Category → Technical Geekery
Write less CSS with Less CSS
Less CSS really does what its title claims. It’s an elegant approach that adds all the syntactic sugar you ever wanted to vanilla CSS, such as variables, nested rules and declaration templates. And it starts out by being 100% compatible with your original CSS files. So what are you waiting for? The only way is up.
Less CSS.
Backfire – Save CSS changes made in Firebug
Firebug offers a great way of doing on-the-fly CSS modifications right there where it matters: in the browser. It allows you to actually “design in the browser” which is part of the Quplo philosophy. The only problem is that CSS changes done in Firebug aren’t persistent, so you have to redo them in your editing environment in order to save your work.
Well, not anymore. Here’s Backfire: the save button for Firebug.
Backfire fires your CSS changes back to the server.
Improving the website production process – Part 1: Exporting to development platforms
If you’re involved in the website production process, chances are your job involves wireframing, visual design, prototyping, development or a combination thereof. More often than not, the process involves designers tossing designs “over the fence” to a development team. Regardless of what side of the fence you’re on, it’s clear that there’s room for improvement.
The website production process.
Adventures in integrating payment services as a Dutch business
We’d been developing and testing our PayPal subscription flow for Quplo for a month and had almost gotten it completely working when PayPal suddenly decided to change their user-facing checkout wizard. Our code was suddenly broken, and x.com‘s documentation hadn’t been updated to reflect any changes. Nor had the web service code. Even though we probably could have figured it out by looking around the internet and asking people, this entire experience gave us a queasy feeling: pulling the rug out from under developers’ feet, even if it’s just the Sandbox, doesn’t inspire confidence.
Impressions: Briefs for iPhone
Briefs - wireframes remade for Cocoa Touch
Briefs is an upcoming image-based prototyping app for iPhone created by Rob Rhyne. You create sketches or designs of iPhone apps any way you want, and then combine them (in image format) with a kind of manifest that describes what’s on each picture. Then Briefs makes your design interactive based on that description.
CSS code completion in your browser
It’s been three days since we introduced Common Sense Code Completion, the HTML code completion addon to CodeMirror for speeding up your browser based editing experience. Today we’re adding CSS support using the same common sense approach as last time.
There’s a video for you to check out, demo to play with and source code to grab. And there was much rejoicing.
Common Sense Code Completion
I remember when I first learned HTML. It must’ve been around ’97 or so. Over the years I’ve memorized an arsenal of tags, attributes and values that I know how to use. Now whenever my HTML knowledge lets me down (like when adding an encoding type to a file upload form) I rely on code completion or Google. I bet you’re no different.
Quplo is intended for designers and developers with a strong passion for HTML, and building a prototype in quplo introduces nine new tags. Only the <page> tag will do at first, but in order to create reusable parts of HTML, work with real data or mock up a functional sign in form you will need to master all nine of those tags. In order to familiarize you with these new tags we’ve built code completion into our browser-based editor. It adds to the kickass user experience that we’re trying to achieve with Quplo. In fact, in some cases our code completion seems more useful than what regular desktop IDEs such as Visual Studio tend to offer when you’re writing HTML. And that’s odd, because Quplo’s code completion does so little! We just used common sense. That’s why we call it “Common Sense Code Completion”.
