My Year in Software
Now that I have a blog I can do what every blogger loves best: make lists.
Herewith a list of the software that made an impression on me in 2009.
Archived entries for Web Development
Print Designers and the Web
Related to my previous post about web designers and code is this post from factor[e]. It reminds me of the uncomfortable situation of dealing with designs from non-web designers.
I certainly sympathize with print designers. Their clients all want to get on the web and print designers must feel they either need to step up or lose the work. Unfortunately, the results are rarely pretty.
The Case For Code
I came across The Case Against Code on Stuart Thursby’s blog today. As I understand it, he writes that web designers shouldn’t feel constrained by the code required to implement their designs.
As he aptly writes
coding a website introduces inherent realities which a Photoshop document cannot account for. As a result, I’ve found myself (and I’m sure many of you can say the same) dialing down my designs somewhat to allow for a more realistic and attainable end result.
I partially agree with his point.
Better Web Typography with Spaces and Hyphens
One of the minor irritants of building websites is the lack of proper hyphenation and word-wrapping. Browsers don’t have the same level of text-flow smarts that InDesign or LaTeX have.
This has been discussed a few places, notably A List Apart’s article on dashes and typography, but they all end by saying that hyphenation and word spacing isn’t very well supported by browsers.
The Benefits of Giving Away Code
In 2007 I decided to start releasing a few pieces of code to the public.
At the time I was experimenting with Rails, so I released a few plugins, including one that became pretty popular. Since then, I’ve released a few more odds and ends, notably a few WordPress plugins and Premailer, a tool that helps build email newsletters.
My motivation was pretty clear in the beginning–the web had been good to me, and I wanted to do my part for other developers. But I’ve often wondered if there were other benefits to releasing code, and what they could be.
Here’s a brief of summary of what I’ve found.
Respecting the Grid in HTML (and Making Your Designer Happy)
I made Nik, the design half of Dialect, really happy a few weeks back. You see, he’s meticulous, as any good designer should be, and sticks strongly to a grid system when designing sites. I sometimes (inadvertently) miss a few things when coding up his files, and I think my interpretations of the grid have driven him to drink on occasion.
Collecting Image Dimensions and Aspect Ratios
The supporting files submitted by a client for an ongoing project included 8,000 images.
To figure out what sort of dimensions we were dealing with, and whether the images were primarily horizontal, vertical or square, I put together this little script.
This is a Windows batch file that outputs the dimensions and aspect ratio of all the images in a directory as a CSV file. It uses ImageMagick’s identify tool.
@ECHO OFF ECHO file, w, h, aspect > aspects.txt FOR /f %%a IN ('dir /b *.jpg') DO ( identify -format "%%f, %%w, %%h, %%[fx:w/h]" %%a >> aspects.txt & ECHO %%a )
Thoughts on Smush.it
I developed a plugin last year that integrated Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan’s Smush.it service with WordPress. In a nutshell, it reduced the file size of all images uploaded to WordPress without losing any quality.
Stoyan and Nicole are Yahoo! employees, and Smush.it was moved under the Yahoo! banner fairly soon after its launch. I was pleased to see that move. Long before Google-hosted jQuery and Closure, Yahoo! was making high-quality tools available to web developers (YUI library, YUI Compressor) for free. They integrated Smush.it with YSlow and put up a basic web interface.
Since then, Yahoo! has moved Smush.it fairly often, and I’ve been playing cat-and-mouse with them, changing the API endpoint URL in my plugin to try to match their changes. This has been in response to a bunch of support requests from my users in the forums, and many more by email.