Improving Your Process: Establishing Style Guides ⇾
This is a great article by Jonathan Christopher on Monday by Noon. For a beginner like myself, looking at a well organized stylesheet or markup behind a site is inspiring all on its own — I love seeing how the professionals organize their front end code in different ways.
As with anything in technology, documentation is crucial — and just plain being kind — to yourself and your team in the future. Creating style guides like Jonathan describes results in consistency at the very least, and hopefully, smarter, more efficient code.
For envy.
Updated Weightshift.com:
Updated Colly.com:
Year in Review: Highlights from 2009 ⇾
From Jonathan Christopher, this is a recap of the best posts on Monday by Noon for 2009. There are some great articles included here, most focused on design and development.
After upgrading to a new Macbook last week, I had to go on a hunt to find several hidden preferences that I had grown to rely on. I wanted to document these settings for future usage and thought I would share them as well.
You’ve probably seen these all before, but it’s nice to have them all in one place.
1 - Copy email addresses in Mail without all the extra junk
2 - Enable the list view option for Stacks in Snow Leopard
3 - Enable the option to view the full path of an item in the Finder
4 - Force Safari to open external links in a new tab rather than a new window
5 - Enable the Xray folders view in QuickLook
You can view or copy/paste from the full list here.
Week 2 of the new feature, here’s my top 5 from last week:
1) Acorn 2: Every time I open this app, I’m struck by how much the interface has improved and how enjoyable it is to use.
And while I can’t photoshop my way out of a wet paper bag, I’ve heard enough horror stories from the pro’s to believe that a lot of people could save themselves some pain by using a smaller tool like Acorn for various tasks.
2) Tweetie 2: I’ve been using the app since the Loren pushed out the beta, but it was only last week that I noticed you can flick scroll through maximized tweets (timeline, replies or DM’s).
It’s the little things.
3) Alela Diane (iTunes link): Maybe it’s just a fact of getting old, but my musical tastes are definitely changing. Perhaps expanding is a better word. Folk music such as this, or what iTunes classifies as Singer/Songwriter genre, is becoming a big part of my music library.
4) Shortwave: this is old news, but if you want a nice fast way to search items from within your browser, Shortwave from Shaun Inman gives you a great list of default options.
5) YouVersion: the most well designed Bible study app I’ve come across on the web. Also comes with an amazing, free iPhone app.
A new regular post for this space (regular for at least one week), every Monday I’ll be posting my top 5 items from the week previous.
The inaugural list:
1 - Spotify in Canada: a great way to explore new artists.
2 - OS X’s single application mode: much more friendly than Spaces in my mind and works well with Witch.
3 - Droplr: A really nice way to share stuff from your Mac. Similar to Cloud.
4 - Pattern Tap: like Ember, but focused on UI elements. Inspiration for designers and developers.
5 - Mailtags: After my Postbox trial ended, I started using Mail.app again. On its own, Mail is missing some key features, but Mailtags fills in the blanks oh so well.
