“The thing is,” I said, “Wallace doesn’t teach you a little bit about tennis and then start talking about tennis. He just sort of starts talking about tennis.”

Nothing is overkill if it helps. The only danger I see is that you can spend so much time getting the wiki just right that you never actually write the movie.

I haven’t used it in years, but I remember loving VoodooPad for the Mac, which makes for a fast and nimble single-user wiki.

We’re using an industrial-strength MediaWiki for the bible on a very complicated project that involves a number of specialists. It’s been a good way to keep people on the same page over the 15+ months we’ve been in development and production.

I bought a WebOS device and went to Taiwan. Now I understand why the Web on Mobile is a pretty big deal.

So after we spent 30 minutes walking through the apps he uses, which were just games and Photobooth, he showed me all the other capabilities of the iPad. “You can even use it as an iPod.” However when we looked at iTunes there was no music to be found. He admitted that he doesn’t listen to any music on it, but he wanted to make sure that I knew the device could do such things.

There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.

It's ironic, but this actually allows AMD users to use backbone in an amd environment without hacking the source.

Backbone checks for root._ but underscore didn't export to root when define was detected, and since underscore is a dependency it was all busted.

Now you can write a little shim to get all the libs you need for backbone w/o touching the source of any of them.

define ['vendor/underscore', 'vendor/jquery', 'order!vendor/backbone'] -> Backbone

The Friedman, or Friedman Unit (F.U.), is a tongue-in-cheek neologism... A Friedman is a unit of time equal to six months in the future.

The term is in reference to a May 16, 2006 article by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) detailing columnist Thomas Friedman's repeated use of "the next six months" as the period in which, according to Friedman, "we're going to find out...whether a decent outcome is possible" in the Iraq War. As documented by FAIR, Friedman had been making such six-month predictions for a period of two and a half years, on at least fourteen different occasions, starting with a column in the November 30, 2003 edition of The New York Times.

If you look at Chris' example below, it's pretty clear that the "ease" transition looks very jerky and just doesn't work well on the shorter width transition...

Luckily for us. other easing keywords, even one that is rather similar to "ease" like "ease-in-out", don't suffer from the jerkiness in similar situations.

task.js is an experimental library for ES6 that makes sequential, blocking I/O simple and beautiful, using the power of JavaScript’s new yield operator.

Tasks are interleaved like threads, but they are cooperative rather than pre-emptive: they block on promises with yield.

Breakpoints are Dead

There’s nothing that says our breakpoints, whether in our designs or in our CSS, need to be pixel-based. Marc and Stephanie’s essays reinforced something I’ve been thinking for some time: that while px-based breakpoints quickly obsolete themselves, they’re not our only option. As I mentioned on Twitter, em-based breakpoints have the benefit of being tied to our content, and might present a more future-proof alternative.

Snapshot of 500 Android screen sizes on EU site...

...The first culprits are embedded web views—browser views embedded within apps such as Twitter or Facebook, enabling users to consume links and content without ever leaving the app itself. These views often incorporate their own chrome which results in slightly smaller (or at the very least different) dimensions than the native browser...

...But this is only the half of it. On Android specifically, a series of personalisation and accessibility settings further contribute to screen size diversity. The most disruptive setting by far is Zoom Level.

There is only one valid definition of a business purpose: to create a customer.

It’s a pretty shallow insight to say that a comedian who has a special named Shameless creates his comedy about shame, but I never noticed. Louis CK has jokes because he is ashamed of his body, ashamed of his thoughts, his culture, his whiteness, whatever. Every joke seems to be about shame in some way. Ashamed of the things he doesn’t do that he knows he should. Ashamed of the things that he does do that he knows he shouldn’t. Ashamed of his privilege, and ashamed of how he doesn’t do anything to help others who don’t have it.

You might have a finite set of data that you need to fetch once for your application.
You might have a feed of data that is constantly updating and thus your collection periodically check for updates.

Dealing with the first scenario is quite simple. It would require defining a Collection constructor that has a url property. Calling fetch on an instance of that collection would then fetch the data and that would be sufficient.

Dealing with the second scenario is somewhat more complex for several reasons

You could look at this trend and say, “As software improves, it respects its users more. It works better and looks better, is easier to learn, and leaves out the things that waste a user’s time.”

Or you could look at this trend and say, “As software gets simpler, it gets dumbed-down — even toddlers can use iPads. Users are now on the mental level of children, and we should design accordingly. What do children like? Games.”