Journal
Music For Programming
Feel like I’m probably really late to discover this website, but here’s “Music for Programming” from Datassette. Hopefully this’ll be of use to fellow programmers who like music, although I daresay you can probably enjoy it if you’re a normal person too.
Through years of trial and error - skipping around internet radio stations, playing our entire music collections on shuffle, or just hammering single albums on repeat, we have found that the most effective music to aid prolonged periods of intense concentration tends to have a mixture of the following qualities: Drones, Noise, Fuzz, Field recordings, Vagueness (Hypnagogia), Textures without rhythm…
Complete Guide to Source Sans Pro (on Beautiful Web Type)
At the time of writing, my personal website uses the typeface Source Sans Pro and has done for around two years. I already employ a number of its cool features however this lovely demo page provides further inspiration.
Source Sans Pro is a versatile typeface designed particularly for user interfaces. Its letterforms are slightly condensed allowing them to fit into tight spaces within a UI, and remain well-defined even at small sizes.
Use Mac Zoom to show the text a screen reader gets
I picked up a good accessibility testing tip from my work colleague Max today.
On a Mac, if you open System > Accessibility > Zoom, you can enable “hover text”. This allows you to hold down command (cmd) and then whatever is under the mouse will be shown. This shows the same text that a screen reader sees so it’s good for checking if bits of the page respond to a screen reader. It doesn’t show any sort of ordering, unfortunately.
Accessible interactions (on Adactio)
Jeremy Keith takes us through his thought process regarding the choice of link or button when planning accessible interactive disclosure elements.
Meta Tags - Preview, Edit and Generate
A handy tool which lets you type in a URL then inspects that page’s meta tags and shows you how it will be presented on popular websites.
Comparing Browsers for Responsive Design (on CSS-Tricks)
Chris Coyier checks out Sizzy, Polypane et al and decides which suits him best.
There are a number of these desktop apps where the goal is showing your site at different dimensions all at the same time. So you can, for example, be writing CSS and making sure it’s working across all the viewports in a single glance.
Progressively enhanced JavaScript In Real Life
Over the last couple of days I’ve witnessed a good example of progressive enhancement “In Real Life”. And I think it’s good to log and share these validations of web development best practices when they happen so that their benefits can be seen as real rather than theoretical.
Assistiv Labs
A tool for testing how accessible your experience is on various assistive technologies – perhaps “like BrowserStack but for screen readers”?
Assistiv Labs remotely connects you to real assistive technologies, like NVDA, VoiceOver, and TalkBack, using any modern web browser.
VisualSitemaps: Autogenerate Beautiful Sitemaps and Screenshots
A great tool for automatically generating a visual sitemap (visual because it attaches a screenshot to each node) for any given website.
Simply enter a URL and get a thumbnail-based visual architecture of the entire site.
07/01/21 DJ Mix – Manifold
First in a series of mainly short, off the cuff mixes where I just hit record and see where it goes. This one’s on the Electro tip, having kicked it off with Versalife’s Manifold from last year.