Web design & Free Software

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3 reasons why Mac is best

You thought you’d seen the end of the Flame Wars) between Mac and PC, redolent of the late ’90s, lumber-jack-shirted hipster vs. besuited-beige-square dullard. But no, it is my duty to report back to you why a Mac is twice as good as PC.

Not only will I prove it to you, I’ll do the maths as well.

In short, here are the reasons:


Linux
Mac OS X
Windows


My trusty old ThinkPad X60s died last... Read more

The Idle Self-employed

What this country needs is a new scapegoat for ordinary, hard-working, honest families to blame for our economic woes.

Bankers no longer cut it, they’re yesterday’s news. How about contractors, freelancers, and the swelling ranks of the self-employed? They don’t work full-time, 9 to 5. They get paid way more than poor down-trodden employees. They magically declare an income which matches their personal... Read more

My next project will be in HTML

Nathan Ford, Welsh-living and “Texas-born designer/developer/capitalist”, writes wise words about typography, and has created a couple of dev tools to strip out decoration from a site and tell you which web fonts you are actually seeing.

He tweets well too, useful stuff, not gibberish:

“With internal projects, including @gridsetapp, I’ve built the thing first, then styled. Results in more elegant CSS... Read more

Modular CSS from 10,000 feet

Anyone can write CSS.

h1 { color: red; }

There you go, easy, isn’t it? Well, yes, that is indeed the whole point.

However, organising CSS is a whole different ball game. To properly manage CSS on anything more than a couple of pages is a job in itself (ie a Front End Developer). My own portfolio website www.jrayson.co.uk is only six pages. Yet still I have managed to wrap myself in CSS knots.

Part of... Read more

If only Windows were like Cary Grant

Cary Grant once said “It takes 500 small details to add up to one favorable impression.”.

The appositely named Sublime Text editor dutifully steps up to the mark. For my sins, I have been formatting Terms and Conditions (Lord knows, they must have been terrible). I have never quite learned regular expressions, so the column and multiple select features are an absolute boon.

I also discovered wrapping... Read more

Another day, another...

The Amazing Marvin Suggs And His Muppaphone coined the phrase “Another day, another headache”.

For me, it’s “Another Day, Another Front End Dev Contract, Another Set of Cool Tools”. Not quite as catchy but far more fun.

For starters, there is Codebase, a cross between the delectable GitHub hosting and the project management tool BaseCamp. I have yet to use it much, as the day has been filled with... Read more

CAPTCHA? Gotcha!

CAPTCHAs are designed to stop spam. This is good.

I am finding it increasingly difficult to ‘solve’ CAPTCHAs. This is bad.

I am not sure whether my brain is slowing down, whether my eyesight is failing, or if CAPTCHAs are becoming more sophisticated and harder to solve (indeed, I've noticed a couple of instances of photographic CAPTCHAs).


Example of a photographic CAPTCHA

And therein lies the... Read more

Can you be agile with a waterfall client?

An exasperated front end developer was telling me his project woes the other day. The project had started out using the Agile development methodology, using an iterative and evolutionary approach based on close collaboration.

However, the client didn’t dig the agile vibe. The client dropped by every couple of weeks, and dropped disconnected bombshell requests, and then disappeared again.

I’ve never... Read more

Dirty font tag secrets

I nearly used the font tag. There, I said it.

Being freelance, I get used to the gritty reality of web development. Case in point, building HTML emails. CSS3?! I don’t think so, you’ll be lucky to get margin-top working (thanks, Hotmail). Background images? No, not without Outlook, which can be shortened to withOutLook. Oh, and the reams of inline styling. Delight.

Campaign Monitor have a fantastic... Read more

RWD & the death of JavaScript libraries?

Responsive Web Design is a watershed in the web development world. You build one website for your business that serves a variety of different devices. It is the logical culmination of accessible, semantic web design.

Simple, no?

Well, no.


BBC Responsive News front page test, showing difference between HTML4 & HTML5 browsers. Image credit © BBC News

In a marvellously insightful blog post... Read more

About this blog

Coretech

Free Software tools & technologies for web design & front-end development.

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Community highlights

Jack Schofield

Smartphones run HTML5 a lot slower than PCs

Blog Post Benchmarks run by Spaceport.io show that HTML5 runs "six to ten times slower"...

22 May, 2012 by Jack Schofield
Jake Rayson

3 reasons why Mac is best

Blog Post You thought you’d seen the end of the Flame Wars) between Mac and PC,...

22 May, 2012 by Jake Rayson
Lucy Sherriff

Samsung draws logic-worthy on/off ratio from graphene

Blog Post Researchers at Samsung’s Advance Institute of Technology have developed a...

22 May, 2012 by Lucy Sherriff
Jack Schofield

Windows 8 could speed multi-monitor uptake

Blog Post Microsoft has announced that it will improve multi-monitor support in Windows...

22 May, 2012 by Jack Schofield

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