June 20, 2014 - Comments Off on Building The BugTrap JavaScript Widget

Building The BugTrap JavaScript Widget

Over here at The Mechanism's headquarters, Team Mechanism has been busy working on a better way to track bugs, code named: project:Venus. We want to make it easier for our clients to report bugs while reviewing projects and improve our workflow by allowing internal communication on a bug by bug basis.

The idea came to us as while working on another project. We realized we had the technology to build a swift prototype by leveraging tools that were already part of our arsenal. More on this in later posts. For now, we will focus on the front end javascript widget, "The Bug Trapper" if you will.

As an agency, we often have many projects in process so our bug tracker needs to be easy to implement across multiple projects and domains: we wanted to use a simple script tag which would be added to projects during test phases, with the project id included in the script 'src' GET parameters.

This posed a couple problems:

  1. Scripts are not aware of the GET parameters from their requests
  2. AJAX requests cannot load anything other than scripts from other domains

 

1. Javascript and Parameters Passed through GET Requests

We came across this tip for pulling the parameters from the script request. It actually has little to do with a GET request as the parameters are parsed by the script on the client side. By providing the name of the script, it searches the DOM for itself (javascript has no awareness of how it has been called or where it exists in the DOM). And then we do some regex magic to construct an object of key/value pairs. We have abstracted the code slightly from the original. Below is our script:

 

// Extract "GET" parameters from a JS include querystring

function getScriptTag(script_name) {

// Find all script tags

var scripts = document.getElementsByTagName("script");

// Look through them trying to find ourselves

for(var i=0; i<scripts.length; i++) {

if(scripts[i].src.indexOf("/" + script_name) > -1) {

return scripts[i]

}

}

// No scripts match

return {};

}

function getParams(script_tag) {

// Get an array of key=value strings of params

var pa = script_tag.src.split("?").pop().split("&");

// Split each key=value into array, the construct js object

var p = {};

for(var j=0; j <pa.length; j++) {

var kv = pa[j].split("=");

p[kv[0]] = kv[1];

}

return p;

}

 

 

2. Cross Domain AJAX Requests

For security purposes, AJAX requests only accept scripts from other domains. This is a problem for our widget which we'd like to build modularly, separating the script logic, markup and styling into separate files, while maintaing the simplicity of including a single script when creating new instances.

There is a work around and it involves turning the response from our server into JSONP. JSONP is JSON with Padding. Essentially our server response is turned into a JSON object and then gets wrapped in a function, which will get called on the client side and return an object containing our data.

Thank the heavens for jQuery. jQuery's AJAX/getJSON method has baked in support for JSONP which will expect the callback function name to be a random string (an added layer of security), and will process the data, provided it gets the correct response from the server. On the client side, all we need to do is indicate we will be expecting the response to contain a callback function by adding "?callback=?" to our URL.

 

var stylesheetURL = "http://example.com/getmystylehsheet?callback=?";

$.getJSON(requestURL, function(data) {

$('head').append('

');

}

 

On our rails server we route this request by wrapping the intended response in a function, the name of which is passed by jQuery as a parameter through the request. Below is the ruby on rails controller code to do this on our server:

 

def getmystylesheet

css = File.read("path/to/stylesheet.css").to_s

json = {"css" => css}.to_json

callback = params[:callback]

jsonp = callback + "(" + json + ")"

render :text => jsonp, :content_type => "text/javascript"

end

 

We're beginning a test cycle with the bug tracker on some internal projects and we will be rolling this out on upcoming client work. Hopefully, with feedback from our clients, we will continue this project with a view to scaling it. Stay tuned for future updates!

Published by: georgebrassey in The Programming Mechanism
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June 13, 2014 - Comments Off on The MechCast 303: The Internet of Things

The MechCast 303: The Internet of Things

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In this episode of The MechCast, Team Mechanism gathers to discuss the connected world in which we live, better known as The Internet of Things. We take a slightly different approach to this episode, in the form of a QI episode. We hope you enjoy!

Music

  • Howard Goodall - QI Theme Song
  • Aphex Twin - Taking Control

Related Links

Published by: antonioortiz in The Mechcast
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June 9, 2014 - Comments Off on The End of Web

The End of Web

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By 1995, David Carson was the poster boy for an avant-garde and increasingly, subversive direction that graphic design was headed. He had built a global following of design school kiddies by bucking the traditional "ad-man" approach previously taken by Ogilvy, Burnett, Brownjohn and others with regard to clever, effective and readable advertising. Much like the controlled chaos of the Deconstructivists before them, in the cyclical karmic wheel of creative expression, Carson (and arguably Segura, Brody and others) had taken accepted graphic design in a direction that tore up the rules and started over. Their sauce was the gateway drug for Sagmeister and his ilk in later years.

I recall attending a HOW Conference in Monterey, California, where Milton Glaser, Bob Gill and their colleagues were publicly seething at Carson's new found popularity. These arguably brainer, and certainly more seasoned road dogs of the graphics industry, were, for the first time, being ignored by the graphic masses for a new, hot little surfer boy (who openly admitted he just fell into the industry like like a leaf into a big pond of ducks). There were lines around the block to have his new book, "The End of Print: The Grafik Design of David Carson", signed by the man himself.

For the ad-men, this was a moment of reckoning. At the Monterey HOW Design conference Bob Gill was more vicious and crabbier than usual. The unsuspecting rock stars of the past were now being exorcised by the new punk regime. The Sex Pistols were coming - and there was nothing that Jethro Tull and Yes could do about it. A creative tool called the computer, had replaced hand-cut rubylith and type.

Digital printing would slowly all-but-kill Gutenberg's printing press as a cheaper solution to your printing press expert, who was always there on press to get your colors just right. The industry of graphic design was becoming cheaper. We began to believe "shitty" was acceptable, and various economic factors and corporate budget cuts didn't help matters either. Software took away the human touch, tablets would later take away the notepad, and being digital began to slowly take root - a fungus to wash over the senior graphic Luddites, like a creeping red tide. An in-depth review of this historical moment in printing can be read on articles from https://www.littleprint.com.au, the review highlights key moments in the transition to digital. A clever and eye-opening read for millennials who have missed out on seeing the changes first hand.

A dear departed friend of mine once quipped, "What happens when everyone has a website?" Now that's a bit naive, but I get his point. While the convenience of smartphones and tablets has pushed us into a post-PC world, where expansive experiences are more desirable and useful than a website. Websites, by definition, are just a group of connected pages regarded as a single entity, and they are practically free if you look hard enough. The modern digital branded experience is much more.

Mobile devices and likely the upcoming wearable industry will continue to steadily infiltrate and replace the experience of a single website for an organization and brand's digital expression. In recent years, the concept of social media has raised the stakes by creating two-way conversations in real time with real expectations from your audience. We prefer to not be removed from experiencing one form of entertainment or educational media to sit down at a computer and look up a website. We want to experience all things collectively and collaboratively with our friends, and the distraction of a website, as we once knew it, is not nearly complex enough to satisfy our desires.

...Back to Carson and the End of Print. He later claimed that he wasn't trying to infer that the print industry was dead, but those who had just raised the flag of technology and the new coming internet revolution didn't care. His mostly unreadable style and grungy approach to design was necessary. It rocked the industry boat - and as music, fashion and entertainment fell into line - it forced the rules to change. The web would later become a viable and uniquely positioned means of both creative expression and a way for businesses to connect to consumers in sometimes profound ways - the world's most accessible art show and trade show under the same roof. The Nerds had their revenge while the ad-men were left to their martinis, suits and stories.

The Mechanism recently retired the word "website" from our vocabulary. It’s too close-minded and obvious a concept to exist as an agency without discussing the future of an integrated digitally-branded experience. In fact, we were 13 years ahead of our time when we started The Mechanism and used “From Media to the Medium” as our tagline. We believe that a website has always been a thread in the expanding tapestry of brand expression. We understood from the start that everything begins from the brand outwards, and given the technological tools that were available then (and are available now) the implementation of an idea in any Medium wouldn’t be the problem - it would be the enormous and interconnected creative collaborative that would be required to see through the changing variety of media delivery mechanisms.

The “website” as we all know is less important than what's coming next. Website development was the catalyst, a "blip" towards an interconnected omnipresent, ever-communicating "Singularity". We will soon live with systems that plug into an artificial or ambient intelligence to manage your life, curate your interests, drive a vehicle, keep track of your day to day travels and never force you to remove yourself from an existing experience to use a website to research what the Network will already know you’re looking for. The next generation will be the “Mighty Untethered”, ubiquitously connected to a Universal Machine. You and your friends and colleagues interests will be part of the system, and as they change, so will your personal experience to match your tastes. Diseases, dangers, economies and civilizations will be repaired on a global scale due to mass shared information and the artificial intelligence to be gained from it. Privacy will continue to suffer, but it has since the first time you signed up for a college loan.

Web developers, this is your moment of reckoning. When nearly everyone can make a peanut butter sandwich, it's not just time to suggest a banana - it's time to introduce it to the 10,000lb gorilla in the room.

Sitting on the couch, plugging-in and tuning out, growing fat, eventually growing tentacles and remembering what it once was like when we were knuckle-dragging Homo sapiens is a possible future. Or hopefully, our wearables, implants and attached digital devices will feature new, usable interfaces and non-intrusive experiences enabling us all to once again perceive the world around us with better clarity and understanding of the human experience.

The Web is dead, long live the Medium...

May 30, 2014 - Comments Off on Configuring Sunspot Solr Search Controller

Configuring Sunspot Solr Search Controller

Search is the compass of the internet. It guides us to the content that we are really looking for and helps avoid the stuff we don’t really care about. Or at least that’s how it is supposed to work. It turns out that beyond just the complexity of installing and configuring a search server, it can also be difficult to account for the various use cases of your search tool. Lets take a quick look at how The Mechanism engineers were able to tackle this challenge when building a restaurant search application for SafeFARE.

The good folks at foodallergy.org enlisted our services to build a restaurant search sushi near me that will allow users to find allergy-aware restaurants based on any combination of 9 criteria. Using the Ruby on Rails framework and Sunspot Solr (a Ruby DSL for the Lucene Apache Solr search server) we built this search app, and learned a few things on the way.

If a user searches for restaurants in a ZIP code should we only return restaurants within that ZIP code, or should we include restaurants from other nearby ZIP codes in our search results? And if we include other ZIP codes, how many other ZIP codes? How should we order the results? These and other similar questions helped up to come up with the structure of our search controller.

Figure 1.1

if params[:search].present?

@search = Restaurant.solr_search do

fulltext params[:restaurant_name] # runs a full text search of

with(:approved, :true) #facets approved restaurants

if params[:cuisine_search].present? #user also entered cuisine preference

any_of do

params[:cuisine_search].each do |tag|

with(:cuisines_name, tag) # facet by matching cuisines

end

end

end

if params[:address].present? || params[:city_search].present? || params[:state_search].present? || params[:zip_search].present?

#if any location fields are present, geocode that location

with(:location).in_radius(*Geocoder.coordinates(whereat), howfar)

#facet based on user given location,

end

order_by_geodist(:location,request.location.latitude,request.location.longitude)

@restaurants = @search.results

end

 

It took us about a week but we were finally able to come up with enough if statements to cover every one of the 362,880 possible combinations of search queries. Figure 1.1 is a small sampling of how we implement search when a user types in a restaurant name, cuisine preference, and restaurant location. First we search the solr index for whatever the user enters in the restaurant_name field, then cut that list down to only the approved restaurants, then we check to see if the user also entered a cuisine preference, if so we facet our list down to restaurants that match that cuisine, if the user did not enter a cuisine, we skip that step, then we check if the user entered a location that they would like to search like a city, or state, and we facet our list down to only restaurant’s in that area. Using this strategy we can create sort of a Venn diagram that allows us to drill down only to the information that we want, and point that result to the restaurant variable. To increase the functionality of the site, The Mechanism engineers implemented an IP lookup to automatically detect the IP address and location of the user, and order search results by how close the restaurant is to the user.

A second major challenge that many developers face when using a search server is deployment. In order to use solr in a production environment, you will need a Java app servlet like Tomcat or Jetty, and you will need an instance of Apache Solr. Developers may consider installing standalone versions of Tomcat and Solr Sunspot depending on their hardware capabilities, but sunspot comes bundled with a Jetty server which can be used in production by running the command RAILS_ENV=production rake sunspot:solr:start

And voila! we have implemented an advanced search tool that will help users find allergy-aware restaurants all across the nation and may even save somebody’s life one day.

Published by: Sharon Terry in The Programming Mechanism
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May 28, 2014 - Comments Off on DANCING TO YOUR BRAND – How the Pet Shop Boys got me thinking about responsive design.

DANCING TO YOUR BRAND – How the Pet Shop Boys got me thinking about responsive design.

image copy

A few weeks ago, I took a trip back to the 90's by heading down to Terminal 5 for the Pet Shop Boys concert. The British electro-pop duo actually hit it big in the mid-1980's and have never stopped working, but I remember dancing all-out to their club sounds in the early 1990's.

This show was the last stop of their world tour and I had asked several friends to go with me… months in advance. Mood- pretty darn excited by my choice.

As the concert date drew closer, I wondered - will the Pet Shop Boys still feel relevant? Sure I think their music is great, but then I worried, will this be a memorable "experience" for all? or will it feel dated, quirky, and somewhat nostalgic.

Either way I thought this will reflect on me. I know we all worry when we are throwing down big bucks for a concert and coercing friends to go. YOU become the host and you are somehow responsible for everyone enjoying the event. Your mouth is saying "come on... it will be great!", while your brain is whispering - "it had better be since you bought 8-pricey tickets to this shin-dig"!.

Well I have to say the show was amazing. Neil Tennant, and Chris Lowe are still a perfect blend of electro-pop craftsmanship and really interesting performance art. A funky spacious club in New York City was the perfect venue to share the experience. And we really did "share" the experience. All around me people were holding up their Smartphones (which was not broken like mine) - taking pics, recording video (see photo above - I took that one at the show) - and thank goodness, since half the time I couldn't see the stage - I could however see it on the phone of the tall person in front of me - revelers were Tweeting, Tumbling, Pinning and sharing the experience in real time.

Which got me to thinking ...

Not that long ago people went to concerts and went nutty. We danced, sang, and sweated and told our friends about it the next day. "You should have seen Blink-182 last night man, it was insane!" (I went mid-2000's here to illustrate my point...remember the first release of the iPhone was June 2007 - and all of the realtime sharing came in the following years).

So my thought. Technology moves faster than a one-hit-wonder drops in the charts.

Right now, We are a culture in motion.

Everyone participates in the moment equally in realtime. Snaps and videos of your experience are up online before you leave the parking lot.

My question to friends, clients, and potential clients is this.... are people dancing to your brand? Or is your website a Wallflower? (Yes I know another great band from the past).

Internet browsing from smartphones and tablets grew 35% from Q4 2012 to Q4 2013. Simply put - Almost a third of global Internet traffic to North American web sites—31.3%—in the fourth quarter of 2013, came from smartphones and tablets, according to marketing and public relations firm Walker Sands Communications’.

According to Mill and Brown Research, per day Americans spend -147 minutes on mobile phones, 113 minutes viewing television, and only 108 minutes on their PC. easy to see who is winning the race here. We use a lot of mobile apps all the time. This can be a great tool to develop your business. Learn more at Sandcastle-Web.com and get the most from your mobile app.

Now ask yourself - How does your company's website hold up when you hold your phone up? How are people accessing your website? Is it a satisfying user experience?

In the same way I thought about my friends judging me based on a concert experience… I wonder, how are your clients judging your brand based on the mobile experience your website provides? Does your site feel relevant? Is it satisfying and engaging? Is your mobile web experience worth sharing and talking about? Or does it feel dated, quirky, and somewhat nostalgic?

The Mechanism has been a pioneer of Responsive Design from its earliest days.

Check out our own site right now on your smartphone or tablet.

Functional design and a pleasing user interface, these are the things that excite me as a designer, creator and a user.

Note how our site reconfigures gracefully to maintain large action buttons, and behold - text that remains readable. Fluid grids and flexible images are the cornerstone to a satisfying user experience. Other benefits include interactive calls to action such as one-tap to dial a phone number within your site, one-tap to email or interact with your site.

Just imagine... all you Non-Profit organizations out there, this could mean the difference between an immediate digital donation or a delayed action that is never acted upon.

The opportunity for your clients to take immediate action is in the palm of their hands.

I could go on however, I would rather invite you to join in a conversation.

The Mechanism's first of this seasons in-house conversations on best practices for your digital brand experience will kick off on Friday, June 13th, at 8:30 am at our place.

We will be featuring an intimate chat with our Founder and Executive Director Dave Fletcher about True Responsive Design and your brand experience.

We have limited seating and coffee. If you would like to join us please register by clicking here!

Can't attend? Just contact me directly to chat - 212-221-3444 x-102

Best,

Michael

 

May 27, 2014 - Comments Off on R.I.P. Massimo Vignelli

R.I.P. Massimo Vignelli

massimo

A designer has just left us with an amazing legacy of creativity and clarity. The great Massimo Vignelli (January 10, 1931 – May 27, 2014) has died at the age of 83.

The life of a designer is a life of fight. Fight against the ugliness. Just like a doctor fights against disease. For us, the visual disease is what we have around, and what we try to do is cure it somehow with design. – Massimo Vignelli

A massively influential designer and one of the last true great creative thinkers, I had the good fortune to have a brief correspondence with Mr. Vignelli back in 2002. I was putting together a presentation entitled "Good Examples of Bad Design", to be delivered at the HOW Design Conference in Orlando. He reached out to me, presumably out of curiosity and delight in the subject matter. He told me quite simply, that he was looking forward to my presentation. It meant the world to me and I've cherished this memory even as the archived bits of the conversation have faded from my hard drive.

Michael Bierut from Pentagram produced a short video about Massimo's approach to book design. In a world that is quickly becoming digital, it's worth watching to learn (and hear) a few insights from one of the masters. The creative world was a much better place with him in it.

Massimo Vignelli Makes Books from Pentagram on Vimeo.

Also, to catch up on the legacy of Mr. Vignelli - check out this link.

Published by: davefletcher in The Design Mechanism
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May 16, 2014 - Comments Off on What We Talk About When We Talk About Testing

What We Talk About When We Talk About Testing

Until recently I considered writing tests for my applications much like reading Dickens in high school: boring, repetitive, hard to understand, and yet for some reason a total necessity.  What's more, I wrote tests about as frequently as I read Dickens - and I've never read any Dickens.  My meandering point here is that Test Driven Development (TDD) seems to be the standard of the rails community, yet I don't know a single person who actually does it.  With that it mind, I decided to develop our last client's application with tests written to the best of my ability.  At first I thought I was burying my productivity in the minutia of each test, but I ended up learning quite a few things, including the value of testing.

Tools

I guess the first thing to do here is to describe my tools.  To test with Rails I used RSPEC, Factory Girl, and Capybara.

RSpec is a testing tool for Ruby.  Baked into the gem is a rich command line program with detailed error reporting. The beauty of Ruby, and RSpec, is that it enables you to write human readable tests that tell a story. For instance:

it 'has a list of employees' do

employee = Employee.new('John', 'Smith')

company = Company.new([student])

expect(company.employees).to include(student)

end

 

Though testing with RSPEC ensures that our models behave the way we expect, there is a serious problem with this approach: It takes forever. Testing any sort of interesting behavior not only involves extensive amounts of setup to your environment, but a tremendous amount of code to create various instances of your model. This is where Factory Girl comes in.  Factory Girl allows a tester to create factories that create multiple records for a model with some generic attributes that are able to be overridden as needed.  This means that creating a unique record is as simple as:

FactoryGirl.create(:employee, name: "Jon Snow").

My last tool in my little testing toolkit is Capybara. Where RSpec is a way to test your models, Capybara allows your application to test external behavior. In other words Capybara provides a simple way to test user stories and general behavior. Heres an example:

'When I sign in' do

visit user_sign_up_path

fill_in 'Login', :with => 'DavidBowie@spidersfrommars.net'

fill_in 'Password', :with => 'whereWereTheSpiders?'

click_link 'Sign in'

end

 

 

So What's The Point

When I started, I assumed that testing would help to prevent bugs. While this is likely the case, I found that using TDD did something far more valuable. By letting tests to drive the code, developers are forced to conceptualize their application before a single semi-colon is ever written. This forces developers to step through their own logic, which in my case, is full of inconsistencies and little things that I had not thought through fully...likely because I have never read Dickens.

Published by: dhruvmehrotra in The Programming Mechanism
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May 9, 2014 - Comments Off on The MechCast 302: Internet Privacy

The MechCast 302: Internet Privacy

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On this episode of The MechCast, Michael (our host), Tope, Dhruv, George, Dave, & Joe discuss privacy on the internet, how safe we really are while surfing the web, and how we as individuals feel about our own digital footprint.

Related Links:

Music:

Published by: antonioortiz in The Mechcast
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May 8, 2014 - Comments Off on An Event Apart • Boston • 2014

An Event Apart • Boston • 2014

Here are some thoughts on talks at the recent An Event Apart, in Boston.

Understanding Web Design - Jeffrey Zeldman

  • Web Design is held to the expectations of other media. Often ignoring the intrinsic strengths of web
  • Like typography, web design's primary focus is communicating content
  • Technology is often a hangup for people, when the user and their needs should be the primary focus of designers. "Design for people, not browsers!"
  • Design is about detail
  • A great website will subtly guide the user to their desired destination

Designing Using Data - Sarah Parmenter

  • Design is no longer a differentiator. Making things look nice is common. The differentiator today is designing with purpose — answer the question 'why?'
  • When the right metrics are studied, data offers objective and actionable feedback
  • Data should allow a team to unite behind an objective goal — such as: Increase clicks etc.
  • Customer facing advertising is most effective when honest and transparent
  • Iterative design allows you to be flexible and try new things

Responsive Design is Still Hard/Easy! Be Afraid/Don't Worry! - Dan Mall

  • Frameworks rather than processes, mean you define a set of constraints within which a project exists, and within this you find out what you can do that's unexpected
  • Be active within your framework and volunteer/get involved with stages of production outside of your discipline
  • Each member of a team will have divergent perspectives at the start of each project cycle, they should become convergent by the end. These are focal points
  • Rinse and repeat the cycle, getting smaller each time to increase team involvement
  • Extensive preparation should make the assembly part of the process the shortest

Screen Time - Luke Wroblewski

  • Mobile is the dominant web browser worldwide
  • Responsive design includes additional considerations than just screen size (multiple input types, variable ambient lighting etc)
  • Screen size is a poor proxy for many of these considerations (screen size does not reveal input type)
  • A user's posture or distance from device will also affect it's design, independent of screen size or number of pixels
  • Design for human proportions, not pixels.

Content/Communication - Kristina Halvorson

5 key points for working with a client:

  • Principles: these are internal motivators based on our better intentions. They can unify a team
  • Strategy: pinpoint your goals and provide helpful constraints with which to execute
  • Process: the process is not God, it should change and grow as needs change. Regular post mortems are encouraged
  • Roles: RACI key for each agent on the client end. Responsible. Accountable. Consulted. Informed
  • Perceptions: Translate to facilitate communication between different disciplines

UX Strategy Means Business - Jared Spool

  • Design is the rendering of intent. Both user and provider
  • Content delivery is as important as the content itself and vice versa. Great UX cannot exist without great content
  • Advertising is unhelpful for all parties involved
  • Strategic priorities in business can inform design considerations (increase revenue, reduce cost etc)
  • There are a variety of models for monetizing the web

The Long Web - Jeremy Keith

  • HTML allows for fantastic accessibility, deprecation and backward compatibility
  • New HTML specifications can be adopted early as they will be skipped over when unsupported
  • Progressive enhancement means you start with the lowest common denominator and then enhance as much as you like
  • Progressive enhancement protects the experience from unaccountable errors such as unrelated javascript errors
  • Text formats will last longer than binaries. Binaries are forever changing and becoming outdated

Responsive Design Performance Budget - Paul Irish

  • Mobile users expect their content to load faster than the desktop
  • Web growing is latency limited. The nature of requesting many small files means that a user's experience is improved by reducing the number requests
  • UX can be greatly enhanced by prioritizing critical data and rendering early on
  • Separate the critical CSS from non-critical. Load non-critical at the end of the page. Aim for main content to load in 1 sec (< 14kb)
  • The number of higher latency users is increasing

The Chroma Zone: Engineering Color on the Web - Lea Verou

  • Colors in web browsers have many nuances and limitations
  • Hex and RGB are poor representations for human reading
  • HSL and HSLa are better although they are not perceptually uniform (we perceive 50% yellow as much lighter than 50% blue)
  • New color properties in CSS level 4 will make color coding more human readable (HWB = Hue Whiteness Blackness)
  • There is room for much more improvement in web colors

Mind the Gap: Designing in the Space Between Devices - Josh Clark

  • Designing for the space between screens. Not content but tasks. Verbs not nouns
  • The technology is available today, we just haven't imagined the possibilities yet
  • Interfacing with machine is likely not going to change much (touch and mouse are great interfaces)
  • Physical things are beginning to have digital representations (avatars)
  • How about affecting how we interface with physical world and communicating that to our devices.
  • Software makes hardware scale, The endless possibilities

Web+: Can the Web Win the War Against Native Without Losing its Soul? - Bruce Lawson

  • Web technology has inherent strengths, despite the popularity of native apps
  • Web tech should not try to replicate — though it can learn from native. Build to the strengths of web
  • Progressive enhancement and interoperability make web accessible and global. Always accessible by everyone
  • Widgets failed as they were a poor imitation of native apps. They existed as a snapshot without the ability to update
  • W3C is built for accessibility and interoperability. This means that it is designed for low level functions. Can be complicated but powerful

How to Champion Ideas Back at Work - Scott Berkun

  • Great things are achieved in difficult circumstances
  • Success and acclaim only arrive once a project is complete
  • Charm and convincing people of your ideas is important!
  • A network increases your potential. Reach out and get advice to harness that potential
  • To enact change, start small with something you can excel at and expand from there

May 2, 2014 - Comments Off on Never Hear Them Coming

Never Hear Them Coming

electric-car

Small wins.

The Danish Energy Agency allocated EUR 4 million for public and private electric car projects. This will bring 1500 new electric cars to the streets of Denmark in 2014. With about 6 million people, they are approximately 1.5% the population of the US.

Bhutan, the Himalayan kingdom of 700,000 people, measures progress by the gross national happiness index. They also export 72% of their electricity. Nissan is helping them to build a complex infrastructure for charging their whisper-quiet Leaf electric and diesel cars you can easily repair with parts from local diesel engine core buyers  when need.

Electric cars are so smooth, nimble and silent – you don't even hear them coming.

In the United States, we have oil lobbyists fighting against the existence of electric cars to their last breath, all part of our historically vaudevillian political system where money and power are sadly trumping progress. Getting these jackals to finally back off enough to even allow rational conversations about electric cars will require such a widespread public demonization of oil, that cowboys will have to kneel before the masses and swear that Texas tea is really made from fresh butterfly milk.

Remember, the United States (and arguably Canada and South Africa) has Elon Musk, the baddest-ass electric car maker in the world, headquartered right in Palo Alto. A ruthless innovator, rocket launcher and inventor like this hasn't been seen since "The Great and Powerful Jobs". And what do the bureaucrats do to Musk through lobbyists and political baboonery? They tar, feather and shit on him. He'll eventually take his magic ball and teleport to another playground. But, we're too busy punching the nerd in the face to notice that we're actually slugging an invincible warlock.

And such is our system. Obese and overwrought with so much rotten sausage that if we keep it up, we are likely to fall behind even the developing world in a generation or two. By the time we pluck our heads out of our own posteriors and realize that politics ain't reality tv, it'll be too late.

Charging equipment for PEVs is classified by the rate at which the batteries are charged. Charging times vary based on how depleted the battery is, how much energy it holds, the type of battery, and the type of charging equipment (e.g., charging level and power output). The charging time can range from less than 20 minutes to 20 hours or more, depending on these factors. Charging the growing number of PEVs in use requires a robust network of stations for both consumers and fleets. Learn more about ecologic infrastructure from Sinisi Solutions.

To get electricity you have to start with an alpha particle.

You want electric cars? You might have to travel to tiny Norway. In March 2014, Norway became the first country where over one in every 100 registered passenger cars is plug-in electric. Among the existing government incentives, all-electric cars are exempt in Norway from all non-recurring vehicle fees (including purchase taxes - which are extremely high for ordinary cars), and 25% VAT on purchase, together making a whisper-quiet electric car purchase price competitive with conventional cars. Take that oil lobbyists...

You want your government out of net neutrality? You might have to go to smart, little Brazil for internet freedom. Remember, when you disrupt the flow of free ideas by allowing money to clog the pipes, you'll have such a backlog of slime that you'll need to hire Godzilla the plumber to clean them out. And as we all know, Godzilla makes a big mess.

when you disrupt the flow of free ideas by allowing money to clog the pipes, you'll have such a backlog of slime that you'll need to hire Godzilla the plumber to clean them out.

It's also why a small agency wins. Small is nimble. Nimble is smart. Smart is quick. And assuming the person at the top of a small agency is open minded and searching for a future not caught in the past, then the possibilities are endless.

Made in NYC? Yea, I've heard of it - The Mechanism helped to write that book for the past 13 years. We're nimble, speed-hungry, cockroaches, nestled in the bowels of New York City. We're surviving, and we're whisper-quiet.

And you know what? You never hear us coming either.