@cirrus@mstdn.social
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

cirrus

@cirrus@mstdn.social

#DesignSystems aficionado. Classically trained #webmaster. Slayer of pixels. DTCG spec editor.

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cirrus, to random
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

FFS, the UK govt just won't give up on trying to break E2E encryption or similar tech: https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/07/ukgov_wants_prior_notice_of/

Making it easier to catch criminals is all well and good, but don't they realise how vastly more dangerous the ability to spy on all civilians can be in the wrong hands?

brucelawson, to random
@brucelawson@vivaldi.net avatar

Whole bloody day spent fighting abstractions (some Tailwind vue UI library full of over-engineered ARIA and under-engineered <divs>) and misc. 3rd party libs, so they excrete accessible HTML that would have taken 10 mins to type into an editor. Fucking nonsense.

cirrus, (edited )
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

@brucelawson That sucks.

But your choice of language has inspired me! From now on, I am always going to talk about "excreting HTML", rather than "rendering".

As in, "[insert JS framework name] supports server-side excretion"

cirrus, to random
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

Speaking of #DesignSystem events, the nice folks at Specify are running "Connect" the week after next (13. - 17. Nov): "a week of exclusive insights on the future of design tokens and systems"

As part of that, I'll be taking part in a discussion panel about the #DesignTokens Community Group (DTCG) file format.

Specify will be announcing more details soon, but you can already register here: https://specifyapp.com/connect

cirrus, to random
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

Ooh! The Patterns Day #DesignSystem conference is making a comeback next March: https://patternsday.com/

I really enjoyed the past ones. Hope I can make it down to Brighton again 🤞

cirrus, to random
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

TIL the Window Maker window manager is still being actively developed! https://www.windowmaker.org/news/

Love that!

Back at the tail end of the 90s, when I first used Linux, this was one of the first WMs I encountered and used for a while. I have fond memories of running lots of little dockapps along the edge of my screen. Mostly pointless but cool-in-a-geeky-kind -of-way stuff like this Matrix one: https://www.dockapps.net/wmmatrix

Ahhh... those were the days

cirrus, to UX
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

Why is corporate intranet #UX always so terrible? It's on par with Bluray menus and restaurant websites.

Just imagine all the time, money and frustration that could be saved by making them suck just a bit less.

You wouldn't need anything elaborate or cutting-edge to have a big impact, just apply some tried-and-tested usability heuristics make stuff clearer, less error-prone and faster.

cirrus, to random
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

Yarrrr! How be ye today me hearties?

#itlapd

cirrus, to random
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

Just shutdown my Twitter/X account.

I had it for almost 15 years. I had a lot of fun there, learned a lot and met some great people. But, after barely using it since Elon took over, I've come to the conclusion that I'll never go back.

I grabbed an archive of all my tweets before closing my account, so perhaps I'll rehost them ony site one day.

cirrus, to random
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

/me Re-reads previous toot. Notices lots of embarrassing typos. Remembers that Mastodon lets you edit toots. Fixes typos.

cirrus, (edited ) to UX
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

Hey #DesignSystem friends, I'm looking for my next job! Needs to be permanent and London-based hybrid or remote.

I know a thing or two about #UX, #WebDev, #a11y and #DesignTokens (I'm one of the DTCG spec editors 😜), so can get stuck into all sorts. Ideally though, I'd like to use my skills and experience to help your organisation establish, run or grow a design system!

DM me if you're interested.

Boosts would be much appreciated. Thanks! ❤️

cirrus, to minidisc
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

TIL in the 90's a company considered making a car stereo that would play both #MiniDisc and #DCC tapes!

Obsolete tech nostalgia overload!

https://www.dccmuseum.com/collection/delco-dcc-minidisc-prototype/

viticci, to random
@viticci@macstories.net avatar

I used a Game Boy Camera as a webcam to do FaceTime video calls on my iPad Pro.

That's right. It's wild, ridiculous, and it totally works thanks to USB changes in iPadOS 17.

Here's what I did: https://www.macstories.net/stories/i-used-a-game-boy-camera-for-facetime-video-calls-in-ipados-17-and-it-was-glorious/

cirrus,
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

@viticci I love it!

cirrus, (edited ) to random
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

I have a few ideas for blog posts relating to #DesignSystems & #DesignTokens, but my personal website design is extremely crusty and old (still using XHTML!!), so I worry folks might be turned off by that and not read the posts.

Should I...

cirrus,
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

Looks like I'll be blogging first then! 🙂

Thanks to everyone who voted!

cirrus, to random
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

Current status: Freshening up my CV and tarting up my LinkedIn profile.

Edent, to webdev
@Edent@mastodon.social avatar

Hello #SemanticWeb & #SchemaOrg people - I have a conundrum.

My blog posts' #HTML is, essentially:

&lt;main&gt;  
 &lt;article itemprop="blogPost"&gt;  
 &lt;header&gt;  
 &lt;h1 itemprop="headline"&gt;…&lt;/h1&gt;  
 &lt;/header&gt;  
 &lt;div itemprop="articleBody"&gt;  
 Content   
 …

Given that "div is the element of last resort" - what should I use instead?

It isn't a sub-<article> (and wouldn't have a separate heading).

The <header> isn't part of the articleBody (I think).

I guess it is a <section>?

cirrus,
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

@Edent @monkeymad2 I think this is a legit use of <div> then - i.e. it's just a hook for you to hang the itemprop on (for the benefit of search engine crawlers). Since it has no special meaning to web browser and human users, it won't negatively affect them.

cirrus, to random
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

More shady behaviour from X and also yet another reason why URL shorteners in general suck: X's URL shortener was adding a deliberate ~5 second delay when redirecting to URLs of competitor sites and also certain news sites.

Source (in German): https://www.heise.de/news/X-Twitter-Links-zu-Medien-und-zur-Konkurrenz-brauchten-fuenf-Sekunden-zum-Laden-9245261.html

cirrus, to random
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

Deleted my Instagram account earlier today. I was barely using it.

Had been considering deleting my Twitt... X account too. But, decided to just keep it dormant (for now). My profile and pinned tweet basically just link here, so it's essentially just a promo for my Mastodon account 🙂.

Gotta say, I was a bit disappointed to see so many friends being very active on X, when I briefly logged in to update my profile. I had really hoped most of that community would have migrated here.

cirrus,
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

@donnie (╥﹏╥)

cirrus, to ai
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

I've been playing with an #AI image generator lately, Clipdrop #StableDiffusion XL (https://clipdrop.co/stable-diffusion).

Quite impressed with some of the results, so sharing some of my favourites here. Hope you like 'em!

Yes, I'm aware there's a big quagmire of copyright and bias issues surrounding this tech that need resolving. Also, some details in the output are still pretty glitchy (peope's faces often look fubar). But, I can't deny the potential intrigues me!

A lady wearing cyberpunk clothing sits in a large, reclining chair in a dimly lit, industrial-looking room. She is wearing a large virtual reality headset, which has some blinking lights and an LCD display on the front and is attached to several cables that dangle from the ceiling.
A man sits in an alleyway holding a futuristic, electronic device with red lights that is connected to cybernetic implants on his head by thick cables.
An old man sits in a dark, industrial room surrounded by lots of computer screens displaying complex data and terminals, cables amd keyboards. Some of the computer equipment looks quite old and several of the screens are CRT monitors or greenscreens.

jina, to random

Going to Seoul for my 40th birthday next month. Have a couple friends and family coming as well.

I haven’t been there since I was a baby.

Please share recommendations!

cirrus,
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

@jina If you want to visit the Gyeongbokgung palace, you can get in for free if you're wearing a Hanbok (traditional Korean clothes)! You can rent them from several nearby shops.

cirrus, to random
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

Benefit no. 1749 of #DesignSystems:
If your company is taken over by megalomaniac who decides on a whim to change the company's name and logo overnight, then it's just a matter of replacing a single SVG file and perhaps a few #DesignTokens and then letting the automated pipelines do their thing.

joelanman, to accessibility
@joelanman@hachyderm.io avatar

when I asked Site Inspire and Awwwards to take #accessibility into account
https://twitter.com/joelanman/status/1310893406479093765

cirrus,
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

@joelanman Perhaps there's an opportunity here to start a new website award that does take #a11y into account 🙂

cirrus, to random
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

Oh dear. My phone is "struggles to last to the evening before the battery runs out" years old.

Also, the wireless charging broke yonks ago (I dropped it one too many times) and lately cables keep slipping out the USB-C socket. I tried to clean it, so don't think it's clogged with lint. Maybe something's a bit bent in there?

Was planning to wait for next year's Samsung S-series line-up, but not so sure it'll last until then. 😞

cirrus, to random
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

Nice summary by @donnie of some of the #DesignTokens formats that are currently out there: https://blog.damato.design/posts/spicy-specifications/

FWIW, an analogy the #DTCG editors have used in the past is vector graphics formats:

The #DTCG format aims to be to tokens what SVG is to vector graphics. Standardised, widely supported as an import/export format and (somewhat) human editable.

However, lots of design tools also have their own, proprietary formats - e.g. Illustrator has .ai files. These may have additional...

cirrus,
@cirrus@mstdn.social avatar

...features that are unique to that tool.

As we've seem in the vector world, both can coexist.

Perhaps users of, say, Figma or Tokens Studio will maintain a source version of their #DesignTokens in those tools' own formats. But, when it's time to send that token data off to other tools they'll "Export as DTCG..."

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