221 karma · joined December 7, 2010
What is the use case for generating 2000 unstyled divs with one line of text? Try making that into a nice slick CSS list, maybe throw an image in each list item, with some title copy and supporting text. Perhaps you throw a bit of text shadow on it to create a nice beveled effect. Oh yeah, that 2000 divs per 200 milliseconds probably just turned into 10. Maybe even less, maybe 1 or 2 on a mobile browser.
Not some silly NodeJS/MongoDB API.
But I am perhaps a bit biased, I already think Meteor is a joke of a product.
This site barely works... Simply hangs with spinning jewish logos...
I think I have a way to explain why pixel perfection is a very good optimization that caters to more of a a developer mindset like yourself; it comes down to image compression, and specifically PNG compression.
When it comes to UI elements, the fewer colors you use, the better. This means avoiding things like gradients, or unnecessary colors can have a major impact on file size. It's also the 'art of design' to manage to create a beautiful design without a lot of crappy and needless 'veneer'.
I don't know the specifics of the PNG algorithm, but it can do an amazing job at compressing an image if it's made up of few and often repeating colors (typically it's terrible at photographs, however).
When you apply a scaling algorithm (as exemplified by the post) other than nearest neighbor, it tends to create a lot of intermediary colors that end up hurting the size of the image.
Looking closely at the borders of those buttons, that blur is going to end up adding to the file size because it adds colors that didn't exist before. If you properly 'scale' (which sometimes requires a redraw at a smaller size to get it right), it can have a huge impact (sometimes as much as 2x or 3x).
Oftentimes you can get away with it from a 1/2x scale fairly easily, but you have to remember there are many android devices at a 1.5x scale, and that can sometimes require completely new rounded corners that take advantage of that pixel density.
This is of course anecdotal, but it's not as simple as 'looks' even though I could immediately see the differences between the properly and unproperly scaled images.
http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/12/mumford-sons-lending-...
TL;DR: The term lending has been on most records in the last 20 years and actually refers to public rentals, or something to that effect, and has nothing to do with letting your friend borrow your CDs.
The App Store and iTunes Store are pretty damned successful services, whether you like them or not.
iCloud is not a joke, it does it's job well for the 99%. I turn on my new phone, enter my apple id, and I have all my settings, apps, etc synced and ready to go.
Here's why.
First thing I did, started dragging around when I was presented with some grey/brown screen (an intermediary between the load image and the web app actually being loaded?) so I got a nice little rubber bandy action on a grey screen. Web app.
Since there is no normal iOS UI pieces, I find myself being more critical of it because it's unfamiliar.
I tap the input for the dollar amount, I am presented with the default keyboard. Very crappy for entering dollar amounts. Web app.
Oh yeah, also the entire view slides up on focus. Web app.
When changing the number of guests, I get a weird white flash before everything animates in. Typical sign of a... Web app (a symptom of poor usage of translate3d, generally).
And then of course, there's the final piece, this app is a tech demo, not a serious application. It makes no calls to the server, has no serious scroll views, etc.
There are decent examples out there of what can be a good web app, this is not one of them.
Why is this on the front page?
People should think about what they say.
Gotta love and hate Hacker News sometimes. Idiots.
Edit: Bury me all you want, but by booting this post off the front page you've essentially agreed with me ;)
EasyMotion is not for searching, it's for moving the cursor deliberately to a place onscreen where you need to make an edit.
So now when I create something that requires a browser that actually has good hardware acceleration, it will be a dastardly turd of a performer in Opera.
Vim does EXACTLY that. It doesn't add silly buttons that require you to remove your hands from the keyboard to the mouse to interact with. It doesn't add silly gradients that get in the way of showing you text. Aesthetically it's incredibly simple, and interactively it's incredibly complex, but IN A GOOD WAY. Not everything, especially tools, should be easy to use and learn. A well designed application knows its target and exploits it. Vim does exactly that. It doesn't mean it's a catch all tool for everyone, generally those kinds of tools end up half assed.
And for the record, I am actually a designer, I used to use TextMate, I now mostly use Vim. The UIs are similar in their sparseness. The 2 small beefs I have with Vim is the title bar text being overly verbose and and the rounded corners added by Lion on the bottom are rendered a bit glitchy.
TextMate on the other hand, while a decent text editor, has perhaps the most hideous project drawer around. Wait, actually, TextMate was never 'designed' as you describe it either. It just uses built using Mac OS libraries. I would think that if you were going to harp on design so much you would at least bring up the more 'designed' text editors, like Coda and Espresso, not TextMate.
Notice how I said it 'can be'. Out of the box, Vim is not very attractive, but with a bit of work it actually looks rather nice (yes, I did modify the application icon, but that's not really what I want to get at here).
Some of this beauty is subjective due to the syntax highlighting used, configuration of invisibles, etc, but that's configurable and therefore can be customized to your liking.
There are clean and elegant fixed with fonts, which again, you can choose whichever you prefer.
What I meant by simple was the complexity (or lack thereof) of the UI. It only shows you some basic information that is readily important, everything else is hidden away in various keyboard shortcuts. This makes it more complex to use, but it also means the beauty of your work, the code, is at the forefront with little distractions. Hell, I even turn off scrollbars.
At the risk of starting a discussion of opinions over my choice of syntax highlighting, here's a screenshot of my vim setup:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/18782/macvim.png
I don't really understand how you can call this ugly, unless you're referring to my taste in syntax highlighting.
I like to think learning Vim akin to learning a musical instrument. It's not easy, the learning curve is very steep and it forces you to think about writing code in a completely different way. But once you get the hang of it, the power available to you is absolutely incredible and you'll code with efficiency never thought possible.
My 2 cents.
2010 San Francisco Giants.
If interested, you should add these easing formulas:
Unfortunately this guy's script takes it a little too far for browsers that DO support bfcache and unfortunately breaks functionality a bit, or at least makes it confusing, despite it being intended functionality or not.
Ultimately I think it forces people to think about JS differently than what they might be typically used too.