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The Tools We Need vs. The Tools We Build.
I love to create things. Making something out of nothing, coming up with ideas and transforming thoughts into reality is – for the most part – an incredible joy.
Today, the range of tools we can use to bring ideas to life appears to be nearly endless. And yet most of the tools fail at one basic principle: Immediately showing us what we create. This is especially true when you create something with code.
What you see here – or, more precisely, don’t see – is a pulsating circle. It’s all there, but in order for you to see it, you’d first need to compile that code (If you have a webkit browser you can see it in action here).
What if we could see and interact with the output of the code directly? Why isn’t coding more like drawing a picture? How does it come that traditional tools, like pen and paper, are still the benchmark when it comes to connecting the creator with her piece of work?
I’m talking (and thinking) about all of this, because I stumbled upon an incredible talk by Bret Victor on that exact topic. It is a strong reminder, that there is still so much innovation possible – and that our shiny digital tools have still so much potential.
If you have the time, I encourage you to watch Victor’s talk. It’s an hour well spend.
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The new BaseCamp is moving in a great direction. It is blazing fast and the sheet based navigation seems to work pretty well. Also, the “Catch Up” option is a useful thing. Looking forward to use it!
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Walked out of my room to make myself a coffee, came back and looked at the scene you can see above and though: Hey, that is pretty nerdy. Took a picture, uploaded it to my blog, wrote the few words you are reading in the moment and thought: Sweet, I’m even gaining some bonus nerd points right now. #levelingup
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A search bar!
Wow, finally. This blog has a search bar. Right there at the bottom of the page.
To be honest, I was truly frustrated with the build-in Tumblr search so I never integrated one at all. But just the other day I stumbled upon a post by Pat Dryburgh who wrote about integrating a custom DuckDuckGo search bar into your site. I tried it and since it worked so well I decided to keep it.
If you want to do the same thing, it is really easy. Just paste this code snippet where you want your search bar to appear, add you domain, apply some nice CSS and you’re done.
<form method="get" id="search" action="http://duckduckgo.com/"> <input type="hidden" name="sites" value="YOURDOMAIN.COM"/> <input type="hidden" name="k8" value="#444444"/> <input type="hidden" name="k9" value="#D51920"/> <input type="hidden" name="kt" value="h"/> <input type="text" name="q" maxlength="255" placeholder="Search…"/> <input type="submit" value="DuckDuckGo Search" style="visibility: hidden;" /> </form>If you need more customization DuckDuckGo has an extensive list of parameters you can use.
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“No, it’s exactly like Pinterest.”
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Getting started with Less.
I came across less - a CSS extension by Alexis Sellier (better known as cloudhead) - quite a few times last year but I’ve refrained from using it, even though I immediately understood it’s great potential. I had that wired thought that I needed to develop my CSS skills at least to a level where I could take advantage of all the fancy stuff one can do with less.
But now that I started looking into it I must says that I’ve been a total fool. I should have started using it way earlier. Being able to insert variables into my CSS is a total time saver! Why remeber and repeat
/* CSS */ color: #dedede;every time you want to have the color gray to appear somewhere? Or worse: What happens if you want to change that exact color that probably appears quite a few times in your stylesheet?
Defining the color as a variable once and inserting it where needed makes just so much more sense.
// Less @gray: #deded; #header { color: @gray; } #footer { color: @gray; }And it gets even better with Mixins – a way to embed all properties of a given class or id into another.
// Less .border-radius (@radius) { border-radius: @radius; -moz-border-radius: @radius; -webkit-border-radius: @radius; } #header { .border-radius(4px); }It’s powerful stuff, really. And I haven’t even looked into functions and operations yet… I’m so excited to develop my next project with it.
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↪ Flickr's "renewed sense of focus"
Flickr is promising some significant updates to it’s photosharing site. I’m curious what they have in store – especially since sites like 500px successfully started to compete with Yahoo’s (once) popular service.
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Storing thoughts and code with DayOne.
During the last days I have been playing around with the journal app “Day One” a bit and found it quite useful for two of my daily needs: Storring quick thoughts and saving useful code snippets for later reference or refinement.
DayOne collects all these little bits of information and displays them in the nicest way possible. I haven’t found any other journal or note taking app that worked that well and looked that gorgeous.
The latest version (1.5) finally adds Markdown editing and Monospace Fonts. You know, that kind of stuff that makes my geeky heart happy. Also, there is now an option to sync your entries across your iDevices via iCloud – but I’ll stick to the Dropbox Sync solution.
The only thing missing are tags for better differentiation between post types. But the developer already promised to add that feature soon.
So if you’re into that kind of thing and need a fast, beautiful note taking app that has all the bells and whistles you’ve come to expect, I highly recommend getting Day One in the Mac App Store now.
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↪ Twitter Developer Teatime in Berlin
The Berlin tech and start up scene is really thriving at the moment. If you need another proof: Twitter is holding a first developer session in Berlin this month. Check the link for details.
