web standards make me want to rock out
When writing documentation, you can write it in one of two languages: Designese or Engineerean.
The perfect example of Engineerean is your typical O’Reilly book. These usually begin with a panoramic view of the topic as a whole, and then outline the specifics of every tool available. Engineereans go from the inside out, taking in the building blocks of the language and then using those to move towards a finished product. While a native Designese speaker such as myself may not learn a whole lot from Engineerean language books initially, they’re still invaluable desk-side references, as their structure makes it very easy to look up a specific property or method.
However, when you write documentation in Designese, then you’re speaking my language. The Designese approach is a very practical one: we as a people are visual learners, and we crave lots of examples. The Designese work from the outside in, seeing the finished product first and then analyzing how it works and going inwards from there. Dan Cederholm’s books are a great example: he begins with a functioning demonstration site and then dives in and explains the various parts that make it work.
So how can we bridge the culture gap and appease the citizens of both nations? The obvious answer is to start with a bunch of visual examples, and then have a full alphabetical glossary. But there are more subtle touches, for example, the excellent Visual jQuery, which is ostensibly Engineerean but is full of useful before-and-after code examples.
If you want people to use your library/framework/whatever, spend as much time as possible to write good documentation, and try to make it as accessible as possible. I see documentation as being much like product marketing, and arguably as important as the product itself.
TuneCore enables anyone to sell their music through major MP3 stores for super cheap, and to keep all the rights to it. ¡Viva la revolución!
New design freshness for the portfolio: the Arena PLM Release Notification page.
Clustarack’s intro is chock-full of OMG. That trick with the measuring tape blew my mind. (via Textism)
The Mysterious “Save For Web” Color Shift by Doug Avery has some great tips for preventing annoying color shifts when saving for the web in Photoshop.
This isn’t a simple set-and-forget process and it’ll require some experimentation, but it’s worth the effort. My images fared a little better with the article’s advice, but after trying the “just use sRGB all the time” method recommended by MacMojo in the comments, colors seem to save perfectly now.
While vacationing in Japan I stumbled upon my new favorite t-shirt store, Graniph.
Image from Flickr user suviko, under Creative Commons license.
Tons of great stuff there, and my fellow design geeks will love it as there’s lots of Helvetica and even a couple collaborations with Josef Müller-Brockmann.
It can get a bit expensive on the website though as they don’t seem to give volume discounts like they do at the retail store (there it was 1 shirt = $28, 2 shirts = $22 each and so on), and also the images there don’t really do justice to the great build quality. So I would recommend going to Japan. There’s lots of other cool stuff there too.
Safari 3.1 finally includes the excellent Web Inspector (note the date on that article) from the Webkit nightlies.
Took me a minute to find as it has to be activated in Advanced Preferences, but it also comes with an added surprise: a whole “Develop” menu complete with some other features from the Web Developer toolbar. With that, I think I have a new default browser.
How many O’s does it take to get to the end of the internet?
The premise of this experiment is simple: incrementally add O’s to Google’s address (http://gooogle.com, http://goooogle.com, etc.) until encountering ten unowned domains in a row, thus exposing the lengths spammers are willing to go to cheat the system, and consequentially proving what an unbelievable nerd I am.
Take a guess, multiply by three and you’re probably still below the final answer: 59 (highlight text to reveal) I thought the prevalence of link farming was bad, but I really had no idea.