mobile

App Store
Where has this been all my mobile life? It’s Greasemonkey + Stylish + AMP remover + more for mobile Safari. Recommended!
gq.com gq.com
image from gq.com
Speaking of digital habits, Cal Newport has a new book called Digital Minimalism. This GQ interview has some great gems on the rise of social media, like this: "It took this careful attention engineering, and cultural engineering, to try to make this seem innovative, and high-tech, and like you had to be doing this. If that falls apart, the whole thing goes." Ezra Klein also recently had him on his podcast: Cal Newport has an answer for digital burnout.

onfocus is AMPed

I have officially jumped on the Accelerated Mobile Pages bandwagon. Every post page here at onfocus now has an AMP version. (You can append /amp to any post URL to see it in action. This post, AMPed. I'll wait here.)

Pretty similar, eh? I thought it would be good to get a sense of how AMP pages are different from standard HTML. There are some proprietary tags and some required JavaScript dependencies. I guess if you're loading a dozen JS libraries and a million lines of CSS, going through the AMP conversion process could help get you thinking about minimalism. Not much to change here. I could probably combine a couple JavaScript files into one.

In 2003 I added WAP cards to this site. Those are long gone. Maybe AMP is the new future.

Update from the future: Hello from 2019. At some point I removed AMP from my site because I think it's a walled garden that doesn't necessarily improve performance—especially for a small site like this. AMP gives Google more control in a world where they have enough.
  • Great presentation about developing web apps for mobile browsers. Includes some nice solutions to common headaches.
  • Ajax spinning image with no image! (A bit heavier than an image, though.)
  • "...it would seem that many who claim to be pro-business are trying to 'save' us from exactly the inclusive, creative, tolerant values that have made America's most successful company possible." Anil connects the dots.
  • UGH. "AT&T's killing their $10/1,000 text plan. Now, you'll have to choose between $20 for unlimited, or forgo a plan and pay $0.20 per message. AT&T calls this 'streamlining.' We call it what it is: an outrageous, gigantic scam."
  • Mat Honan quoting Mike Monteiro: "We used to design things to take us to the moon, now we design things to keep us from getting out of bed." Like!
  • Nice toolkit of design elements for building websites.
  • Excerpts from the style sheet of the Kansas City Star, where Ernest Hemingway worked as a reporter in 1917.
  • Yes, this. There's no easy answer. "So the dis­cus­sion is re­ally about whether, on one hand, you build your mo­bile app with JavaScript and HTML and CSS, or on the other, you ship com­piled code that talks to a frame­work like Co­coa­Touch or An­droid or Win­Phone7."
  • Hey neat! James Taylor has some highly produced guitar lessons he's putting on YouTube. [via scottandrew]
  • "As we mature as developers, finding logic errors and incomplete solutions becomes our way of life. It defines us. But our engineering strength is also our social weakness." uhoh, I'm guilty of this sometimes. [via mathowie]
  • A nice modal window kit for Prototype.
  • "Amplify's goal is to simplify all forms of data handling by providing a unified API for various data sources." Looks like a write-once way to handle client side storage.
  • Filed for use: "...ultimate guide to 37 download resources for hundreds of [mobile] emulators and simulators."
« Older posts