My favourite CSS comment style

I wish I could say this post was an intellectual discussion on the the importance of creating guidance through your code. But it isn’t.

I’m posting it because I want a handy place to keep my favourite CSS comment style. Which is this:

/* ====================================================
CSS comment
======================================================= */

I like to use this as a separator for each section because it’s nice and clear.

If you’re interested how I like to split up my CSS, I’ve written an article about that (click here).

Why I think smartwatches will destroy cinemas

With smart phones getting bigger and turning into phablets it was inevitable that someone would invent a smaller device to use instead of the bigger one, to save you having to pull the TV-sized phone screen from your pocket. So that’s what we have now, smartwatches to save you the effort of looking at your smartphone.

I have 2 friends with smartwatches now, both different manufacturers but both have the same feature that the screen activates when you move your wrist in a certain way.

And that’s what I think is the problem. I was in the cinema at the weekend and my smartwatch weraring friend moved his arm slightly. He was probably only scratching his nose or something, but the watch activated the screen.

I noticed this because it caught my eye. I wasn’t annoyed or anything, but it did catch my eye and temporarily distract me from the film.

Right now smartwatches are rare, but imagine in only a short amount of time everyone has one, each watch face activating when someone scratches their nose. The amount of distractions could be unbearable! Especially irritating when you’ve already paid an extortionate amount to watch the film at the cinema, believing it to be a better experience than sitting at home, where ironically there isn’t a problem with a hundred smartwatches flashing around you.

This is why I think smartwatches will destroy the cinema.

…Unless we start to see signs saying “Turn off your phone AND your smartwatch”. Yeah, to be fair, that might save it.

Some awful #darkpatterns

I’m always on the lookout for examples of horrible examples of interfaces, especially websites with terrible user interface. I hate terrible user interface, in fact it’s more perverse than that, I LOVE to hate terrible user interfaces.

Really bad user interface that’s actually intentional is called a dark pattern. This is something that’s deliberately intended to mislead the user.

A colleague of mine found this example of a dark pattern recently and screenshotted it:

Constantly switching the context and switching positive and negative actions makes it confusing. 

 

Here’s another with confusing negatives intended to catch you out:

I think the worse example of a dark pattern is on the RyanAir website, where there’s a section asking if you want travel insurance. You don’t HAVE to buy travel insurance from them, but the way to opt-out isn’t all that obvious. You have to find the “Don’t insure me” option hidden amongst the countries of residence:

ryanair-website-ux3

I wonder how many people have unnecessarily bought travel insurance because they didn’t know how to opt-out?

You’ll find more stuff like this tweeted as #darkpattern and I’m going to try and opost any I find here under the category dark pattern.