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A Blog and Activity Feed Rolled Into One:
Evolving Conversations
A quick video tour of our Cold Brew process for making coffee. Enjoy!
Coffee Technician - Jason Hogue
Music - Sweet Love (sweetlove.bandcamp.com)
Editing - James Re
4 cups of water in the Toddy Cold Brew brewer.
3 cups of grinds sprinkled on top of that.
Do Not Stir.
5 more cups of water poured slowly into the grinds. Wet them thoroughly.
This recipe makes a brew that does not need to be thinned out with additional water. The original Toddy recipe produces a coffee concentrate which we used to drink straight, one which made us way too caffeinated and made us go through coffee beans like whoa. This mixture is the right amount of flavor and caffeination, using the least amount of grinds. Pour into a glass with some ice, and add simple syrup and/or cream to taste.
Its a cliche that a cobbler’s son has no shoes, but talk to most crafts folk and you’ll find that the work they do for their clients is oftentimes very different than what they do for themselves — because they always plan on going back and fixing it, or want to keep tinkering, or just because they don’t have time with all the paid work they need to get done. But we’re trying to buck that inevitability...
Every now and again, you run across a rendering issue or bug and think "There is no way I can fix that, I'll need to submit this as a bug to the browser people". Designers and developers hate those issues — they are almost like admitting defeat. But when there is nothing we can do, there is nothing we can do.
Yesterday I ran against an issue that I thought was a lost cause. We had a funny rendering issue on non-Retina iOS devices with a simple repeating background image on the body. The png in question was only 41kb, and was large enough at 256x256px, so it couldn't have been a memory issue. We were stumped.
A few Google searches later, trying different words and combinations of "iOS", "iPad", "rendering issue", "background image", and others, we found someone with a similar issue. Thank god for StackOverflow.com.
As it turned out, turning on hardware acceleration for webkit devices did the trick. The code we ended up implementing is as follows (in SASS format):
We use Modernizr for feature detection, which is where the .touch class will come from. We do not apply this fix to desktop browser without touch, as the rule will effect the way position: fixed elements are "stuck" to the top of the browser window. We don't want to "stick" anything to the top of the viewport for touch devices, anyway.
So there you go. Sometimes, when a bug seems like the fix is out of your control, you get lucky. Thanks to a strong developer community on sites like StackOverflow and CSS-Tricks, we can benefit from the frustration and Eureka moments of others.
Nice thoughts from @weightshift about the current state of design schools & the (lack of) skills in new grads: https://t.co/QcmFsFsR9O
What, you don't author your CSS in SCSS (SASS) yet? Read this and get started! A great primer for newbs. http://t.co/zEzqPIvkab
Slick and simple UI concept for processes that require user feedback ( loader ) http://t.co/BW0prv0dvQ via @bitchwhocodes
8% of the 900 million Android activated devices are in use today in the US.
Had a great conversation today... I love good conversations with people who may not speak your language, but are in the same country. The people I was conversing with had a particular set of problems, but none of them were that unique. They are the same problems that a lot of large companies face. And the conversation keep coming back to content. Content is king, but damn if great content is not a pain in the butt.
And that got me thinking... one of Project Evolution's businesses is creating web-based CMSs for companies. That's a good niche to be in, but what happens when a company has content assets far beyond what they need for the web? How do they manage content? How can they manage "chunks" of content — short form, long form, multiple languages — all in the same system? Can we craft a solution for that? Of course we can...
what we have today are publishing tools, we have content management systems that force us to think about content management + authoring and content publishing + display as the same thing.
And that's just it. Even we have to remember — the makers of Content Management Systems — that while some companies are only getting into the web CMS game now, others are far ahead of the curve and need more abstract systems that can manage chunks of content, and most importantly, help make the process of creating new content more fluid for the author.
Let's make tools that help authors author and publishers publish. It's a challenge that I would like to think more about, because the need is out there. The first wave was Content Management and Publishing, and the next wave needs to take it all even further.
It's been almost a year since "father" was added to my list of titles, and although it's not all that difficult to acquire said title, the transition into parenthood has been the biggest challenge I've ever known. The experience can only be understood by those who have staggered the path.
Design and function, peanut butter and jelly, or whiskey and sweet vermouth — things that go well together. Sometimes, even if you don’t like peanut butter.
As I talked about in my first blurg post, one of the things that made me so excited to make the leap to join the crew at Project Evolution was its marriage of design and development. Some call it Human Centric Design — others, design driven technology. Its this union of design and technology that makes it possible to conceive and create something so usable that you want to reach out and start pushing buttons as soon as you see it. PE’s technological chops make these clever and beautiful designs not just function in ways that you have come to expect, but can also function in ways that you’d never think were possible. Once you see them in action, you’ll not only wonder how you ever worked without them, but you’ll marvel that it seems like they were always there.
I am obsessed with semantic markup and object-oriented CSS. We don't always follow those guidelines to a "T", but our team always tries to get close. The perfect set of markup and CSS — and therefore the perfect project — doesn't exist, but we try to get as close to perfect as possible.
Lately, we've been making updates to our own website to try to bring it up to speed with some of the new projects and patterns that we have been pushing out the door with other clients. A colleague came across our <blockquote> style, and made some suggestions. That started a conversation about a simple question with an elusive answer, "What's the best way to markup a blockquote?" Even though I went down this rabbit hole a few months ago, this time, I had a willing participant in the conversation. Little did he know how a simple little bit of advice would start this exploration again.
A blog and an activity feed rolled into one. The “Blurg”™ is a collection of long-form articles, short-form thoughts and quotes, alongside images and tweets.