Category Archives: Code

Iterating, iterating, iterating

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I have been messing with the layout and design of stonehippo.com, working little by little to improve the overall feeling of the site. I decided to take a “release early and often” approach, updating not just the code by the live site pretty much as soon as I made a new change. The result has been a relatively rapid evolution over the past few days.

The layout has undergone some tweaks to implement a responsive design that will work well across a range of devices and browser configurations. The design was already responsive to some extent, but after reading Ethan Marcotte’s handy Responsive Web Design, I decided that I could do more.

stonehippo.com on the iPhone

The new responsive design as seen on the iPhone...

I still have some work to do, notably around adding media query polyfills to support older browsers. And I am not entirely happy with the two column layout presented at the widest screen sizes.

stonehippo.com in desktop Safari

...and on desktop Safari.

I have also added some graphic design elements to the page. I wanted to keep the design simple, with minimal embellishment and a focus on the content, but the older text-on-white design felt like it need some accenting.

Take a look and see what you think. And if you get a chance, take a screenshot and send it to me. I am looking for some additional data on how the design holds up under a broad range of conditions, especially mobile and small screen devices. I am pretty happy with the results on the iPhone and iPad, but I’d love to see how it’s working on Android, Blackberry and other devices.

Five short points to software success

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If you are involved in the creation of software, here’s a short list of things you can do to ensure that your software will sell a bazillion copies of your product, whatever it is.

  1. DON’T piss me off.
  2. DON’T rip me off.
  3. DON’T let your stuff get in my way.
  4. DON’T include shit no one needs.
  5. DO make me feel like a rockstar.

That’s it. If you can do that, your path to fame, fortune and Ferrari’s is assured.*

* Ok, maybe not. But it’s more likely, at least.

Why You Should Learn HTML + CSS (And Maybe Some Javascript)

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Are you a content creator for the Web? If you are then you need to learn HTML, CSS, and maybe some Javascript, too.

I have spent a significant amount of my career implementing Web sites and applications for clients. A decent amount of that time has involved implementing content management systems for businesses of all sizes. And one of the most common requests in such projects is setting up a WYSIWYG editor.

The request for a WYSIWYG editor usually stems from the desire to sheild “non-technical” users from the supposed complexities of creating Web markup while still providing them with the power to produce material that take advantage of the styling and visual design of the site. The assumption is that the content creator will not want to learn the HTML markup and CSS required to make there pages “look nice” but that they still want the flexibility and additional expressiveness of something more than plain text. In fact, a common corrollary request is to provide a “paste from Word” button. “After all”, the reasoning goes, “we already know how to write the content we want in Word.” Oh, boy.

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Mobile Development

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I have managed to spend most of my career as a developer and architect not doing mobile development. I had a brief dalience with Waba back in the early 2000’s. I was looking for a simple way to write apps for my Palm Pilot and at the time I was boycotting C and C++1.

Every time I thought about mobile applicatoin development the thing that ended up turning me off was the devices. No matter how good the development environemnt might be—and most of them are abyssmal so that doesn’t help—I found that I have no desire to cram anything useful into the small screen size and sub-par interface designs found on most such devices.

And then came the iPhone.

And now I’m finding myself interested in branching out. No, interested is too tame. I really want to jump into mobile development with Android. I am even ready to give Blackberry a try again. And with the annoucement of the iPad, things are looking more interesting every day.

It goes beyond mobile. Working on iPhone apps have re-ignited my interest in desktop application development. I have been doing mostly Web development for so long that I had almost forgotten just how much better a native app can be. Sans the enforced framing and quirks of the browser-based world, my imagination of what I want to make do with a computer do is expanding again.

I won’t be giving up Web development any time soon, but I will be spending more of my time working with mobile devices. And I’m grinning from ear to ear about it.

1 For no good reason at all. I just didn’t want to work with low-level languages in those days.