Web Design

Think about the iPad, which presents so many design challenges. It can be wi-fi only or 3G, so bandwidth issues can be present. It has retina, so there can be display issues. When you design for web, you want to have great-looking images, but how do we get higher resolution images to those devices.

Why don’t we ask the browser? http://www.usearagentstring.com/ Available since the first browser Mozilla/1.0 (Win3.1), but browser put tons of stuff in the user agent string and can be spoofed. Instead of asking the browser, we do feature testing.

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Filed Under: HTML5, Web Development
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HTML5 TX 2013

February 2, 2013 By Leave a Comment

HTML5 TX Opening CircleToday is the 2nd annual HTML5 Texas conference at St. Edwards University in Austin. Looking forward to learning some great HTML5 goodness today.

Important things for today:

  • Parking is available in any lot except the red lots (resident parking)
  • Great sponsors
  • Hackython with free copies of Kendo UI
  • Closing Party tonight

Open Spaces – Alan Stevens

HTML5TX Open Spaces by Alan Stevens

Open spaces technology allows for the important stuff that goes on at conferences in the hallways. An open space is a place where you can run an impromptu session on any topic. The first step is to propose a topic that you’re passionate about. It doesn’t have to be related to other topics or the conference at all. Announce your topic and your name and put it on the board in one of the areas available. The only other responsibility is to show up. Then you can do whatever you want. Give a lecture or a presentation or a conversation. If no one shows up, that’s okay, too. Just stay there and see what happens. It is an amazing experience.

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Filed Under: HTML5, Other Stuff, Web Development
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Waze Gets You There

June 8, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Waze community driving app helps drivers on the roadWaze is a community driving app that makes commuting easier. I’ve been a Wazer, using the Waze driving app, for a couple of years now and it has become part of my daily routine. According to Waze, they are all about contributing to the common good out there on the road and by connecting drivers to one another, they “help people create local driving communities that work together to improve the quality of everyone’s daily driving.” Waze is all about avoiding the frustration of sitting in traffic or running into a police trap and wants to help shave five minutes off of your regular commute by showing you new routes that you never may have discovered otherwise.

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Filed Under: Mobile
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What Makes a Company’s Culture Great?

April 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Lunch with Zappos executives

Lately, at work, within our department we’ve been discussing company culture. A while back, we read Delivering Happiness, the book by Tony Hsieh about the history of the company and culture of Zappos. A few months ago, a Googler accidentally posted an internal memo on Google+ that showed the world a lot about Google culture, especially with the fact that it was allowed to be left public and did not receive any negative repercussions (as far as we know). We’ve also been mulling over the Netflix culture presentation over the last few weeks. I love what I do and where I work, especially the team I work with and the department I work in. I’m always encouraged with a discussion about how we can improve workplace culture, so I was very interested to dive into a study of workplace culture and how the corporate presentation of culture and actual practice line up.

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Filed Under: Business
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I wanted to use Google Chrome to create this post, but I had to use Safari

April 2, 2012 By 6 Comments

I started using a MacBook Pro a few months ago and haven’t had many issues with the transition. I’m finally getting used to the differences in how the operating system works and all the differences that you find out about as you go. Overall, it has been a good experience with the exception of all of the problems I have had with fonts. I have a font manager installed with way too many fonts and so I’ve been trying to pare them down to something more usable, but keep running into issues.

WordPress Font Messed Up in Google Chrome on Mac

WordPress Font Messed Up in Google Chrome on Mac

The first issue I had was with the Arial font. It was installed, but not active (or something like that) and so sites using the Arial font ended up showing a serif font instead. As a web developer, it was a little frustrating, but wasn’t a great hindrance to browsing or productivity, however. After playing with the font manager for a while, I finally got Arial to show up.

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Filed Under: Browsers
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The Science of Good Design: A Dangerous Idea at #SXSW2012

March 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Tuesday, March 13, 2012 at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas #sxsw #Dangerous #SXDangerous
by Ben McAllister (Assoc Creative Dir – frog design)

Richard Feynman - Image via Wikipedia

Research is about informing decisions.

“The Research” – the data doesn’t speak for itself. Someone should interpret it.

The Science of Certainty vs. The Science of Wonder

Scientism vs. Science

The Blind Spot: Science and the Crisis of Uncertainty by William Byers

Different kinds of research are very different from each other, there is a broad spectrum.

Hard sciences have laws that predict things with a large degree of certainty.

Social Sciences have experiments.

At the other end of the spectrum, we have “looking at stuff”. In design, we don’t do a lot of real scientific studies.

Cargo Cult Science – Richard Feynman’s Commencement Speech at CalTech

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Filed Under: User Interface / User Experience Design
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The Right Tool for the Job: Native or Mobile Web? at #SXSW2012

March 13, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Tuesday, March 13, 2012 at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas #sxsw #righttool
Panel discussion by Buzz Andersen (Dir of Mobile – Tumblr), Jacob Bijani (Prod Engineer – Tumblr), Majd Taby (Software Engineer – Facebook), Matthew Delaney (WebKit Engineer), and Tom Dale (Sr Software Engineer – Ember.js)

Apps are much easier to monetize than websites, because you can charge up front.

for Tumblr T-shirt Contest / 01 (Photo credit: albyantoniazzi)

The browser rendering engine does a lot of the heavy work that native developers have to contend with. The web browser is a highly evolved medium for content delivery and rich layout.

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Filed Under: Mobile
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Don’t Build a Power Glove: Talk to Your Users at #SXSW2012

March 12, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Monday, March 12, 2012 at the South by Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, TX
by RJ Owen (Lead Experience Planner – EffectiveUI)

PowerGlove - Everything Else is Child's Play.

The Power Glove was a video game controller made by Mattel in 1989. It was the first wearable video game controller. The glove had lots of buttons and options in addition

Nintendo released two games with the Power Glove, including Super Glove Ball.

Marketing for the PowerGlove focused on immersion in the game. PowerGlove has captured the mind of the American public. It was even on Stephen Colbert recently. Even though it was really cool. It was a commercial failure.

The PowerGlove was

  • rated the 7th worst video game controller of all time
  • sold $88M US (failure)
  • japanese producer declared bankruptcy

It was so bad that people are still complaining about it today.

Bill Buxton – data design

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Filed Under: UI/UX