Blogging and all that Malarkey

Summary: If you use OSX and write HTML, screw the trial version. Buy Hammer. You’ll earn back what you spent on it during the first hour you use it.

I’ve found that if you want rough indication of a designer’s experience, look at the time they spend on different stages of the design process. Novice designers spend most of their time creating a solution, and maybe 20% refining it. Intermediates split the time roughly evenly. For senior designers, the ratio flips: 20% creating, 80% refining. And the experts realise that creating and refining are actually the same thing. This is a fabulous insight. Next week I’m heading back to Geneva to do exactly this with ISO, because ‘expert’ clients realise it too.

Remote preview is a tiny JavaScript based tool which I built for our test lab. It allows you to preview any URL on large number of mobile devices simultaneously. Just enter a URL, hit Cmd+S, and new URL gets automatically loaded on each device. Remote preview works on platforms like Android, Blackberry, iOS, Maemo, Meego, Symbian, Windows Phone and WebOS. I’ll test Remote Preview for myself later this week. I hope it’ll be another reason for me not to renew my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription next year.

It’s coming up on four years since I published my original Contract Killer over on 24ways. The reaction to it was astonishing and over the last four years the feedback I’ve received has been overwhelmingly positive. I feel very, very happy that so many people have found Contract Killer useful.

Although Adobe have said nothing officially, their silence says it all. Unofficially my little birdies tell me that Fireworks is not being updated for retina displays so the tool I’ve used and loved for a decade or more is effectively dead.

“Prototype iPhone apps with simple HTML, CSS and JS components.” From the fellas that brought you Bootstrap.

Two great reads this week, on connected subjects:

Two things about the iPad mini as I’ve owned one since Friday:

Jordan Moore (who wears crocodile skin shoes) made a handy little tool for “showing what @media features your device can and can’t see.”

Don’t be put off by ‘Windows Store apps’ in the title. There’s lots of really good information about designing for tablets in general here. Aside: I spotted this in the ‘Windows 8 touch posture’ section: Because slates are most often held along the side, the bottom corners and sides are ideal locations for interactive elements. That’s a big difference between iPads and Microsoft’s Surface ‘slate’ (do they actually still call it that?). Microsoft sees the 16:9 Surface as a landscape device, whereas a 4:3 iPad is for use any way up.