Posts by Psycho Flump

Re: or an un-improvable legacy interface designed a thousand years ago by a goblin

Because not all laptop screens are the same size and resolution. Because some users may have sight issues such that they zoom their screen.

Out of interest, what watch are you using? Asking because currently I'm running a Note 9 with a second SIM that I'd like to promote to my primary phone.

Currently my primary phone is an iPhone SE purely for the pocketability and Apple Watch. The Wear OS watches I've looked at either don't have Google Pay or look like a reject prop from a Borg cosplay at a Star Trek convention.

Re: Javascript is a plague

Visitors using screen readers will only have a problem with large header menus if the web developer forgot to include the skip navigation links at key points in the page.

Re: Only 7 external scripts?

The whole commercial font system is to blame for externally loading fonts (usually via a third party JavaScript file). Font licenses being what they are: pay £1000’s for the license but those help guide PDFs you want to create? That’s one extra license per file. Want to use the font on your website? Then you need to use Adobe’s TypeKit because we won’t let you serve the WOFFs from your own domain.

Re: A small number of our customers MAY be experiencing...

If you're seeing an unstable connection via Plusnet you may be suffering the same thing I've had. It seems IP addresses starting with 51. are seeing packet loss. Go to their addons in your account and add a static IP. They'll add it to your bill but I'm planning on arguing for a refund as they've set a precident in their forums by giving it to someone else for free for the same issue. My IP switched to an 81 and my problems (seem) to have gone away.

Re: A resourceful web developer

I'd much rather be serving our corporate font (Myriad*) from our own server but the licensing is so strict it's only available via Typekit. I'd love to get rid of our reliance on this Adobe fronted piece of shit but in spite of pointing out that Myriad is not worth the trouble of relying on someone else's uptime.

*Honestly, using Myriad is like changing something from ocean grey to military grey given the amount of sans-serif fonts that we could self host and mitigate the risk.

I'm a designer and front-end dev and whilst I have Adobe CC at work I haven't looked at any of those features as:

1. I'll bet it doesnt work for responsive code

2. Auto generated code tends to be crap

They can pry my personal copy of CS6 out of my cold dead hands. I'll never "upgrade" to their Cash Cow. I'd rather run a VM with an older OS to maintain compatibility with CS6.

It's disheartening to see the lack of forward planning of my fellow designers who are all too quick to tie themselves into paying Adobe every month for the rest of their working lives. Whilst they hold your files to ransom.

Re: I used to be a customer

I don't buy the idea that pro users = users who upgrade every version. I'm a pro user but I'd be happy designing things in CS3. The software is just a dumb tool, it's the person that operates it that makes the difference.

Adobe CC is a colossal waste of cash, how often does anyone really need ALL of their apps? As a web designer I couldn't care less about Flash, After Effects, Premier, etc but there's no option to just pay for the software you need (even if I was interested in tying myself to CC). Adobe have become so user hostile it would be almost laughable if I wasn't so reliant on Photoshop / Illustrator. Unfortunately there's nothing really in the same league at present, Sketch is good but not cross-platform.

Still, I'm actively looking for alternatives. Two years ago that wasn't ever a thought I'd entertained. I long for the day that someone does to Adobe what they did to Quark.

Re: How to fix a MacBook

Cobblers.

I have an MBA. I love it but I know it would be massive pain in the end if anything went wrong with it. Assuming I could wave it at a genius (and I use the term in its loosest possible meaning here) they are not simply gonna replace it as it's a BTO model. There was a brief moment in the early 2000's when buying Apple didn't mean locking yourself out of DIY repairs, that day is long gone now though.

I'm a "creative type" and it's definitely put me off. I bought CS6 Design Standard (full license, not an upgrade) last year. The only Adobe applications I use are Photoshop and Illustrator. I moved on from Dreamweaver over a decade ago and there's no way I'm going back.

When working on projects requiring interaction with other designers I'll use the Adobe stuff, if I am the entirety of the design team on a job though I've been using Sketch for interface design. I don't envisage being able to move completely away from Adobe in the short term but neither am I prepared to pay for Cash Cow for the long term (or in fact one single day).

Re: Jailbreaking

I jailbreak, have done since buying the first gen. iPhone. Since then I've bought a 3GS and a 4S (my current phone). I've got a lot of software on my phone that's useful to me. If I wasn't already invested in the platform I might consider switching to Android, but the upheaval of finding replacement apps is just too time consuming and annoying.

No, I don't see jailbreaking as all that different to rooting and installing CyanogenMod. Both have me crossing my fingers and praying to the gods of no-bricking. (And yes, before anyone assumes otherwise, I do have an Android device).

Re: CalDAV

Pretty sure there're moving it to some sort of whitelist system. Sorry, that's not good enough, either offer it or don't, because if it's down to some half-arsed who's a flavour of the month partner I'm not trusting that.

Re: Oh right, it's an RSS reader

I've installed Fever (feedafever.com). My server, my rules. Screw this free-because-I'm-the-product lark, I'm reclaiming my data (or at least everything generated from now on).

I look at the time spent jailbreaking as an investment, once payed I don't get annoyed EVERY. SINGLE. TIME a link opens in Safari rather than my prefered AtomicWeb browser. That I can then enable the Nitro JS engine so the aforementioned browser isn't being run deliberately piss-slow.

Don't be so quick to run an update every time Apple forgot to test something, half the time you might find it won't affect you anyway.

Re: @scrote

Just because two browsers use the same rendering engine doesn't mean they'll both render a page the same. I've seen Chrome and Safari render things differently.

Whatever you do don't read the 24th century Star Trek relaunch books. It's some of the most depressing, dark sci-fi I've ever read. It makes Iain M. Banks' Culture books read like comedy gold.

Re: Missing the point slightly

I've also got an 11 inch Air, one of the 2012 ones. I bought it to be the little, more mobile brother to the too heavy 15 inch 2010 Pro sat on my desk. I'm a web designer and front-end dev so I thought I could use the Air for the dev stuff on the move whilst keeping the Pro for the CS6 stuff. Six weeks into using this machine all I can say is I'm getting rid of the Pro, I was dubious of the claims on various mac forums claiming their Air "smoked my old Pro". Clearly a bit of emperors new clothes I thought. My Air has no problem running CS6, Parallels with Windows 7 and my IDE of choice (Espresso, the one app that keeps me using OSX) all at the same time.

I plug in three cables and I've got it hooked up to all my desk-bound peripherals, monitor and power. For what I do I just don't need anything more powerful, my Air is the best of both worlds for me; really portable, powerful enough to not need anything bigger, I couldn't have been more surprised.

@BoldMan

You should try iCab, it has a built-in ad blocker.

Malware?

I should have been clearer, it's not malware, just some basic perfectly valid JavaScript that IE6 can't handle, that's the point :)