The Best Of The Internets

This is a pretty interesting idea and I see where Peter Bright is coming from with this sentiment:

Although Microsoft has endeavored to be more open about how it’s developing its browser, and which features it is prioritizing, that development nonetheless takes place in private. Developing in the open, with a public bug tracker, source code repositories, and public discussion of the browser’s future direction is the next logical step.

With Microsoft opening up their process more and more, I wonder if they’ve considered open-sourcing Trident (or whatever is driving “Project Spartan” under the hood).

I love this visual timeline of Web browsers because it shows where we’ve been, where we’re at and where browsers have converged, diverged, and switched things up. Thank you Internet!

Bruce Lawson, briefly, on why picture, srcset, and sizes are better for adaptive images than CSS or JavaScript any day of the week when it comes to performance:

The only way to beat the preloader is to put all the potential image sources in the HTML and give the browser all the information it needs to make the selection there.

Good stuff, Bruce. I’m sorry I won’t be in Barcelona to see this presentation (and you)!

PPK nails it as usual:

Back-enders work with only one environment, their server. They have the option of changing their environment; for instance by installing new software or upgrading the hardware.

Front-enders work with an unknown number of radically different environments, ranging from state-of-the-art desktop computer to three-year-old, crappy phones with limited memory and processor time. They cannot change these environments because they have no power over their users’ browsers. Still, their code should work in all of them.

I shared similar thoughts in my post A Fundamental Disconnect.

In this extensive piece, PPK does a brilliant job voicing the thoughts and feeling I think a lot of us front-enders have when it comes to Angular. You should do yourself a favor and read the whole thing. Seriously. Especially if you are in IT in a large company that is using or thinking of using Angular. Seriously.

Go. Read. It.

This is a beautiful account of the struggles of bringing cellular networks to poor, rural areas that are uninteresting (e.g. unprofitable) to the major providers.

Of the world’s 7 billion or so cell phones, a few hundred of them are already in Yaee—they’re just not connected to a network. Kids use them as cameras and mp3 players, and Hernández, like many adults, bought his to use in Oaxaca City, a seven-hour bus ride away. When he’s there, his cell phone can connect to plenty of base stations, which, in turn, link him to his choice of commercial network. But back in Yaee, there are no base stations and therefore no network. Every time Hernández wants to make a call in his hometown, he hikes for 20 minutes to the top of the highest hill around and hopes to catch some signal trickling in from a faraway base station, installed in a place deemed more profitable for telecoms than small towns like Yaee.

Articles like this are a great reminder of how fortunate we are and how our experiences are not universal. They help us empathize with the struggles others must overcome to participate in the “modern world”.

A good collection of design-related thinking. Here are some highlights:

Great design often disappears, leaving the user with no more than a simple and intuitive experience.

From Gentry Underwood of Dropbox. Jared Spool has been beating this drum for ages:

When things are going well in a design, we don’t pay attention to them. We only pay attention to things that bother us.

Jack Schulze of Berg offered an interesting perspective on design permenance:

When I was studying graphic design in the late '90s, there was a dream that as a designer, if you were good enough, you might create an archetype for the age—the sorts of things you see in Mad Men, artifacts and images that characterize an era. But when I graduated, it became abundantly clear that when people looked back on the decade to come, they would not be looking at record covers or chairs. It was going to be glowing rectangles and software. People would remember the aesthetics and noises of operating systems, the first time they pinch-zoomed something, the aesthetics of Google Maps, the Nokia ringtone, and Candy Crush Saga.

Closing out the piece, Alexis Lloyd of the New York Times R+D Lab offered an area of concern (and a challenge to designers everywhere):

We’re seeing new relationships emerging between people and technology. Algorithms influence an ever-increasing number of facets of our lives: the media we consume, what our health insurance knows about our physical condition, whether we’re approved for loans or hired for jobs, and whom we may date or marry. But we don’t have much agency in those interactions. These “smart” systems are black boxes, eschewing transparency in favor of simplicity. But when we can’t interrogate a system, that disenfranchises us. Designers now must facilitate interactions that balance ease of use with transparency.