The first (and hopefully only) release candidate for the latest K2 is up and about, and it’s a milestone.
Monthly Archive for June, 2010
It pains me to bring this up, as it’ll no doubt bring about scorn from the Android liga on Twitter, but seriously Apple? In what world and under what kind of a regime is this alright? Never mind that I can’t even stretch my imagination far enough to think up a technical reason, but my music is my user data. User data is sacred. The first time this dialog popped up I just pressed enter without reading it, because that’s what users do!
Boom. All my music gone. Not so magic. Not so revolutionary.
Don’t ever do that again please.
I’ve always shied away from using CSS grids simply because they require a deluge of classes cluttering up the HTML, which gives makes my gag reflex a run for its money.
Similarly I’ve shied away from using CSS extensions like LESS because they screwed with my development habits and required new hoops to jump through. And if there’s one thing web development doesn’t need, it’s more hoop jumping, trust you me.
However, there’s a tremor in the force called less.js, which essentially solves both these problems with one stroke, with nary a disadvantage, barring the use of JS, in sight.
So I created a small demo of how to use the two together, and aside from the added complexity of using LESS over CSS (the price of smart, but complex, over dumb, but cumbersome).
Yesterday I sent Rikke off to a party and hunkered down in front of my MBP to get some work done. Not content to let Gozer, my newly acquired iPad sit unused next to Vinz Glortho, my iPhone, I ran a couple of video podcasts on it, since most days I can’t seem to find time or in more practical terms actual screen real estate, 27 inches regardless, to do so.
I ended up watching The Big Web show at around the time my internals started sending signals up through the system along the lines of: “Hey moron, you know food? Have some, why don’t you…”
So I walked the iPad into the kitchen, docked on the kitchen counter, nearly flush against the wall, listening to sage usability testing advice while I got out and prepared a particularly scrumptious left-over burrito, of which I should have tweeted a photo, because after all that’s why we — we being someone else — built the internet.
Once I had finished messing up the kitchen counter, being a man’s man and all, I moved burrito and iPad in tandem to the table and proceeded to reenact a less trance-like and considerably less well-designed version of Dave Bowman chowing down.
Then I threw myself on the couch like the slob I also am, finishing The Big Web Show. Then I may have nodded off for a short while. But when I woke, I checked some feeds, answered an e-mail and bought Invincible #60 and read that.
Then I updated my Things todo list for the project I was working on, wrote a draft e-mail to the client and went back to… ehm.. continued working at the MBP.
The assholes were right, this thing is worthless. Especially without the camera.
I should’ve bought a netbook.
NOT!
In playing around with the interface design for an as of yet unannounced — so far webkit only, and altogether largely non existing, I might add — project, I came across several nice-to-know a-ha’s and gotcha’s that are unbelievably helpful for trying to get beyond the usual flaky ‘yeah, we’re still in the browser alright’-feel of most web apps out there, one of which is the remedy to how when you’re using something like this timeline, and you end up selecting text and other elements on the page as you try to navigate it? Stuff like that makes me want to blow my brains out.
Well, saved by the bell, there’s a CSS3 property for that called user-select, it works at least in both Webkit and Mozilla, and it’s heavenly. There’s a lot of uses for it, but for something like the stuff we’re going to do, which is a lot of dragging and dropping of elements, we’ll probably end up simply adding a basic class to the BODY element whenever we don’t want text to be selected, and ét voila.
body.dragginginprogress {
-webkit-user-select: none;
-moz-user-select: none;
user-select: none;
}
World peace. Easy as that.
It’s these small things, the things that you don’t see people writing massive colorful articles about, that really make my day.
You can see it in action in my playpen, though I won’t promise I don’t break that n the near future as I throw various things up on the wall to see what sticks.
Update: If you’re using jQuery UI, there’s also an (undocumented) function called .disableSelection().