I wonder if Edward Tufte knows about this.
THE DAILY STREAM
Mike's site
Stuff and things
Material Sublime Theme
Here's a theme that makes your Sublime Text look all Google-Material-ish. It's actually pretty nice. I like to change my editor often — it's one of those minimal-effort ways to stave off everyday boredom.
NYT blocks desktop access for employees
This is how you show you mean business on mobile-first.
Showing passwords
Luke Wroblewski on login screens:
Quite quickly I came to see password-masking as a rut. A design pattern that has been around so long that no one thinks about it much. We all just go through the motions when assembling a log-in screen and add password-masking by default. Lost business and usability issues just come along for the ride.
Really makes u think.
(Not long before this, my team and I got in a fight about this topic, and we won. Pretty cool!)
Writing interface copy
Great stuff from Nicole Fenton. This is a talk but translates well to a writeup.
UI copy gets the shaft so often, not just in terms of the attention it receives but also the way it's written.
You write code iteratively, so why not the rest of it? It’s okay if your interface writing isn’t perfect. But you better believe that you need to go back and clean up those strings before you go live.
This is really important. Every project I've ever been a part of forgot the "we can improve later" mindset of Agile to some degree when faced with the prospect of launching with imperfect interface copy.
New Pirate Bay logo
This is pretty awesome, regardless of your opinion of TPB. If you see them as sort of punk rock establishment fighters, you're bound to love the visual middle finger. If you think they're villains, well at least they're suitably entertaining ones.
Hamburger update: totes fine
From UXmatters, "Why It’s Totally Okay to Use a Hamburger Icon."
The pendulum swings to a reasonable center. Which, apparently, is the part of a mobile screen where users focus. This makes sense, too.
Don't call it the hamburger to users, though.
Heresie
I stumbled on this a while back when I was big on reading mp3 blogs. In the few years since I regularly trawled those sites for the mysterious and bizarre gems they posted, many of the really sought-after pieces have been reissued.
For the “Rock In Opposition (R.I.O.)” bands of the 70s, King Crimson was just too simple and pop-oriented. R.I.O. were progressive rock bands from England and Europe who packed so much complexity into their music that the standard prog fans wouldn’t touch them. Their audience consisted of avant weirdos, industrial heads, and fans of more experimental stuff, and their membership was as varied as Henry Cow and This Heat.
Belgian chamber rock band Univers Zero were one of the most intense R.I.O. groups, and Heresie is the best and darkest of their work. It’s sonically dissonant and very, very oppressive sounding in both its density of notes and darkness of mood. Perfect lights-off, scare-yourself music.
Bad townies
On the way to work this morning, I heard Op Ivy's "Bad Town," and I realized two things:
- It is objectively the worst song on Energy.
- Tim Armstrong's obsession with both rap and violence, which came to a head with his and Travis Barker's awful group the Transplants, is nothing new.
Not going anywhere with that. Just thinking.
ARIA landmark roles
Some of the commenters are arguing that there is, in fact, plenty of information out there. But this is a good primer on something that I feel like I should be doing but never seemed to have a good idea of how to do it.