Blogging and all that Malarkey

Microsoft launches Windows 8 in just a few days, so now’s a good time to turn our attention to Internet Explorer 10. Here are two links to help you get prepared:

Chris (I so want to say “ Stretch ”) Armstrong: Absolute units like pixels effectively give a layout a sell-by date, locking it to a finite resolution range in which it will “work.” Proportional units (ems, rems, and percentages) enable you to define the important relationships between elements, and are a crucial first step on the road to resolution independence.

Thibaut Sailly added an extra dimension to the three-lines responsive navigation icon discussion by suggesting that the three horizontal lines could represent a gesture.

An incredibly useful, and beautifully designed, colour tool by Lea. I can see myself using this all the time. ( Some background to the tool.)

In a fantastic A List Apart double bill, Matt Griffin tackles Responsive Comping: Obtaining Signoff with Mockups: Sending clients in-browser comps is remarkably easy, as it turns out. We just e-mail them a URL. Clients can look at the designs in various browsers and on various devices, resize them, click links and navigation, and check out hover states. Instead of asking our clients to pretend that an image is a website, we show them a website. Keep in mind though, that showing clients a prototype instead of showing them static visuals is about setting realistic expectations and not about designing a browser.

This spot reminds me somewhat of Apple’s iPod ads and I don’t mean that in a bad way. I like the look of the Surface. I like it a lot and will probably pre-order one (for testing) this week. Even as an Apple devotee, I really hope that Microsoft does well with the Surface. I have a Windows Phone 7 phone that I used as my only mobile until I upgraded to the iPhone 4S and I love the we don’ call it Metro no mo’ Windows 8 Style interface. If I had to stop using an iPhone tomorrow, I’d head straight to a Nokia Lumia running Windows Phone 8.

Something strange happened to me on Twitter today.

I’m glad that the three-lines icon I suggested first, back in March is now being established as a sort of standard.

With the help of Tapbots’Netbot client, it looks like App.net might be gathering steam. If App.net’s your thing, you’ll now find me there too although I guess I’m not alone in being unsure when I’ll use App.net instead of Twitter. Follow me on App.net. (Damn that name isn’t getting any easier to say.)

Jordan Moore (who has a name like a country singer, but doesn’t like country and can’t sing): There have been calls recently from Andy Clarke and Jeremy Keith to have a standard icon for revealing navigation in small contexts, and rightly so — this is a new technique and we need to set users’ expectations about the consequence of the reveal action.