Month: February 2010

Blog

Jim Reekes doesn’t care who you are or where you came from

Post author By Tim
Post date February 26, 2010

My first exposure to hardcore 12-year Apple employee Jim Reekes was when he stole the show as the jaded, contrarian voice in the ultra low-budget documentary Welcome to Macintosh.

Listening to him recall his sound engineer work at Apple, he is one part Dwight Shrute and one part Bill Hicks. I simply love his candor, honesty and frankness when talking about his work, his industry, his coworkers …and all the little blunders they never quite thought through.

Grounded employees like this are a valuable asset to keep a project on the rails, and simply to keep people from developing really bad ideas. I can only hope to aspire to be as much of an incisive crank as Reekes.

Here he is again talking to One More Thing about the Mac’s startup tone. (You haven’t gone crazy, the introduction is in Hungarian.)

OMT in San Francisco #3: ‘Let it beep’ from One More Thing on Vimeo.

…and now you know the origin of Sosumi.

Tags Apple, audio, good ui

Blog

Start with HTML

Post author By Tim
Post date February 17, 2010

At work, our web site code is becoming a morass of nested <div>, <p>, and <span> tags. Our CSS file alone is nearly 3,000 lines long. Since the CSS is so byzantine to begin with, whenever a redesign comes along, frequently us poor developers — rather than untangle this Gordian stylesheet — simply declare new classes and bolt them onto the end of our stylesheet; hence the 3,000 line CSS file. This has to stop.

I propose a new solution for developing web pages: start with HTML. Imagine you are developing a clean, informative page for Mosaic. Only once your HTML is done do you start mucking it up with CSS. Have we forgotten this is the way style sheets were intended to be used? We’ve let them be perverted to add rounded corners, fix IE bugs, and even add arbitrary spacing. Your CSS will be much cleaner and more meaningful if you start with the information as the structure, and then build on that.

Tags css, design, html

Blog

We’re gonna need a bigger phone

Post author By Tim
Post date February 16, 2010

Nothing wrong with the Windows Phone 7 Phone Something Something OS, but I think they may have designed the titles for a bigger device.

Tags iphone, Windows

Blog

“A wakeup call for the Drupal community”

Post author By Tim
Post date February 14, 2010
1 Comment on “A wakeup call for the Drupal community”

Freeman recently wrote A wakeup call for the Drupal community and I wish I could have put the failings of the Drupal CMS as well as he has:

This is a common theme in the community. You can kludge your way to victory with just about any feature set you can think of if (and only if) you write enough hook_$n_alter() code, can find some contrib modules to pick up the slack, and have a designer who can code php tucked in your back pocket

Freeman’s states that the reason Drupal failed to win CMS of the year over WordPress is because WordPress is simply easier to use.