WebKit: Improved Support for High-Resolution Displays With the ‘srcset’ Image Attribute →

WebKit now supports the srcset attribute on image (img) elements (official specification from the W3C). This allows you, the developer, to specify higher-quality images for your users who have high-resolution displays, without penalizing the users who don’t. Importantly, it also provides a graceful fallback for browsers that don’t yet support the feature.

Too bad Google went and forked WebKit, otherwise Chrome would probably have support for this too.

(via Mr. Gruber)

Constraints →

I only know of one company that gives me options for the choices I want to make, and eliminates the rest. As a creative person who values my time, money and sanity, it doesn't make sense for me to buy from anyone else.

Mr. Gemmell nails exactly how I feel about technology in this fantastic article of his. Go read it.

Waiting to bash Apple →

It’s like the mainstream media are [sic] waiting with bated breath for the slightest mishap so they can bash Apple. A lot of times, they are just plain wrong.

I couldn't agree more. I keep waiting for the media to figure out that they're not being even-handed, but they never change. I've learned that the media tells they story they want, or need to tell in order to make money. Garbage headlines about Apple generate page-views, and viewership regardless of their truth.

"This is a world you'll never understand. And you always fear what you don't understand." - Carmine Falcone, Batman Begins

Understanding Google →

I've noticed many writers I follow have been linking to Mr. Thompson's writing on his Stratechery website a lot recently. I subscribed to his site, and I'm very impressed. He seems to know a lot about tech company business models (particularly Apple, Google, and Microsoft).

His latest piece about how to understand Google is spot on:

Google is much more successful, relatively speaking, selling Nexus tablets than they are Nexus phones; they sell 10% of all Android tablets, but a tiny fraction of Android smartphones. I don’t think this is a surprise; the go-to-market in smartphones is much more complex due to the involvement of carriers. Google isn’t great at dealing with such complexities, and given the fact they’re a horizontal player, aren’t that motivated to get better. Tablet sales, however, are much more transactional.

Also, this footnote is accurate, and rather humorous.

To be clear, the decision has already been made; any pundit that suggests this year’s iPad mini will be in any way influenced by the Nexus 7 is an idiot .

As Good a Time as Any

Mr. Blanc (in a fantastic interview with Mr. Wolsey):

If I want my kids to feel empowered to take risks and pursue their dreams, then I figured I'd better be willing to do the same. So that's a big factor for what prompted me to.

Mr. Blanc has mentioned this before on his excellent Shawn Today podcast. This is the thinking that finally convinced me to take the risk (however small it was) in starting my own website. Even though I don't have kids, I still want to get in the habit of taking good, calculated risks. It's the only way to succeed in life, and it's a skill I need to develop. Now was as good a time as any to start.

Three Hops →

“Well we don’t spy, I mean we do, well it’s only on terrorists, well and those that come into contact with people we have a gut feeling are terrorists, oh and those that come into contact with those that come into contact with… ok it’s everyone.”

- Mr. Brooks on the NSA spying.*

*(which he is covering quite well I might add).

Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines Garbage?

Wikipedia (the infallible source of all knowledge that is always accurate and just) defines Betteridge's law of headlines in the following way:

Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states, "Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist, although the general concept is much older. The observation has also been called "Davis' law" or just the "journalistic principle."

At first glance it doesn't seem possible. It even took me a bit to understand how this could even be possible. After some thought I believe it is possible. It will be a lot clearer if I break it down (which I'll do Barney style if the need arises).

Firstly, I have zero problems with writers or journalists asking questions. It's what they're supposed to do. What I do have a problem with is when they sensationalize or manipulate news to increase page views on a particular article than what is warranted. For instance, if I were to write about brick cell phones, it makes no sense for me to write a headline like this: Will Resurgence of Brick Cell Phones Destroy iPhone Market Among Hipsters? That headline may increase page views, but it's an idiotic question, and the answer is clearly "no".

You may notice you almost never see a headline with a question if an article actually contains information that will actually rock people's worlds. For instance, If Android ended up destroying the iPhone, you wouldn't ever see a headline such as Can Android Sink the iPhone? because the answer must always be no. If the answer was ever yes, their headline would get far more page views if it read Android Sinks the iPhone.

Mr. Marks goes into more detail with The Verge's specific case, including the below tweet by the Editor-in-chief of The Verge himself:

Betteridge's law is garbage. Stop being sheep by citing it. Joshua Topolsky (@joshuatopolsky) July 16, 2013

Turns out he had a conversation with Betteridge on Twitter about this very topic. Topolsky mostly just made personal attacks, and asserted the law is false without backing that up with facts. He decided a better approach would be to call people "sheep".

Regardless of whether Betteridge's law "exists" or not, I still think less headlines should contain stupid questions. They're like lazy plot devices in movies. If you took the time to think about it, they could have added to the story. Instead, they make the end product worse.

Getting Your Site on App.net

Many folks in the nerd community are using services such as Twitter and App.net to replace RSS. It's increasingly important for geeky sites to have presence in social. I'm no SEO guru, but it seems logical to make sure your website has a presence wherever your audience is likely to go looking for it. Since my site is primarily focused on geeky things, being in front of the very geeky audience of App.net is good idea for me.

For the uninitiated, App.net is a freemium Twitter alternative for geeks. Instead of ads, it allows users to pay for increased file storage and the ability to follow more than 40 people (the primary limitations of a free account). It has the potential to be far more than that, but that's the best way I can describe it. If your audience is full of geeks or if you just enjoy conversing with them, it's a great place to be.

You can sign up for a paid account, or use this invite to sign up for a free account. Until recently only paid members were allowed to send out free invites. Now free accounts can invite people as well. This was the first improvement that made it easier to get my site on App.net.

If you haven't already, I would recommend setting up a personal account as well. It gives you a chance to promote your work, and join interesting conversions as well. If may help get people interested in what you have to say on your site if your personal account is interesting as well. All that is required is that you have different emails for each account (if you're a nerd this shouldn't be a problem). If you decide to create a personal account, you will also be able to invite a different email address to App.net to create an account for your website.

App.net settings screen.

App.net settings screen.

One other thing I recently discovered. In your settings under 'Account Type', you have the ability to set you account type. By default it's set to human. I went ahead and changed my site's account to be 'Feed'. I couldn't tell if this changed anything, but it might be useful for discovery, or something along those lines.

Next you need to get the link for the RSS feed to your site. This will differ depending on your CMS. I've been able to find tutorials for Squarespace, Wordpress, Blogger, and Tumblr (just search RSS on this help page). A quick web search should help should reveal how to find the RSS feed for your CMS of choice.

If you have a square logo, or favicon I recommending setting it as your profile image. You can take a look at mine to get some inspiration. At this point you probably have an account up, and running for your site. You could manually post links from that account every time you have a new blog post, but if you're anything like me, you're likely to forget, or not post because it takes too long (first world problem, I know).

PourOver's login screen.

PourOver's login screen.

Luckily you don't have to go though all of that pain, and suffering. PourOver is a new product that automatically checks your site for new blog posts, and automatically posts the titles as link to said posts. It's incredibly simple to setup. Just hit the 'Authorize with App.net' button, sign in with your website's account, and paste the url to your site's RSS feed which we found earlier.

PourOver's simple feed configuration screen.

PourOver's simple feed configuration screen.

The interface lets you choose how often to post items if you post a lot, and even gives you a preview of what your feed will look like. It's incredibly slick, and is just seamless.

With just a bit of work, you can get your site automatically posting to App.net. This isn't assured to increase the number of people reading your site. It will be nice to have for those readers turning to App.net as a source for news, and reading material.

The Email Charter →

Some really good rules here. I particularly like this one which — if put into widespread practice — would eliminate a big pet peeve of mine:

If your email message can be expressed in half a dozen words, just put it in the subject line, followed by EOM (= End of Message). This saves the recipient having to actually open the message.

(via Mr. Brooks)

Forget icons and typefaces, iOS 7 is the birth of dynamic interface →

Here's the gist, though: Apple has built a complete, robust physics and particle engine for iOS 7. Elements don't just go from point A to point B, they move through a "real" world. They react to the accelerometer and gyroscope, they collide and bounce off each other and with the edges of the display, and they can change color according to the environment around them.

Many are considering iOS 7 just a re-skinning of Apple's mobile OS. I knew there had to be something else to this. Apple doesn't just do redesigns. They usually include a healthy amount of rethinking with their redesigns.

As a side note: Mr. Ritchie has been killing it for a while now over there on iMore. He's one of the few that really gets Apple. Which is saying a lot since that is not an easy thing to do. I wouldn't even put myself in the category.

‘U.S. Army Restricts Access to ‘The Guardian’ Website’ →

That content which is being blocked is anything that is classified — but once something is published publicly how can it still be classified?

I agree completely with Mr. Brooks. I'm just guessing the reasoning behind this has to do with the Army's definition of classified. To the Army, just because a bunch of people know something doesn't mean it isn't classified. I'm guessing that's the way it is with a lot of stuff there, but I digress.

That said, this is just plain silly. Restricting access to what are essentially public documents at this point isn't realistic. I think it also fails to recognize that (right or wrong) the public knows about this stuff. The genie is out of the bottle on this one.