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If you still want to work in the tech world but are reconsidering coding, designer Nick Marsh suggests doing something coders find useful. Brilliant as great developers are, there are plenty of things that they hate doing or are just no good at. Coding requires a level of focus bordering on tunnel vision, and if there’s one thing developers hate, it’s distractions. For a coder “distractions” mean dealing with business people, management, customers or, in fact, anyone outside the engineering team. If you want to get popular with developers, spare them from some of these interactions, which they often see as a shocking waste of their time. A great product manager, for example, is as crucial to success as a competent coder. It doesn’t matter how clear the code is, if nobody wants the product. Translate the language of the developers into that of the users and vice versa. Promote the product. All makers of creative work want their work to be used. Marsh concludes that it’s much more important to understand coders than to understand code

Three specifications that we’ll likely find ourselves using in the future are: “Flexbox4,” “Regions5,” “Grid Layout6.”

Magic numbers in CSS are best avoided.

We need fewer of these HTML containers and more CSS virtual container classes that we can apply to different elements as needed. In other words, instead of this… <div id="container"> <div>Content here</div> <div>Content here</div> <div>Content here</div> </div> … we need more of this: <div class="container">Content here</div> <div class="container">Content here</div> <div class="container">Content here</div>

I have not created any new way of writing. All I'm doing is writing computer programs that mimic the way people write. Going back to the Elizabethan sonnets, Shakespeare or one of his contemporaries created the 14-line iambic pentameter poem, where the rhyming pattern was 'a-b, a-b, c-d, c-d, e-f, e-f g-g.' G-g being a couplet at the end. By line 9 there has to be a turn in the poem, so there has to be a phrase like 'yet' or 'but.' The first line is typically a question, which acts as a title. All of them are 10 syllables in each line... they have to go in the rhythm of that pattern. If you do an analysis of sonnets, you'll realize that about 10% of sonnets violate those rules. But they do it only in a very particular way. Even that formulation of violation is itself constrained... Once you have all of those rules you then write algorithms that mimic those rules. It's a very different kind of philosophy from artificial intelligence.

The methodologies are extremely old, just like the methodologies of writing haiku poetry are very old. An Elizabethan sonnet is 14 lines - that is a line of code if you think of it that way. The code is constrained. So all genres, no matter what the genres are, are a form of constrained writing.

Defining Skeuomorphism This obscure word describes the way designs often borrow a particular feature from the past, even when the functional need for it is gone. Examples include pre-recorded shutter noises on smartphones to remind us of film cameras, or calendar apps that feature torn paper and metal rings. Or, as Wikipedia tells us [1]: A skeuomorph is a physical ornament or design on an object copied from a form of the object when made from another material or by other techniques.

the digital world has seen skeuomorphism popularized in the past couple years mainly thanks to the recent iOS-inspired trend of rich textures and life-like controls.

By opposition, the other side of the coin would be the newly popular "flat style", of which Microsoft's Metro UI is probably the main example. Flat Style embraces visual minimalism, eschewing textures and lighting effects for simple shapes and flat colors.

When you first load a webpage, the first thing that happens is it generates an impression, which is then forwarded to an ad server. So far, so good, but you might be surprised by how much that ad server knows about you. Using information gathered from Internet cookies, social media, and more, an ad server is capable of generating a unique profile of various metrics, almost like a QR code, that contains everything it knows about you: how old you are, your relationship status, what websites you browse, where you're located, etc. With that code generated, the ad server tries to match it against a pre-sold inventory of ads, almost like a key fitting into a lock. If the key fits, the process ends there, and an ad is returned that advertisers believe jibes with your unique personal profile. But it's what happens if the server doesn't have an ad that matches where things gets interesting.

Without a pre-sold ad to serve you, an ad server forwards your profile to an international ad exchange, where a network of different ad servers examine it and bid on it in real time. In a fraction of a second, a host of third-party servers around the world go into a bidding war for the opportunity to show you an ad, with the highest bidder taking the prize and filling your eyes.

Two years ago, the two greatest Jeopardy champions of all time got obliterated by a computer called Watson. It was a great victory for artificial intelligence--the system racked up more than three times the earnings of its next meat-brained competitor. For IBM’s Watson, the successor to Deep Blue, which famously defeated chess champion Gary Kasparov, becoming a Jeopardy champion was a modest proof of concept. The big challenge for Watson, and the goal for IBM, is to adapt the core question-answering technology to more significant domains, like health care. WatsonPaths, IBM’s medical-domain offshoot announced last month, is able to derive medical diagnoses from a description of symptoms. From this chain of evidence, it’s able to present an interactive visualization to doctors, who can interrogate the data, further question the evidence, and better understand the situation. It’s an essential feedback loop used by diagnosticians to help decide which information is extraneous and which is essential, thus making it possible to home in on a most-likely diagnosis. WatsonPaths scours millions of unstructured texts, like medical textbooks, dictionaries, and clinical guidelines, to develop a set of ranked hypotheses. The doctors’ feedback is added back into the brute-force information retrieval capabilities to help further train the system.

For Watson, ingesting all 2.5 million unstructured documents is the easy part. For this, it would extract references to real-world entities, like corporations and people, and start looking for relationships between them, essentially building up context around each entity. This could be connected out to open-entity databases like Freebase, to provide even more context. A journalist might orient the system’s “attention” by indicating which politicians or tax-dodging tycoons might be of most interest. Other texts, like relevant legal codes in the target jurisdiction or news reports mentioning the entities of interest, could also be ingested and parsed. Watson would then draw on its domain-adapted logic to generate evidence, like “IF corporation A is associated with offshore tax-free account B, AND the owner of corporation A is married to an executive of corporation C, THEN add a tiny bit of inference of tax evasion by corporation C.” There would be many of these types of rules, perhaps hundreds, and probably written by the journalists themselves to help the system identify meaningful and newsworthy relationships. Other rules might be garnered from common sense reasoning databases, like MIT’s ConceptNet. At the end of the day (or probably just a few seconds later), Watson would spit out 100 leads for reporters to follow. The first step would be to peer behind those leads to see the relevant evidence, rate its accuracy, and further train the algorithm. Sure, those follow-ups might still take months, but it wouldn’t be hard to beat the 15 months the ICIJ took in its investigation.

A recent study (PDF) found that more than 80% of people are disappointed with the experience of browsing Web on mobile devices and would use their smartphones more if the browsing experience improved.

A recent study (PDF) found that more than 80% of people are disappointed with the experience of browsing Web on mobile devices and would use their smartphones more if the browsing experience improved.

64% of smartphone users expect websites to load in 4 seconds or less, while the average website takes more than twice that amount, at 9 seconds.

Google’s launch partner for this service is Forbes, but others can implement these recommendations by just adding a single line of code to their mobile sites.

These recommendations, Sternberg told me, are based on social recommendations on the site from your friends on Google+ (only if you are signed in, of course), what the story you just read was about, the story’s author and some of Google’s “secret sauce.”

The new Google+-based recommendations, interestingly, only appear once a reader slides back up on a page. This, Google’s analytics show, is a pretty good indicator that a user has finished reading a post (even if there is still more text left on the page). The recommendation widget then slides up from the bottom and one extra click brings up more relevant items for the page. The other option is to show the widget after a user scrolls past a configurable CSS entity.

I think in the mobile, in the phone space particularly, I don’t think people have time for opinion and commentary--they just want, “tell me what I need to know, tell me all the facts, tell me what’s going on.” I think on the phone it will probably continue to be that way. I think when we get to the tablet, there may be potential for commentary, for opinion, for bringing in some people who have a specific point of view--if you have time and want to lean back on the couch and read what someone’s take is on something, that might come into play. But I think on the phone, it’s going to be strictly the facts, strictly get to the point, tell me what I need to know, informing people very quickly about different topics

if you’re in the business of media or editorial, you’re always going to want to have someone as a human layer--otherwise, it just doesn’t work, I mean I don’t feel like you could ever really present a media product that’s completely automated--those companies are out there and most of them are really crappy.

the usage of a single URL improves site analytics and SEO performance, and sites can easily be resized for new viewing formats.

These include longer time required to develop individual responsive pages, the need for code workarounds to account for older legacy browsers, the need for live device testing, non-compatibility with many existing e-commerce and CMS platforms, the need for a front-end rewrite, the need for a phased development approach in large enterprises, and the extra effort required to provide unique experiences for each form factor.

According to IDC, mobile web browsing will soon eclipse desktop browsing in the U.S. and worldwide. This consumption of mobile content isn’t just happening on the go; 93% of people are now using their mobile devices to browse the Web from their homes, according to a study from Google.

The main development methodology behind responsive design is the use of media query functionality in CSS3. Media queries target not only certain device types (e.g., Android vs. iPhone), but actually inspect the physical characteristics of the device that renders the page. For example, the code below “asks” the device if its max horizontal resolution is equal to 480px: <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css", media="screen and (max-device-width: 480px)", href="http://uxmag.com/iphone.css" /> If it is 480px, the device will load iphone.css. If not, the link is ignored. You can also include media queries in CSS as part of an @media rule:

a responsive design approach does not involve putting all of your content in front of the reader. Responsive design is about putting the right content in users’ hands according to the context of their interaction.

For Google, social media and author authentication help them measure the influence (and trustworthiness) of content and links and, ideally, serve better results. If results have been authenticated with authorship — they’re “owned” by personal and company brands — searchers get better results and advertisers spend more knowing they’re getting more bang for their buck.

Now, page owners can link their sites in a few steps: 1) Visit your Google+ page, open its profile, and click ‘Edit profile’ 2) On the About tab, save your website URL, then click the new button, ‘Link website’ 3) Follow the instructions for adding a short line of code to your website’s homepage, then click ‘Test website’