…the small number of retailers (companies that sell fonts from multiple foundries) decreased by one when Monotype bought the last major reseller not in its portfolio: FontShop. Monotype now owns Fonts.com, MyFonts.com, Linotype.com, FontFont.com, and a newly launched FontShop.com.
Lot’s of great new typefaces from 2014 that you’ll most likely be buying from Monotype.
And then I distinctly remember pausing and thinking something didn’t feel right. Something was off, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. And then it hit me: I was actually understanding the code base for a project I had never looked at before.
One of the major benefits of using Ember. I think this is going to be a trend with Angular developers jumping ship to either Ember or React.
Nicholas C. Zakas:
Not good enough comes in many forms. The most obvious is in the front-end: every company I’ve been at that focused on hiring generalists has had a terrible time getting any sort of quality front-end built. Designers get frustrated because the engineers can’t figure out how to make what they designed, product managers are frustrated because the front-end is a key differentiator to end users.
This was published last year, but I’m just coming across it as I think it’s interesting and relevant. By definition generalists can all do front-end, but in my experience even if it ends up looking good, it’s a different story under the hood. Moreover most of generalist have a justified dislike for actual doing front-end development as it’s a deviation from a typical programming environment where code is written for one platform.
He goes on to argue that:
Eventually, every successful company will hire their first specialist – it’s a virtual certainty. The first step is to figure out how to hire that specialist. You need to accept that your current interview process probably doesn’t apply.
I think many companies actually understand this, but carry on with there standard process because it’s time consuming process to figure out what needs to change.
Not any product can solicit this kind of animosity. The fact that I loved it first is the real fuel here. It’s sort of like a bad breakup: If you really adored the person before the relationship’s end, the finale can be so much more bitter or vicious than if you were apathetic toward the person and things just fizzled. So when my Nest let me down, it didn’t just drop me; it kicked me to the curb.
Ouch.
A way to discover Broccoli plugins. Hopefully this will help Broccoli to gain traction in wider the JavaScript community and branch out from it’s roots with Emberjs.
A handy site for testing regular expressions in JavaScript and Python.
Really fun bicycle art from Geoff McFetridge.
Benedict Evans:
Just as Yahoo’s hierarchical directory didn’t really scale after 1996 or so, so too app stores have not scaled as a discovery platform. Further, though there are lots of ways that the execution of the app stores could be improved, this still ultimately boils down to saying ‘Yahoo’s home page should be better’ back in 1996. Indeed it should have been, but the answer was still PageRank. And we have no analogue of PageRank for mobile apps.
The Snap.svg JavaScript library makes working with your SVG assets as easy as jQuery makes working with the DOM.
Looks slightly more useful than flash.
Ryan Seddon introduces a technique for getting 60fps scrolling on a page littered with elements having a hover state applied to them.
The trick is disabling pointer events on the body tag during scroll, which turns out to be a simple enhancement with big performance gains. His demo goes from 30fps without disabling pointer events, to 60fps with them disabled.
We need to work as a community to develop a language of transformation so we can talk to one another. And we probably need to steal these words from places like animation, theater, puppetry, dance, and choreography.
Words matter. They are abstractions, too—an interface to thought and understanding by communication. The words we use mold our perception of our work and the world around us. They become a frame, just like the interfaces we design.
I can’t agree more on with Frank about this. Having to prototype something because we aren’t able to accurately describe the behavior isn’t a great place to find ourselves in.
Frank is also making another print run of his book, The Shape of Design. I suggest picking up a copy if you can, or it’s free to read online or download as an e-pub.
Definitely worth 140 seconds of your time.
The open web follows standards. Our tools should too.
I would love to see some standards develop out of this initiative. It’s unnecessarily painful to jump between developer tools, and there’s got to be a lot of duplicate work being done by browser vendors.
Mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 49% of advertising revenue for the third quarter of 2013.
Pretty sure this cements the “Facebook doesn’t get mobile” argument as pure nonsense now.