kuniform

I’ve been busy lately, so I haven’t had as much time to post as I would like. I’ll make up for that with a post full o’ links today! A plethora. Plethora.

First off, in the spirit of the never-ending redesign, here’s a great 15 tips blog post on choosing a type face. I am a type amateur, but I love reading and learning about it. This Spiegel article is ancient in our 24/7 newscycle, but here’s a community that has done away with traffic signals. This is reflective of Christopher Alexander’s maxim to always design scaled to the user. It also shows how, though human-designed systems are good, human nodes in an amazing complex physical, emotional, and spiritual system called the world possess an innate ability to regulate themselves and their behaviors absent the enforcement of other humans. Libertarian moment over… now.

From a time slightly after the Spiegel article came out, i.e.—right after the dinosaurs started becoming oil—Tim O’Reilly felt compelled to redefine Web2.0 with a more compact definition. It’s a good read, but the Hype Curve has sailed on that one, Tim.

Some random accessibility stuff about video captioning, Dutch law and a new effort by Joe Clark to make media uniformly accessible.

Garrett Dimon has an interesting article about markup as craft. I’m pessimistic today, so all craft feels dead to me. Happy Valentine’s Day. However, Garrett’s 21 points are right on. They’re the implementation details of these 15 research article-derived design tips. What the heck is up with 15 being the magic number of tips? Who the heck knows?

Where did I get all this great stuff? Lots of it came from the Web Standards Group mailing list. This maxdesign guy put out the links for light reading weekly. Highly recommended.

In the file under random portion of our post, I’m beginning to research buying a hybrid, and this Jamis Buck article on concerns in activerecord in Rails hit the spot, oh, a month ago, when I began this post, back when my life was far less chaotic.

Here on rail one, we have Amy Hoy’s article on using script/console to do debugging. It’s chock full of tips and tricks, and was super-useful when I was tooling around over vacation. It’s Hoyesque! You know you’re rockin’ when you become an adjective or an adverb. At least, a positive one. Don’t even ask what Kuneshesque has been used for.

Over on rail two we have some n00b picture of Rails model associations. Given that I am a n00b, I like it. It’s nice. Nice, not earth-shattering. So, on to earth-shattering. Holy crap! It’s Matt Biddulph’s hackdiary. I saw Matt give his presentation at RailsConf 2006 and thought, “that’s one smart cookie.” Then I saw this script, and thgouth, “that’s one smart CAKE!”

Check out this script which lets you take a Rails app, converts the associations to a GraphViz format that you can then import into OmniGraffle. Since the mac lacks a decent entity relationship diagramming tool and I am too lazy to create one by hand, this is a lifesaver. It totally justified hours of web browsing and and reading on New Year’s Day.

Congratulations to Peter Krantz on being accepted to speak at Europe’s RailsConf 2006! Peter, I feel bad the congrats came so late, but they are deserved! You will rock the house!

In the New York Times today there is this article about Matthew Nagle, a man with a device implanted in his brain to allow him to communicate with a computer. Simply amazing.

In other news, I have been taking notes on making a new, accessible Rails-based version of revizit.com, including screenshots. The new old version was accessible, but the point is to make a Rails tutorial for this. Once I have the first version completed, I plan on using Peter Krantz’s new RAAKT - The Ruby Accessiblity Analysis Kit to do some testing on it. That testing will probably be more for testing Peter’s RAAKT than for testing the site, since his work is still in beta, but it should be cool nonetheless.

Hey everybody-

My talk from the 2006 RailsConf, Rails, Ajax and Universal Design has been posted here:

• Macintosh Keynote version


• Microsoft Powerpoint version


• Adobe PDF version (with notes, but the images probably obscure some text)

The PPT version also include a media folder, which I think PPT needs for the audio. It’s exported from Keynote. If you have questions or comments about the materials, please feel free to contact me at jason .at. kuniform .dot. org. Thanks!