John Cox

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Interesting

adactio.com

Adactio: Journal—Sea change

Responsive design is the natural next step in web expectations, much as slippy maps and microformats once were: a fixed-width, desktop-only site now feels wrong because it carries a print-style, fixed-canvas mentality. Building separate "mobile" silos for each device won't scale and shuts out part of the audience, so the fix is to stop optimising for one environment and make sites fluid, applying mobile best practices to everything. The piece compares this to the earlier shift from table layouts to CSS, predicts that personal projects (like those on the Media Queries showcase) will lead the way until a big brand relaunch opens the floodgates, and ends with a pitch for Clearleft's services.

Permalink designmobiledevelopment

www.calculatedriskblog.com

Calculated Risk: Here comes $4 Gasoline

Calculated Risk's March 2011 post relays a North County Times report that gas prices in Southern California are about to cross $4 a gallon. San Diego County averaged $3.977 and Riverside–San Bernardino $3.955 on Monday, already above the same point in 2008, the year prices peaked at $4.63 in June. It notes that California runs higher than the rest of the country, though prices are rising nationwide and are still under $4 in most places, and it points to Jim Hamilton's recent post linking gasoline prices to consumer sentiment, ahead of Friday's Michigan sentiment release.

Permalink newseconomics2010s

scraperwiki.com

ScraperWiki

ScraperWiki announces a double rebrand: the original product becomes QuickCode, and the company becomes The Sensible Code Company. The product name changed because it is no longer a wiki or only a scraping tool; it is now a Python and R data analysis environment aimed at economists, statisticians and data managers who are new to coding. The company describes its business as building products that turn messy information into usable data, and it points to a separate product for extracting tables from PDFs.

Permalink programmingsoftwaretoolsdata

www.jstat.org

jStat : a JavaScript statistical library

大阪を拠点とする金融・事業支援会社のコーポレートページ。「日本経済の息を、吹き返す」を使命に掲げ、失われた30年、高齢化、後継者不在、過疎化、空き家といった社会課題を背景に、産業界から日本を再起させると主張している。業務は四つで、補助金を活用した資金調達設計や過去契約のリーガルチェックを行う総合資金調達支援、最短当日で現金化できる売掛債権のファクタリング、後継者不在や債務超過に対応するM&A・事業承継、自宅に住み続けながら不動産を資金化するリースバック。オンライン対応も行い、問い合わせ窓口があるが、ニュースや参考情報の中身は空で、具体的な実績や料金は載っていない。

Permalink programmingsoftwaredatajquery

www.sitepoint.com

What’s The Best Date Format? » SitePoint

Argues that dates used programmatically (stored, compared, sorted) should all use one format: ISO 8601 (2004) in UTC with the "T" delimiter and "Z" designator, e.g. 2011-03-21T00:18:56Z. The author weighs it against RFC 2822, which they previously used because PHP generates it easily but which doesn't sort natively. They pick ISO for its fixed length, lack of whitespace, compatibility with JavaScript's `new Date` (the space-delimited variant breaks in Firefox), and use in JSON and W3C recommendations. Timestamps should be kept in UTC and converted to local time only when shown to the user. The practical sections cover generating the timestamp in PHP with `gmdate`, since no built-in token produces this exact variant, and in JavaScript with a custom function. They also show converting it on the client or server, and flag a MySQL quirk where the column type strips the "T" and "Z".

Permalink programmingdevelopmenttips

SitePoint

www.tiki-toki.com

Beautiful web-based timeline software

This is the marketing and signup page for Tiki-Toki, a browser-based timeline maker, whose main selling point is that timelines can be viewed in 3D alongside the usual 2D views. It lists features such as YouTube and Vimeo embedding, colour-coded categories, custom time periods with background images, shareable URLs, group editing and embedding on your own site. It suggests uses like family histories, classroom history projects, company anniversaries and courtroom presentations. The page also lays out the pricing tiers: a free account limited to one timeline, a $150-a-year education plan with 50 pupil accounts, Bronze at $9.50 a month for up to five timelines, and Silver at $25 a month for up to 25 timelines. Agencies making timelines for clients must contact the company separately.

Permalink designeducationtools

Academically Interesting

Nobody Understands Probability « Academically Interesting

A primer on Bayesian reasoning that argues even mathematically fluent people misuse probability, built around the point that you must model how your information reached you. The "man with two children, at least one a boy" puzzle is the main case: being told something is not the same as conditioning on it being true, so the familiar 1/3 answer depends on an unexamined assumption about how likely he was to say it. It then shows model-building through coin fairness (including a "weird" switching coin) and EM clustering, argues that probabilities describe a model rather than the world, and closes by recasting the classical significance test in Bayesian terms, noting that Bayesian inference always gives an answer even when the data are thin.

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nicolasgallagher.com

GraphicRiver

Ecommerce-Platforms.com

10 Outstanding Data-Viz Blogs that You Probably Don’t Know – But Should! | Inspired Magazine

This is a roundup page of excerpts from a web-design and ecommerce blog, not a single article. The teasers cover free Shopify themes for 2024, tested WooCommerce themes (screened out for slow load times and limited design settings), and 25+ ecommerce site designs for inspiration. Others cover ten essential design elements for a store, mobile-first design principles (with one author noting 70%+ of client traffic comes from mobile), and a redesign guide for 2023. The rest are more peripheral: selling logo designs, geometry in design, designing for multinational clients, and 14 dropshipping suppliers. If you saved it for a specific piece, such as the Shopify or WooCommerce theme comparisons, you'll need to open that one directly, since only the openings are shown here.

Permalink designbusinessdata

blog.lostdecadegames.com

How to embed HTML5 into a native Mac OSX app - Lost Decade Games Blog

A step-by-step tutorial from the makers of Onslaught! Arena on how they put their HTML5 game into the Mac App Store using the same source code that ran on the Chrome Webstore. It walks through creating a Cocoa app in Xcode, adding WebKit.framework, dragging the HTML folder into Resources as a folder reference, and writing a small app delegate that loads index.html into a WebView. It then covers wiring the WebView outlet in Interface Builder, with a sample project (using their older game Spacius!) on GitHub and a follow-up promised on icons, localStorage and a JavaScript-to-Objective-C bridge.

Permalink programmingdevelopmentappletutorial