Responsive Nav is a tiny JavaScript plugin which weighs only 1.6KB minified and Gzip’ed, and helps you to create a toggled navigation for small screens. It uses touch events and CSS3 transitions for the best possible performance. It also contains a “clever” workaround that makes it possible to transition to height: auto, which isn’t normally possible with CSS3 transitions. The plugin, along the site, was released today on Smashing Magazine.
Continue reading→The history of typography dates back about 5,000 years. It starts from a series of pictograms, which then evolved to hieroglyphs in Egypt and later around 1,200BC to Phoenician alphabets. Almost 2,500 years later the Chinese invented first movable type which later revolutionized everything in the west when Gutenberg invented latin movable type. Many of the basic concepts of typesetting are still the same as 500 years ago.
Web typography, and digital typography in general, is a huge step forward in this history. It has made setting type fast and easy compared with hand-setting metal type. Responsiveness, when added on top of this, makes this period of change we are living very fascinating. Not only is centuries old design theory being rewritten, but the process of how design happens is now changing too (as Mark Boulton states it).
When talking about “responsive typography,” I don’t just mean flexible body text, but also that all our decisions should be based on universality. Universality, as a design principle, should guide us when choosing web fonts and when testing how our type works on various devices and platforms. It should be the core principle behind all the work we do.
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I were quite surprised few weeks ago when I found out with Matt, my colleague, that no one has tested thoroughly which mobile browsers support input type=file and how to reliably detect the support. After an hour of Googling we literally gave up and decided to find it out ourselves. The results are shared here to everyone for future reference.
For the detection part, I am using similar code as Modernizr does, but I’ve added a separate user agent regexp to check against browsers that falsely report support. There are quite many of those false positives really, at least all Windows Phone devices running OS 7.0-8.0, Android devices running OS 1.0-2.2, Kindle devices running OS 1.0-3.0 and all WebOS devices running OS 1.0-3.0.5 (Although the latter ones being quite old already).
Continue reading→Remote preview is a tiny JavaScript based tool which I built for our test lab. It allows you to preview any URL on large number of mobile devices simultaneously. Just enter a URL, hit enter, and new URL gets automatically loaded on each device. Remote preview works on platforms like Android, Blackberry, iOS, Maemo, Meego, Symbian, Windows Phone and WebOS.
Remote Preview works by making an ajax call every 1100ms to check if the url in the ‘url’ file is changed. If it is, the script will then change the src attribute of the iframe and load a new page into it. If there’s no changes, the script will just keep polling the url file until something changes. Remote Preview allows very fast previewing of different URL’s to check for possible layout problems, which can then be debugged using various other tools depending on the platform where they occur.
There are some issues and limitations with the way it’s being done, but as there currently is no other tool which allows you to preview web pages on all these platforms, I think this can be a handy addition to any test lab’s toolset.
Continue reading→Not so long after the device lab was born I realized that we need a much better way to store and charge all the 40+ devices. There didn’t seem to be any existing solution available which you could just buy, so I started thinking what would be the easiest way to do something like that myself. After some research I ran into this device testing station by 64 Digital and thought it looked like a perfect solution.
The main idea is to provide a dynamic and secure way to store phones, tablets and other devices and make it possible to use them for testing without the need to actually remove them from the stand. Devices are held in place using Velcro tape which is attached both to the back of the phones and the stand. That makes it easy to detach the phones, but it also makes them stick securely to the wall. The whole stand system is done from two 800mm wide racks, and I’m planning to make a third one too so that we have available space to continue expanding our device collection.
The wood materials for both racks cost under 30 euros. The Velcro tape was actually the most expensive part as 25 meters of it cost about 70 euros + shipping. I used two full work days to built these and third to paint them. I guess someone with actual experience might be a lot faster as about half of that time went into trial and error. ❦
Continue reading→I wrote an article to Smashing Magazine. It’s an in-depth guide about how to establish an open device lab. The article gives practical tips about things like location, how to get devices, what devices to get and what software to use. It would not have been possible to write it without the help from Shaun Dunne, Jeremy Keith, David Blooman and Andre Jay Meissner. Thank you guys, I owe you one.
Continue reading→If you’ve been building websites during the past two years you must know that the web doesn’t live on a desk anymore. The reality is that we now need to test our work on multiple devices, instead of just few desktop browsers. All this is easier said than done. It's easy when you have a dozen devices laying on the desk in front of you, but what about the rest of us? Devices are expensive and the landscape is ever expanding.
That is the reason why we decided to set up an open device lab to Kisko’s office. ‘Open’ meaning that anyone can pop round, use the devices freely and contribute by lending their old devices to us. The list isn’t very long yet, but it will grow over time. I am also planning to contact few device manufacturers to help us out here.
Joni Korpi and I are leaving our spare devices at the office for testing purposes and we are hoping to see others to contribute too. Kisko Labs is also—in addition to the space—giving four devices for testing purposes. If you’ve got an old mobile device which you aren’t using anymore and it’s just gathering dust, then why not lend it to our lab. The device will of course remain yours all the time, and you can take it back whenever you want.
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