Blogging and all that Malarkey

.Net magazine published its The top 25 books for web designers and developers after asking a few contributors and yours truly for our recommendations.

There’s been much written about responsive design, but so much of it has focussed on aspects of technical implementation rather than about the design decisions that responsive design demands. So next February (2012), I’ll be travelling down-under to Australia to host four, yes four, ‘Fashionably flexible responsive web design’ workshops.

I’ve become a bit of a LESS junkie these last few months, so I was chuffed when I heard about CodeKit — a new, (free while in beta) toolkit — by LESS.app developer Bryan Jones. I’ve been trying CodeKit out this week.

About two years ago, I tweeted “If your CSS is complicated enough to need a compiler or pre-processor, you’re fucking doing it wrong!” I meant it too. After-all, CSS isn’t hard to learn and it’s easy to write and write quickly. So why would you need a processor like LESS or Sass?

One of the biggest reasons I chose LESS over other CSS pre-processors, was LESS.app. It processes LESS syntax into CSS on my Mac, every time I save a file. No Javascript and most importantly no complicated Terminal, Ruby malarkey. Simpless is a compiler that works on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows. I’m testing it now. I’ll be writing a proper entry about how and why I use LESS soon.

After pushing my redesign live yesterday, I’ve been asked a few times about why I pulled respond.js (and with it, CSS3 Media Query support for older versions on Internet Explorer) from the new site.

Joshua Topolsky We think of The Verge (and its underlying CMS) as something akin to an app. A piece of software that is being constantly developed and updated. Today we’re launching with The Verge 1.0, but 1.1 and 1.2 are just around the corner. This Is My Next — my favourite tech, gadget site over the last few months — has (right on cue) become The Verge. If you’ve been reading This Is My Next, you’ll know there’s been a lot to like about the quality of its journalism. There’s a lot to like about the new site’s design too, from the strong layout of its review pages to many of the design details. I can see myself spending a lot of time on the Apple hub. I love the category/brand tabs in the review sidebar navigation. They’re not unique, they’re not new, but here they just ‘work’. The ‘jump to’ overlay on product review pages, like this one for the iPhone 4S, just works too. It’s obvious that everyone involved in The Verge cares about the details. Compared to Engadget, Gizmodo or the recent TechCrunch redesign disaster, The Verge’s design is a treat and it looks like a worthy successor to This Is My Next. So far, I love it.

I’ve been wanting to create a new look for Stuff & Nonsense for a good, long while, but I felt daunted by how much work I imagined there’d be for a redesign. My work diary is so full that I couldn’t see the time I thought I needed, so the site stagnated and over the last few months I couldn’t bear to look at it. Then a few weeks ago, Elliot spontaneously redesigned his site and inspired me to follow suit.

As Jeremy mentioned yesterday, just before An Event Apart in Seattle, I spent a few hours on a spot of guerrilla testing at an AT&T store. Specifically, I was looking at how Windows Phone 7’s Internet Explorer browser handles ‘responsive sites’.

I gave my first talk of the year at An Event Apart in Seattle. I’m speaking at all six of the events this year (and hosting two workshops ). I called the talk Smoke Gets In Your Eyes after the first episode of Mad Men because I was showing, for the very first time Madmanimation, the Mad Men opening titles recreated using CSS.