Ryan DeBeasi @ryan@mastodon.xyz

Over the past few years I've noticed myself stopping to do custom tweaks on my own system, and instead working to fix the underlying issue for everyone.

I finally wrote my thoughts about this down in a more coherent form https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2020/01/17/doing-things-that-scale

#DesignSystems
"There Is No Design System" Move away from thinking of design systems as an actual thing and more as a way of working better, more efficiently, and more creatively so that we can build great experiences for our users. https://24ways.org/2019/there-is-no-design-system/

#UX
This is amazing: a comics that explains a user centric process by using the redesign of the Batman's outfit as an example.
No more excuses to say "yeah but I don't understand what you people do" now!

http://batux.design/

For those interested, these are the CSS media queries I mentioned:

- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-color-scheme

Because of these, a website can automatically infer whether a user prefers fewer animations (e.g. due to vestibular disorders) or whether they prefer dark mode, based on an OS-wide setting. The "reduced motion" one is especially impressive, as it works across a wide variety of OSes – Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, even Ubuntu! https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-reduced-motion#User_Preferences

Just occurred to me today that you younger folks who have the benefit of awesome tools like #blender might not even know that POV-RAY exists.

Pretty amazing what people are doing with this stately old piece of code these days. Check out the hall of fame, I think you'll find an image or two to be impressed by!

Many years ago, when computers were crawling, embryonic half formed things compared to what we use today, this thing was AMAZING and let anyone ray trace. It was *empowering*.
http://hof.povray.org/

New blog post: "What I’ve learned about accessibility in SPAs" https://nolanlawson.com/2019/11/05/what-ive-learned-about-accessibility-in-spas/

Since learning more about #accessibility, I've had some fun tabbing around different websites just to see what the experience is like. Sometimes it's actually more comfortable than using a mouse.

Slack has a neat feature: if you start tabbing around, it pops up an info message telling you about the keyboard shortcuts.

(I feel like I'm 12 and making shops to exchange gems for torches in zzt again, very good nostalgic feeling)

The Differing Perspectives on CSS-in-JS, an interesting wrap up https://css-tricks.com/the-differing-perspectives-on-css-in-js/

"PWAs on iOS 13 beta: Here Comes Good News"

https://www.simicart.com/blog/pwa-ios-13-beta/

Looks like PWAs on iOS 13 will finally be fully usable. Looks like a landmark OS release for the iPad especially.

That said, I'm already using toot.cafe as a home screen web app on my iPad and it works quite well.

Icon Library by @bilelmoussaoui is here, and it's awesome!

It's the best way to find symbolic icons to use in your mockups and apps. Find icon names, copy icons into Inkscape, and include them in your project as gresources.

Get it while it's hot https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.gnome.design.IconLibrary