I installed IBM Worklight 6.0 following the instructions on the IBM Worklight installation page Generally my focus is on web-development and on delivering a ‘one web‘ experience using responsive design to allow a website to adapt to whatever device is accessing it (N.B. the one web article is great, make sure to read it at least once!). I do recognise that there are cases where ‘mobile apps’ are preferred either for access to device features, offline behaviour or just because that is what the customer wants. In these cases I’d rather create a hybrid app that is basically using my Read More
Author: Kris
Quit dreaming big and start achieving
Quit dreaming big and start achieving. The fabulous @rainypixels explains. http://t.co/sOie6OXuI1
— Jeffrey Zeldman (@zeldman) September 9, 2013
A great article on the always reliable A List Apart on how to achieve your aims, rather than being deterred by over-ambitious goals. The to it all, paraphrasing it to keep the carrot just far enough in front of you to keep on moving onwards and upwards. Set a target that’s just about manageable if you stretch yourself a bit, achieve it, rinse and repeat.
The Microsoft/Nokia deal visualised
The recent Microsoft acquisition of Nokia’s device division is visualised in this diagram by Luke Millar, which shows just how small a piece of the mobile pie this deal covers.
How to detect a touchscreen
Simple and good enough way of detecting a touchscreen — http://t.co/geHoapcWCW
— Nishant Kothary (@rainypixels) September 2, 2013
Discussion on StackOverflow about how to detect a touchscreen
Problems in WordPress paginating a category template
Trying to add paging to a category template in WordPress has been a 404 error strewn pain in the neck. However, I now have the answer. Or at least: an answer In one of my sites, I have a category that I want to present differently to the rest of the content on the site. I’ve created a category-categoryname.php template in the WordPress directory and customised it to my heart’s content. So far so good. But as soon as I add paging to query_posts, the first page displays fine, but going to /page/2 404’s. I read through many alternate ways Read More
Pragmatic Responsive Design – Slidedeck
An excellent slide deck describing experiences, common pitfalls and good practices of developing responsive websites: Pragmatic Responsive Design on Slideshare.
I was quite encouraged to see a number of my own practices being mentioned such as designing in the browser and augmenting the initial mobile stylesheet with additional rules only.
PHP integration with Twitter API 1.1
I got caught out by the recent disabling of the Twitter API 1.0, like many others it seems. I knew it was coming. However I’d held off in the hope that Twitter would see sense on these changes, but apparently not. It was time to add my token few hours into the vast amount of web-development hours wasted as a result of the Twitter API changes. I have a simple setup on a few websites, just to retrieve the last few tweets from a timeline and show them on part of my webpage. This is publicly available information, so a Read More
The BBC News on growing a responsive website
The BBC have been gradually investigating and adopting responsive web-design techniques to their news website, focussing on the mobile variant of the site. Initially I thought they were missing a trick by excluding desktop users from the benefits of responsive web-design. The reality seems much subtler however.
The BBC team describe their responsive approach on the Responsive News site.
Atomic Design
Brad Frost puts forward a design approach for web / user interface design, working at multiple levels of abstraction, for which he has coined the name Atomic Design Working up from HTML tags (‘atoms’), into collections of tags to provide repeatable functions such as sections of a form (‘molecules’). These can then be combined to create recognisable sections of the user interface e.g. a masthead or footer (‘organisms’). Finally these combine into templates and pages which are the full website at different levels of detail. As an aside, it seems a shame (but also natural I think) that the atomic Read More
Accessibilty of desktop applications
Accessibility is all about ensuring that applications can be used by all people, and specifically that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with them. This is often mandated in law e.g. in the USA, Section 508 established binding guidelines for technology accessibility; as did the UK's DDA (Disability Discrimination Act), which is mostly now superseded by the Equality Act When discussing accessibility, most of the time we focus on web accessibility (understandable given its global reach). For website accessibility, the W3's WCAG 2.0 guidelines are the first port of call and are referenced by most accessibility guidance. Read More