redesigning lclark.edu

November 2008

Looking at Mac text editors (moving on from Emacs)

If this doesn’t qualify as “technical arcana”, what does?

The big thing that’s freed me up from using emacs is that I do all my development now on an Ubuntu VM running in VM Ware Fusion on my Mac Pro.  I installed the netatalk Ubuntu package which provides AFP file sharing, and now I can use a native Mac app to edit files.  So I want to see why people talk so much about TextMate.  I’ve been using it for a day, and already am really enjoying it.  It supports most emacs keystrokes, but it’s much easier to move around in a large project.

David, on the otherhand, tells me about Coda.

I’m doing a little looking around for comparisons — here are a couple recent on-point posts:

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One person has made the whale happy; will you?(Go ahead, make a comment…)

Can an image-upload page be a work of art?

I think so, the more I think about Etsy’s.  I was making an upload page for a summer project of mine (Green Fabric), and the more I thought about how to design the page, the more complicated I found it:  How should everything be explained?  The image sizes, types, how thumbnails are cropped, etc., etc.  But look at Etsy’s page:

I love the simplicity and clarity of the process that’s laid out.  And the text at the very bottom — unbelievable!  No big long header ala “How to get best results when uploading images:” But simply,”Tips:“  Beautiful!  Perfect!  People know they’re there to upload images … why needlessly repeat those words?  And the sentence, “We’ll resize everything for you.“  Sublime.  Communicates several positive things simultaneously. And it saves paragraphs.

With copy that’s this succinct and on-point, it will actually stand a chance of being read.

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One person has made the whale happy; will you?(Go ahead, make a comment…)

Wondering about “CSS Frameworks”.

I’ve known about projects like the YUI for a while, but this post at Smashing Magazine has made me consider trying one or two out.  Mostly for the cross-platform advantages: On a couple projects, I still find myself running into problems with Windows/IE browsers.

“Let’s take a look at the idea behind CSS Frameworks, their advantages and disadvantages, most popular CSS frameworks and dozens of default-stylesheets you can use designing a new web-site from scratch.“

That article has a nice summary of the disadvantages as well as advantages, but this post, Please do not use CSS frameworks, goes further:

 ”At their surface, frameworks seem like a great thing; unfortunately, that’s not the case.“

The biggest drawback I see is the reduction in semantic markup.  YUI-based HTML pages look like a total mess to the uninitiated.  Any insight?  Any strong feelings one way or another?

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4 people have already made the whale happy; but who couldn’t be happier?(Go ahead, make a comment…)