kellishaver

There are a lot of cases where responsive design just isn't a good fit, and something with complex user interactions (like a lot of web apps) is often one of them. Responsive design is great for things like content sites, galleries, informational sites... most forms of content publishing. Anything that requires the user to actually create and/or manage large amounts of data or has a lot of interactive media, however, would probably benefit more from a dedicated mobile site and/or app.

So many people talk about responsive design taking longer and being not worth the effort.... That's true if you start with the desktop and try and work your way backwards to the small screen, which is how a lot of designers look at it, I think.

If you take a progressive enhancement approach and work your way up from low-end mobile to full-featured desktop, the process is 100x easier and the end result is, in my experience, an overall cleaner and more stable code base that makes for better performance across all devices/platforms.

I had a similar experience a few months ago, myself, with a huge, very poorly written PHP app. I lasted three weeks; three weeks in which I didn't sleep and felt constantly agitated while I spent nearly every waking moment at the computer trying to be productive amidst an ocean of stress. My whole family suffered from this project, because I became very difficult to live with.

I was brought up with somewhat of a southern baptist upbringing. My mother was a baptist and active in the church, as was I as a child, though she was not really very socially conservative. My father believes (when last I checked), but is not so much a supporter of organized religion. My husband falls into this same category.

I, on the other hand, am an atheist. My personal philosophies tend more toward secular humanism. I'm all for taking care of one another, just because it's the right thing to do. I think we have an obligation to one another to do so.

There are some Buddhist teachings that resonate well with me, but that's because they align with my sense of morals and ethics, not any sort of spiritual motivation.

This interocular lens implant is really doing the trick, but after 7 surgeries, my eye's feeling hacked to bits.

Seriously, though... You're not going to be able to correct for most refractive errors. There are exercises you can do to strengthen eye muscles, but the amount of benefit you will receive from this is limited. There's only so much range of motion there to work with and that range decreases with age and the natural hardening of the lens of the eye.

That said, some people who do a lot of close work (such as working at a computer all day) can benefit, because their eyes get so used to seeing at one focal range that it becomes difficult to quickly focus at other distances, just because the muscles aren't used to doing it.

If you're really serious about it, see an ophthalmologist. There are a number of different types of vision therapies, from exercises to refractive lenses to laser treatments. Tell them your daily routine and your goals and they'll be able to help you find a combination that works best for you.

My reading device of choice these days is a Nexus 7 - It's significantly thinner and a touch lighter than the Kindle Fire and is useful for other things when I need it to be, with better hardware overall. Actually it's become my go-to tablet for pretty much everything that isn't "testing stuff on the iPad."

I agree about distractions, but if I'm reading, I just put it in silent mode and read. You don't have to use the social apps and check email constantly just because you can.

I know some people prefer the eInk display for reading, but I do most of my reading indoors and like (and at one point needed) the added contrast of the backlit display.

It never would have occurred to me that there would ever be any kind of link between vision and reading ability. I say this as someone who is legally blind.

The physical requirements of reading for me, particularly as a young child, have at times been cumbersome - large print books, magnifiers, etc. When I try and read without those, my reading speed would slow to a crawl, but as long as I can see what I'm reading, I can read it. I never struggled with reading as a child. I've always been a very avid reader.

Of course, being unable to see what I was reading at all (where "see" is a relative term and could just as easily mean braille) I would never have learned to read, but that's more of an issue of lack of exposure to reading, not specifically a link between reading capability and visual acuity.

One thing that did come about as a result of my low vision with regards to reading, which (I think) helped me a great deal is that my dad read to me a lot. He recognized that reading for me was physically awkward to do, and so he read to me all the time, probably well past the age that a lot of kids are read to. I remember listening to him read books when I was 12yrs old.

Since he was the one doing the reading, he would read books with more sophisticated language than I might have been naturally exposed to in books at that age; books like "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea", "Robinson Crusoe," etc. So I ended up getting exposed to a lot of language and a lot of literature. This further motivated me to keep reading more on my own and gave me the vocabulary to do so.

Oh, I agree with you. You don't have to be an ass, just because you're anonymous. I didn't troll, either, but I did find that I felt more free to comment on things I otherwise wouldn't for a variety of reasons.

That's certainly both good and bad.

The negatives, in my case, were that I would end up getting into discussions over trivial topics, or would end up reading tons of comments, some good, some bad, and comment on them just because I could.... For example, if I disagreed with you, I would tell you, event hough most of the time it was over things that just weren't worth the time and effort of getting into a debate with a random stranger over.

On the other hand, posting anonymously also gave me freedom to talk at length about things that matter to me but maybe aren't the best things to go talking about using my real name when everything is indexed in a search engine (politics, religion, etc.). I'll certainly stand up for what I believe in, but in cases like a potential client who may be looking me up on Google, my religious views, for instance, shouldn't be the first thing they find. It's just irrelevant in a work relationship 99% of the time.

So making the switch to my real name, I did lose some of that freedom, and one could argue that this is a bad thing, but for me, the constraints it places on the types of discussions I'm willing to have means better time management and (overall) more thoughtful responses when I do respond. I suppose if there was a real hot-button issue that I felt compelled to comment on, I would create a throw away account and do so, but sticking with my real identity forces me to think and evaluate those situations more closely before doing so.

I haven't really noticed a difference. I wasn't much trolling before. I would just end up participating in more discussions that were a) about things that didn't matter, or 2) about social topics that were more controversial than I would normally discuss when the conversation could so easily be tracked back to me.

A while back I deleted my Reddit account and just recently I've created a new one under my real name. I decided that if I was going to post, I would do so as myself and not hide behind an anonymous name. I hadn't really done any trolling in the past, but I'd participated in discussions I certainly wouldn't have participated in if they could have readily been tracked back to me.

But for better or worse, I decided to go the real name route this time.

The result is that I end up commenting on a lot less time-wasting content (and subsequently reading less because I know I won't participate in the discussion and reading often opinionated comments without participating will just frustrate me), and putting more thought into the responses I do post.

That's not to say that I think there's anything necessarily wrong with the anonymity. Sometimes it's nice to give voice to something you otherwise wouldn't because your opinion is controversial or unpopular (and doing business online, one has to protect one's online reputation and what ends up in the search engines). For me, though, it's translated to less time spent on useless AMA/AskReddit posts, more time spent on meaningful discussion, and less time on the site overall. All of these are good things.

I'm trying to decide, which has changed the world most.... the printing press, or computers... In the end, I think I may just pick flushing toilets.

Thank you :)

Just a Mead 5-subject spiral notebook. It's not super thin paper, but it's not really heavy, either. I've never had an issue of bleed through, but I don't write on the back side of the page, either.

A Pigma Micron might work well for you: http://www.sakuraofamerica.com/Pen-Archival

I haven't tried GIMP in ages, but have a look at Pixelmator. It's a great little app. http://www.pixelmator.com/ It has a lot of features for not a lot of money, and a very Photoshop-like interface.

Calling this thing a tablet is like calling a Dell XPS M2010 netbook.

I usually end up writing with a pen because I find the greater level of contrast easier to read; I have pretty bad eyesight. Lately I've been using fine-point Sharpie pens and they're great for readability.

I do a lot of pencil drawings, though (http://orng.us/ob8yao) and I do find something magical about the feel of pencil on paper, and even the smell of the graphite. I can lose myself for hours. But if I'm writing, I like a darker line, which means softer lead, which means more smudging.... bleh.

After switching to a Model M keyboard a few years ago (one that I found in a shed covered in 10yrs of dirt and grease that still worked like new once it was cleaned up), I switched to writing conference call notes on a Mead notebook instead of typing them, because the keyboard was so loud.

After a few weeks of this, my handwriting got back to a decent quality and efficiency and now I find that I take notes on paper for all sorts of things. It's great for working through problems.

I tried a whiteboard for a while and it just didn't do it for me. I think there's something about the tactile experience of holding a notebook in my hand and scrawling on it with a pen; the movement, the sound, the texture of pen on paper, not to mention being able to keep and flip through previous work and go back and make notes in the margins that makes it far better than trying to work out problems on a computer or a whiteboard.

Ah, last I looked at Zepto, it's support for non-webkit browsers was pretty lacking. It's good to see they're making strides on the cross-platform comparability front. The supported browsers list looks pretty good now.

This site could actually be made useful if the little area where you check which "features" you want to include that "generated" the download file actually caused cross-platform, native JavaScript examples of those bits of functionality to be included in a real downloadable file.

If you really think more people should be using plain vanilla JavaScript (and in a lot of places, I think this is actually true and even when a framework is needed, it's good to have the underlying skill) then the way to get them to do that is to educate them on it, not patronize.

jQuery is kind of a big download for mobile, so I often skip it for small tasks.

What gets me is when people include jQuery and then further bog things down by loading a lot of plug-ins to do things that could easily be accomplished by adding a few lines of code of their own. Even if you do need and include jQuery, it doesn't mean you have to use it for every piece of javascript in your app.

Many times, a plug-in will do a lot more than you need it to do. If your primary goal is to just get rid of the 300sm delay translating tap events to click events, you don't need a library for full gesture support. You need half a dozen lines to listen for touch events.

If you just need to add some client-side persistence for a few basic things in LocalStorage, you probably don't need a plug-in with a complex query syntax.

Cannibalize a library if you need to and pull out the bits you need. You don't have to include the whole kitchen sink.

I think what you're trying to say is not just a direct "stuff in vaccines triggers autism" but more to the point that if the lack of exposure to germs/diseases/pathogens can lead to an immune system response that can cause autism, then vaccines contribute to creating that "too clean" environment, by eliminating those diseases.

That's not how vaccines work, though. They create immunity through controlled exposure to the virus. If they were contributing to the "super clean" environment, then they would be preventing exposure.

I'm sure this was part of his reasoning. Now that you mention it, I'm not sure I would buy one from Amazon for this reason. I bought used textbooks from the university bookstore all the time when I was in school, because I could flip through them and find one that wasn't badly marked up, but you can't exactly do that with an online retailer.

My husband, who starts back to university tomorrow, just spent $230 on a new textbook, when I found a used copy on Amazon for $48, because he wanted a new book. I spent a while banging my head against the desk and sighing loudly over that one.

On the other hand, he's excited about finishing his degree, which he has put off for many years now, so if this is what does it for him, it's a small price to pay.... at least that's what I keep telling myself. I suspect that once the excitement of the first couple of semesters of "hey, I'm actually doing this" wears off, he'll be buying used books like the rest of us.

My dad and a friend used to transmit TI-BASIC programs to one another late at night over the 2-meter HAM band back in the mid 80s. They both had TI-99 computers with "tape drives" (really just a regular tape player set next to the computer) and microphones. One would key the mic on the HAM radio and hold it next to the tape player's speaker and the person on the other end would hold the radio speaker next to the TI-99's mic input. They shared code and collaborated on a few projects this way.

My most productive hours are between midnight and 6am, then I usually nap 'til 10am or so and then grab another 2hrs from 9-11pm. I've tried more normal schedules, but this is what works best for me and where I sort of naturally end up if I don't try and force the issue of sleeping at night.

> 1. Platform. Its not about 1 canonical interface or usage. Its real time social information network plumbing. Build your own idea on top of it. In the beginning it will be twitter clones, eventually it will be hooked into all sorts of information generators and consumers in different contexts.

This is what got me to back it (at the developer level). I'm just extremely curious and interested in seeing what I can do with the platform. It may start out as a Twitter clone, but I think there's a lot of potential there for the platform to evolve and grow into something more and I'm looking forward to see what I can do with it.

Good point. It could very well be as much or more matter of aerial perspective rather than atmospheric haze.

That's amazing.

The area toward the top center, where you can see the color striations in the hills is, I think, the rover's primary destination.

I played with it a bit in Photoshop to attempt to correct for the atmospheric haze and wound up with this: http://orng.us/faquvj which may be (probably is) highly inaccurate, but it does make it very evident that there are a variety of rock types and a good deal of exposed geological history there to be sampled.

I don't understand people who say they are able to better focus with a standing desk. I tried it for a while and I couldn't concentrate on anything for more than about 30 seconds. It completley killed my productivity.

Maybe I'm the oddball on this one, but I couldn't do it.

They lost me at "Jmagine" ....