Before taking a crack at any Design Then Code project tutorials you'll need some knowledge of Xcode, Objective-C, Cocoa and UIKit. My goal is for this guide to help bridge the gap between having no knowledge of iOS development and having enough to start tackling more interesting projects.

tools for creating a ruby on rails development environment on a new machine

Automated scripts for getting a development environment going in OS X 10.6 Lion

"The easiest way to share localhost over the web."

Showoff creates a tunnel between your laptop and the web.

Two New Yorkers designed the Glif, a tripod adapter for the iPhone 4. It's a hunk of rubberized plastic with a threaded bushing that will ultimately retail for $15.

The Scaling Startups panel I was on last week at Supernova generated a little coverage, but I wanted to go into a lot more detail than what I saw there.

Innovation is something new and useful. That’s kindof it. Not a one-liner. Not something fluffy and useless. New. Useful.

The real challenge is exploiting that and fostering it. When it happens, you see it and you recognise it. When you can’t find it, it’s obvious (points to newspaper, publishing, music industry).

This is an overview of getting set up using openFrameworks for iPhone development.

I’ll show you how to create an offline HTML5 iPhone application. More specifically, I’ll walk you through the process of building a Tetris game.

This post announces an update to Graded Browser Support. The GBS page on the YUI site always has the most current GBS table. This post includes:

a list of changes;
an updated chart of browsers that receive A-grade support;
our GBS forecast, indicating the changes we expect to make in Q1 2010;
and a discussion section that lays out some of the strategy behind the current GBS update.
GBS Changes for Q4 2009
With this update, Mac OS 10.4 Tiger drops from the A-Grade testing matrix (replaced with Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard) and the testing surface is reduced to 12 browsers on 4 OS platforms (down from 14 browsers on 4 platforms). Specific changes include:

Initiated A-Grade support for Firefox 3.5.† on Mac OS 10.6.†
Initiated A-Grade support for Opera 10.0.† on Windows XP
Discontinued A-Grade support for Firefox 3.0.† on Mac OS 10.5.†
Discontinued A-Grade support for Firefox 3.5.† on Mac OS 10.5.†
Discontinued A-Grade support for Safari 3.2.† on Mac OS 10.4.†
Discontinued A-Grade support for Opera 9.6.† on Windows XP

Win XP
Win Vista
Mac 10.5.†
Mac 10.6.†

Firefox 3.0.†
A-grade

Firefox 3.5.†
A-grade
A-grade

A-grade

Opera 10.0.†
A-grade

IE 8.0
A-grade
A-grade

IE 7.0
A-grade
A-grade

IE 6.0
A-grade

Safari 4.0.†

A-grade
A-grade

Notes:

The dagger symbol (as in “Firefox 3.5.†”) indicates that the most-current non-beta version at that branch level receives support.
Code that may be used on pages with unknown doctypes should be tested in IE7 quirks mode.
Code that may appear in IE8’s "compatibility mode," which emulates but is not identical to IE7, should be tested explicitly in compatibility mode.

GBS Forecast
We expect to make the following changes in the Q1 2010 GBS update:

Discontinue A-grade for Opera across all OSs (if current data trends continue); the latest version of Opera (currently 10.0.†) will be considered an X-grade browser as of Q1.
Initiate A-Grade support for the latest version of Google Chrome on Windows XP (if current data trends continue).
Initiate A-Grade support for IE8 on Windows 7.

Discussion
This update pares the testing surface to 12 browser/platform combinations (down from a high of 15). The most significant aspect of this update is our guidance for Q1 in which we forecast Chrome beginning to receive A-Grade support and Opera 10 moving to the X-Grade. Here are notes from the GBS committee with respect to that guidance:

Chrome: The rate of growth in Chrome’s global usage has been dramatic. By some measures, including ours, it is now double that of the A-Grade Opera browser (source: StatCounter). Chrome on Windows is built around a solid WebKit core, supportive of web standards (including forward-looking HTML5 standards), and extremely performant. With Google’s backing, the project is making rapid progress both on Windows and with the not-yet-released Mac OS X version. If this growth rate continues, we conclude that Chrome will require A-Grade attention as of Q1.
Opera: Opera’s marketshare, which is small and shows signs of diminishing, makes a compelling case for moving this excellent browser from the A-Grade to the X-Grade in Q1. X-Grade is a category designed to encompass modern, capable browsers with small marketshare, and Opera is squarely in that category today. Opera’s marketshare in specific Eastern European and emerging markets might argue for some developers to retain this browser on their testing matrix beyond Q1. We encourage you to watch carefully the argument presented by Opera’s Andreas Bovens and David Storey recently with respect to the “marketshare myth” and reasons why Opera’s importance transcends the global marketshare metric (source: YUI Theater).

Graded Browser Support is a QA philosophy, not a report card on the quality of popular browsers. It’s designed to provide guidance for QA teams about how best to use their limited testing resources (and to frontend engineers about how to sanely cross-check work across a finite set of browsers). The goal is to be conservative and calculating: We want to test the smallest possible subset of browser/platform combinations, leveraging implicit coverage by testing the most commonly shared core browser engines.

Inevitably (and by design), this leaves a lot of browsers out of the matrix. And, unfortunately, the percentage of users still tied to IE6 requires us to include that browser (not because we like IE6, but because we like the many tens of millions of users who rely on it).

One of the most interesting aspects of the quarterly GBS update is hearing your advice (often different than our own), and we’d love to hear your take on these issues in the comments section.

The GBS Archive

GBS Update, 2009-07-02
GBS Update, 2009-01-28
GBS Update, 2008-07-03
GBS Update, 2008-02-19

For those who couldn’t be there, and for those who were there and seek to savor the memories, here is An Event Apart Chicago, all wrapped up in a pretty bow:

AEA Chicago – official photo set
By John Morrison, subism studios llc. See also (and contribute to) An Event Apart Chicago 2009 Pool, a user group on Flickr.
A Feed Apart Chicago
Live tweeting from the show, captured forever and still being updated. Includes complete blow-by-blow from Whitney Hess.
Luke W’s Notes on the Show
Smart note-taking by Luke Wroblewski, design lead for Yahoo!, frequent AEA speaker, and author of Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks (Rosenfeld Media, 2008):

Jeffrey Zeldman: A Site Redesign
Jason Santa Maria: Thinking Small
Kristina Halvorson: Content First
Dan Brown: Concept Models -A Tool for Planning Websites
Whitney Hess: DIY UX -Give Your Users an Upgrade
Andy Clarke: Walls Come Tumbling Down
Eric Meyer: JavaScript Will Save Us All (not captured)
Aaron Gustafson: Using CSS3 Today with eCSStender (not captured)
Simon Willison: Building Things Fast
Luke Wroblewski: Web Form Design in Action (download slides)
Dan Rubin: Designing Virtual Realism
Dan Cederholm: Progressive Enrichment With CSS3 (not captured)
Three years of An Event Apart Presentations

Note: Comment posting here is a bit wonky at the moment. We are investigating the cause. Normal commenting has been restored. Thank you, Noel Jackson.

Short URL: zeldman.com/?p=2695

Static HTML with Haml

A series of excellent presentations held by Douglas Crockford from Yahoo!

A Small Matter of Programming asks why it has been so difficult for end users to command programming power and explores the problems of end user-driven application development that must be solved to afford end users greater computational power.

Massive collection of links and resources for standards-based web design

What exactly is software development, and why is it so hard? This is a question that continues to engage our thoughts. Is software development an engineering discipline? Is it art? Is it more like a craft?

#develop (short for SharpDevelop) is a free IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on Microsoft's .NET platform.