What is SASS & LESS?

Both SASS & LESS are CSS preprocessors, basically they’re created to help you code CSS quicker by allowing the use of basic programming principles. Both allow you to use variables, mixins, nested elements, functions and operators.

You basically put your CSS into a special file, and then when finished, your CSS is run through the preprocessor and it kicks out “normal” CSS. Huh.

I found LESS to be a lot easier to understand and install, although both of them worked pretty much the same way. You’re able to create variables within your CSS so you can reuse certain elements (for example, a hex code), and if it needs changing, you only have to do it in one place. Here’s where my inner-awesome-developer-sense kicks in. You can pretty much already do this with a basic class.

Another major feature in both SASS and LESS is the use of nesting, where you can “save” on repeating code by indenting elements instead of having to retype them, for example, if you indented p {} underneath an id of #header, then the CSS that’s printed out is actually #header p {}

While this seems pretty cool at first, I can easily see this as becoming cumbersome and crazy really quickly. When you’re not paying attention to what’s being outputted, your’re more likely to be lax in your coding.

Important Questions

I had several important questions before and after I read up on the technologies, and most of them really weren’t answered by any of the articles I read:

1. What happens if another developer needs to edit the CSS and doesn’t know or realize a preprocessor is being used? How do you sync the two?
2. When no longer writing CSS yourself, how do you control the structure and organization of the code? How do you ensure you’re optimizing it correctly?
3. What happens if JS is down?
4. Does it work with one line CSS?

All in all, I don’t think I’ll be using either SASS or LESS. Installation time, upkeep and the fact that it ruins the simplicity of CSS will keep me away. If you’re a developer who’s spent a lot of time optimizing your code and really learning the in’s of CSS (not just top level stuff), then you’ll find this pretty useless, as you already can quickly do the type of code it spits out.

I’m also worried on our recent reliance on Javascript and the trend of forcing languages and browsers to do something they’re not meant to do. It wasn’t even a year ago that everyone was worried about best practices and making sure we didn’t rely on Javascript for anything but the beauty layer. Now this is one more thing that can break.

Some of the features, like mixins and operators actually made the code a lot more convoluted an jumbled, and seemed to take a lot more code than if you were just to type it out correctly in the first place. I also don’t see the point of operators – CSS isn’t a programming language and you can’t dynamically update styles so why not just type in the correct number in the first place?

Final Thoughts

Perhaps I’m wrong and you disagree – maybe you think SASS or LESS is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It’s just not for me. I would love your thoughts on it though!

I stumbled across 12412.org when looking at Paul Davis’s work. Consisting of three developers including Paul, Anthony Killeen, and Stephen Fulljames, 12412 aims to log their activities throughout 2012 as they choose a new technology or technique every month to learn and play with.

I thought this was a fantastic idea. I’ve had an insanely busy 2011 and haven’t spent much time learning new things like I should. What better way than to make a goal to learn something new every month? I thought I’d take their idea and list out a few items of my own that I want to do some research on and learn.

January

January’s going to be a short and busy month for me, due to moving across the seas to London. So I thought I’d start the year off a bit easy by doing some research on SASS. I’m very skeptical on this technique, but promised to at least read about it.

February

Inspired by Jeff Croft’s tumblog, I want to make my own to house all of my social media updates. I plan to incorporate Twitter, Instagram, Ravelry, Pinterest, Goodreads, Dribbble, Foursuare and Codesnippit. Building this will force me to learn how to work with APIs, while extending my knowledge of PHP in tying them together.

March

I plan on finishing my Objective-C book that I’ve been working on for so long. After that, I need to make a decision whether to give iPhone development some serious commitment, or move on.

April

Build a premium WordPress theme with admin panels. I haven’t had a chance to build any custom admin panels before, so this will be another great learning experience.

May

Again I want to further my knowledge of PHP and create some kind of user submission gallery site. I’m thinking along the lines of responsive and CSS3 submissions.

2012

That’s all I’m planning for now. Who knows what the next few months will bring in our world. What do you think about 12412?

CSS for Print Designers was a quick read, at only 167 pages long in full color and large type. It sticks to the fairly basics, assuming you’ve absolutely never seen CSS and HTML before. I like the fact that it touches on the basics of HTML and semantics before jumping over to CSS. I think a lot of non-coders, especially print-turned-web designers, are lacking in proper HTML skills, and this gives you a good foundation to start on.

While the book certainly won’t make you an expert by far, it gets you started and is a good primer to learning how to read the code. I think it’s a great read before you pick up a more comprehensive coding book, as it will help to assage the anxiety one gets while staring at a bunch of gooble-de-gook (which I think aptly describes our code, don’t you?).

While the book does have many pluses, it also came up short for me in a lot of ways. The fact that it is so short and broad is also a negative. JD mentions a lot of ideas and pieces of code in the book, but then tells you to just “google it” instead of explaining. I think he should’ve either briefly explained the item or skipped mentioning it at all.

I also disagreed with some of the coding techniques he used, but that was more personal and since we all eventually develop our own way of coding, I was able to overlook those.

I recommend the book only if you’re an absolute beginner in terms of coding to the web. If you know basic HTML and CSS already, skip this one. You can get it on Amazon for $19.49 if interested.

The conference, put on by Aral Balkan, was fantastic. I finally got to meet Sarah Parmenter, Jeremy Keith, Geri Coady and Remy Sharp. I also made some new friends, Laura Kalbag and Scott Coello. I also enjoyed seeing the Clearleft office in person and having a long tea break discussing politics and religion with Aral.

I do admit that I missed the first set of talks due to the airline “forgetting” to put some luggage on the plane and the hubby not having anything to wear. Luckily, we made it there by the first break.

Let’s get started on the talks, shall we?

One Web by Jeremy Keith

I’ve read a lot of books by Jeremy, but never heard him speak until this conference. The man is as stubborn and loud as me and I loved it. His talk was very passionate and I was able to follow along. At one point, he even called iOS developers “fucking peasants”. It was fantastic.

Jeremy stated that the web was created to be open, and unlike anything else, you didn’t need permission from anyone to create content on it and that anything could be published. The links were open and you could link from one site to another without asking anyone for permission. The internet’s primary design was universality and was meant to be used on any device or with any handicap.

The problem with native app design is that it takes us back 20 years before the web was born. Native apps may be great, but how long will those resources lasts? When you create content on the web, it lasts for forever, as long as you pay for hosting, but it’s harder to keep content alive when it’s tied to a specific device. All a web needs is HTML, HTTP and a URL.

Back when the web was new, it’s competition came from CD-ROMs like Microsoft Incarta, but the web was able to succeed because of the links and it’s updatability. Today’s competition comes from apps, but it can be argued that because of links, web is really the “killer app”.

The internet is real time communication and it threatens publishers and content controllers like magazines, news providers, music and film makers because it allows anyone to publish. These outlets are excited about the popularity of native apps because it brings back control and exclusivity.

What is the web for? For for fun? For users? Merely to make money (which Jeremy argued, is no better than a prostitute)? The web is meant for humans in order to contribute to a better world.

Steve Jobs once said that you don’t need to be permission to be awesome – but you do with native apps.

Geek Ninja Battle – or Jeremy Keith vs. Everyone Else

This WAS the best talk of all, which was more like a debate between Jeremy Keith and everyone else on the panel. The other members were Aral, Kevin, Martin, Matt and Seb. Basically, the battle was about which is better, native or web apps. Jeremy being a hardcore web-only kind of guy, basically ended up arguing with everyone, especially Aral, and there was seriously a part where I though punches were about to be thrown. It truly was a battle and quite entertaining (and informative of course). It’s interesting to see how we all geek out over little stuff like this that the rest of the world never thinks or cares about.

Aral asked Martin, who works at Microsoft, why we should use their new Windows phone. Honestly, I thought the guy gave a pretty weak answer, which basically boiled down to “you can build apps quickly and we’re a big company”…riiiight…..

Matt, and iOS developer, thought it was important to just make the commitment to get something out and that it was more about delivery than the type of platform you used. He cited the example about how when you subscribe to a newspaper on the Kindle, it’s automatically delivered every morning.

Kevin, a Titanium developer, suggested that native was better, because in web it’s difficult to integrate with the phone’s system and all of its features. He suggested using something like Titanium, which is a cross-platform tool and allows you to be more productive by creating one app for all platforms.

Jeremy Keith said it was important to not focus on one platform and limit your user base, but to create a progressive website that can be accessed by everyone, even crappy browsers (at this, he pointed to Martin, the Microsoft guy). Jeremy said that by creating a baseline that worked for all devices and browsers and then enhancing it for a few, it gave you a competitive advantage against those that created an app for only a select few. He also stated that what you’re getting natively on apps now, is what will soon be the future of the web. He also stated that we need to stop trying to make web apps look native, in order to avoid confusion.

Seb agreed with Jeremy Keith’s view that progressive enhancement was a great tool for mobile, but that it’s limited and not for interactive apps.

At this point, it was less about questions from Aral, and more about a huge debate between Jeremy and everyone else. Aral and Jeremy debated about optimising for features, not devices, to which Jeremy disagreed with both. Aral brought up the issue of making money from web apps, which is not as easy to do as native apps are. Jeremy stated that making money this way is outdated. Not sure how I feel about that!

Angry Exorcist – Seb Ly Delisle

This talk was a step-by-step on how to make an Angry Birds clone in under 30 minutes using the Corona SDK. You can find the source code at Seb’s website and follow Seb on Twitter to find out more about this hilarious project. Hopefully, he’ll post a video of how he did it, it was fantastic!

Design Challenges – Sarah Parmenter

Sarah Parmenter laid out 10 design challenges that you’ll face as an iOS designer.

1. Fluid design – She stated how important it was to make sure your designs are able to be stretched and to watch out for gradients and the slicing of buttons and background elements.
2. Use familiar behaviors – A great touch reference can be found at Luke W’s website.
3. Clean up your environment – Properly name your groups and layers, keep folders neat and keep a scratch folder for all the elements developer’s will need, like buttons.
4. Progressive disclosure – Hide actions that don’t need to be shown. Clients often don’t like this, but users do. For example, the pull down to refresh action.
5. Tap targets – Make sure they’re big enough for fingers to push without accidentally hitting something else. The minimum hit target is 44×22 pixels.
6. Orientations – Users have a preference for using either landscape or portrait, so don’t force them to use one or another. Make sure your app is flexible and can adapt. A popular layout technique is using 3 columns in landscape mode and 2 in portrait.
7. Keep designs relevant to its OS.
8. Beyond human interface guides – Know the limits of the OS, even the smallest actions and gestures matter.
9. Retina display – Don’t ignore the retina display, it only takes basic math to do. A trick is to use shapes in Photoshop, as this allows you to resize the PSD easily without distorting it.
10. Automator – There’s an add on you can find online for adding the suffix to the file for the retina display to work.

Arse Over Tit or “How designers/developers have perfected the art of making things backwards” – Relly

I wasn’t too big a fan of this talk, I’m not really interested too much in content myself and Relly talked much too quickly so it was really hard to understand her.

Relly noted that content strategists normally don’t come into a project until the end. She asked, “What if books were made like apps?” You would first decide to make a book, choose a format, design a cover, pick out fonts, figure out the type of paper you’d want to use, pick a title….and then come up with the subject and content of the actual book??

You can’t make a hit app, but you can think up a plan for one. You’re only as good as the components you make and writing doesn’t scale. Relly suggested breaking up the large content projects into smaller pieces in order to get through them. She reminded us that the plan is not the work.

Ronald Wayne

Apparently there’s a third founder of Apple–I didn’t know that, did you? He met Steve Jobs while working at Atari (and Steve wrote my favorite game, Breakout). Ronald has never owned any Apple product, so he was present with an iPad 2 by the Update crew.

“We are designing for humans and they are central to what we do”

Beyond Delicious – Joachim Bondo

Delicious apps are those that devs put extra work into the UI. They’re the apps that users recommend, love and purchase.

1. Make code more beautiful than the UI. Delicious apps go beyond skin deep and into the code.
2. Under-state, Over-deliver.  Move focus from the user interface to the user experience.
3. Quality takes time. Respect users by taking your time in development.

The Digital Nature – Anna Debenham

Studies show that students who use tech are better with their studies. Unfortunately, schools are more likely to over-monitor the students. For example, a teacher couldn’t show his students the “view source” feature in the student library  because it had been blocked by the school for “security risks”. Over monitoring of students pushes them to hack their way around the systems.

Computer science isn’t taught as a standard in the UK, instead they teach how to use the software, but not how it’s made. Interest in software development is lower than ever. Today’s software and hardware focuses on hiding its design, because it’s thought to be too scary for users.

You can view the slides of this talk at maban.co.uk/dn

Geek Ninja Battle 2 – Design Challenges

Consisted of Joachim, Cennydd, Relly, Sarah, Remy and Aral.

Aral asked, “What are some of the unique design challenges to mobile?” Sarah answered that less is more and you should try to strip out the process to only three or four screens to make it easier for the user. Cennydd asked, “What do you mean by mobile? It could be the property of the device or user. Is the person using his iPhone at home mobile, or is the person using his laptop on a train mobile?”

Aral then asked, “What about ergonomics then?” Cennydd replied that ergonomics are limited, there’s a big difference between touch screen and using a keyboard and mouse. Anything more than one touch on a real mobile user is difficult to do. Joachim said to always strive for simplicity. Only put five buttons or less in the toolbar (which is in the Apple user guide).

“What are some copy restrictions?”, Aral asked. Relly said that the “people don’t read” belief actually depends on the context. Consider what the main task of what they’re doing is and how to let them get to that chunk of information. Mobile is “not what we can cut out, but what makes the most sense” to show.

Aral turned to Remy and asked him what some of the development challenges were? Remy said that if the app isn’t designed to be on the desktop, then it’s designed to be mobile. He recommended using libraries like jQuery mobile for quicker developer, although he also suggested using barebones development. If he can use a library to accomplish what he’s doing quickly though, he’ll use that. Apps should be as small and lean as possible. Cennydd said context is king in theory, but difficult to figure out in reality. Only way to figure out is by extensive researching.

The Things of the Future – Cennydd  Bowles

Many of the things of today don’t do anything. We plan for obsolesce now and we create a lot of crap and artificial demand. We;ve become complacent and allow advertisers to talk to us like idiots, making a dilution of value.

The audience is changing, however, only 12% of consumers have high opinions of big business. People are now more connected and can find out the truth about your products easily. They’re no longer satisfied with the consumer role. The web builds societies, educates and frees us.

The things of the future will:

• Be human and consider how products talk with the user.
• Mobile phones will have sensory input
• More clues for designers to interact with
• Tackle wicked problems like energy consumption, health and financial management.
• Disrupt by uprooting existing way of doing things

Sites are now cross-channel where media, form and function are now separated. Users don’t see why they should be different from being in-store to on the web or in an app.

Designers should now forced to think about the entire lifestyle of an item and create fewer, better things.

Photos from the Update Conference & Royal Dinner

I again want to thank all of you who made it possible for me to come here! It was fantastic!

I’ve never been a big fan of video on the web either, since I’m never at my computer unless I’m working so I never have time to watch. However, upon learning that Think Vitamin created a new membership service, called Think Vitamin Membership, I was immediately interested.

Read the rest of my post on FreelanceFolder

Google+ was/is currently a invite only network, thus giving it that “exclusive” feel. From the get go, there are some really awesome features that they got right like circles (groups for the uninformed) which enables you when you share new posts via the network to set who sees what. Compared to FB and Twitter (or any other service for that matter), this is a big win for the privacy nuts among us – or the guys trying to hide posts they do instead of doing work at the office from the boss

But where is all this leading to? Without beating about the bush, it is obvious that Google is taking on Facebook, even though they might have the numbers (700+ million users), Google has proved time and again that they are one of the few companies on the Internet that users keep returning to. Will they beat them? I hope so. Looking from a statistics point only, it will seem that they would, as G+ took under 10 days to accumulate 10+ million users, whereas Twitter and FB took over 100 days each. But this alone doesn’t proof that they will win the social media war that is going on. As many researches have shown, G+ is still majorly crowded by the IT people, thus it is still clean from those horrible apps that we all have come to hate on Facebook (here is looking at you Zynga with that damn Farmville and its myriad of clones…)

So what would happen when it goes mainstream, i.e. when your dad/mom/sister/brother/grandad/dog/lizzard start getting onto it? What can we expect to see come from this? Google has always come to the game with innovative new ideas and technologies, so this geek is hoping they keep improving. As long as they keep it from going the route Facebook went, it should/would survive. But will it become the all-encompassing portal that we go to to keep in touch with everyone we know? That is the real question. I don’t have the answers, nor do any of these tech sites posting their predictions.

What would be interesting to see is what they will bring to the table to win more users over and start cutting into Facebook’s market share. I for one haven’t used Facebook in more than 2 weeks, I just go and check who’s birthday I might have missed, give them a call (note that I don’t post on their walls I actually call them, something that doesn’t seem to happen anymore).

So, what do you guys think? Will G+ win? Or will it go down in history as Google Wave version 2?