davidball

I wish on a Mac…

I’ve been given a Mac from work, which is great, but I’ve needed to get back into the habit of its weird quirks again after using Windows again for a while. Some of the ways Mac does things seem so strange when coming from Windows. Here’s a few things I wish Mac did/had. Continue reading I wish on a Mac…

I’ve been using Protoshare – a reasonably good wireframing tool that nobody seems to be talking about

I was introduced to Protoshare when starting my current job, which is a wireframing tool that is quite powerful, and allows you to knock up a decent wireframe for a website quite quickly. Continue reading I’ve been using Protoshare – a reasonably good wireframing tool that nobody seems to be talking about

There’s a word in computing for saving something, & that word is “save” – except in nano, obviously

The world of command line tools is still alien to me, even though I use a terminal every day. And it annoys the crap out of me for being deliberately weird. Continue reading There’s a word in computing for saving something, & that word is “save” – except in nano, obviously

I admire this guy for not using a preprocessor, but I just couldn’t

I read this article today about someone who doesn’t like using preprocessors (like LESS or SASS) to compile CSS. It’s worth a read, here it is:

http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/201603/why_i_dont_use_css_preprocessors/

I put off learning SASS for a long time, because I find it fiddly. You have to install something, and often have to run commands in a command prompt (something I hate), running gulp or grunt or whatever. But I was converted when I realised PHPStorm did it for you – which is AWESOME.

But now that I do, I feel like I can write styles so much clearer and more effectively, without getting lost in a massive page of WET CSS code. I use the word WET as the opposite of DRY (don’t repeat yourself), as without compilation your CSS can end up with lots of repetition. Especially if you need to target things inside a specific class, you might end up with this:

.main-content p,
.main-content ul {}
.main-content h1 {}
.main-content h2 {}

Look how many times you have to type .main-content! Whereas in SASS you could write:

.main-content {
   p,ul {}
   h1 {}
   h2 {}
}

Isn’t that cleaner?

There’s also loads of advantages – being able to split code into useful components you can paste between projects, rather than one big mass of CSS. Also, keeping colours as variables is amazing. I’ve no idea how I managed before that!

Here’s more articles about the way I like to write styles:

Here’s an article to read about preprocessors: Why your reasons for no-longer using a CSS pre-processor are wrong, and you’re wrong, and you should feel bad.

The taskbar in Windows 7-10 is so much better than on Mac

Having a persistent taskbar where you can launch applications with a click of a mouse button is such a good idea, that all Desktop operating systems seem to have one, which is great!

On Windows it runs the full width of the bottom of the screen, and in Mac (on every version I’ve used at least) it does the same, but aligns to the center. Continue reading The taskbar in Windows 7-10 is so much better than on Mac

Unity has a 8 digit Hex color, and that’s insane!

hex in unity

I noticed something today. Unity has a hex value for colours, which is great – I hate having to remember RGB values between various graphics programs. But Unity’s hex value has 8 digits (see above), which is INSANE! Hex should be 6, it’s always been 6. It’s literally Greek for 6! Continue reading Unity has a 8 digit Hex color, and that’s insane!

4 examples of CSS being weird

I know many people find CSS quite difficult, and often I see this gif shared as an example of how people work with CSS:

Peter Griffin doing css

But if you’re doing CSS like this, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG! CSS isn’t that difficult, but sometimes the chosen syntax does make me WTF. Here’s some examples of that:

Comma inconsistencies

Sometimes you need a comma to differentiate multiple values, like:

transition: color 200ms, background 200s;

But sometimes not:

transform: translateX(-50%) translateY(-50%);

Why isn’t this consistent?!

Slashes in shorthand

Ever seen this?

font: 12px/18px "Lucida Grande", sans-serif;

The first 2 values are shorthand for font-size and line-height. Why they’re separated with a slash though seems unusual as I’ve not seen that used anywhere else.

Apart from you can apparently use it in border-radius (here’s an article explaining that) to separate horizontal and vertical axis, but again – that’s inconsistent to how we do it elsewhere!

Camel Case or hyphen?

CSS has always been hyphenated, for example background-color, text-transform etc, so why did we start adding camelcase like translateY, rotateX? It’s inconsistent!

Edit – Also, overflow-y and translateY – Y so different?

Vertical Percentages are Relative to Container Width, Not Height

I didn’t actually realise this for a long time. It can be really useful once you know what it’s doing. Here’s an article about it. But why can’t I also set a height based on a percentage of the container’s height?

Windows 10’s start menu is full of nonsense

Although an improvement on 8, because you don’t have to horizontally scroll, Windows 10’s start menu is ridiculous and full of nonsense. Continue reading Windows 10’s start menu is full of nonsense

Unity – Detect gameObject’s tag via OnCollisionEnter()

I’ve struggled for a long time with Collisions in Unity, and for some reason avoided using the OnCollisionEnter() function, and favouring OnTriggerEnter() instead. Continue reading Unity – Detect gameObject’s tag via OnCollisionEnter()

Most popular articles from 2015

I know March seems like an unusual time to do a roundup of last year, as we’re already 2 months into 2016, but I was recently encouraged to do a roundup of all articles on my OngoingWorlds blog, so thought it wasn’t too late to do it for this blog too. So here’s the most viewed articles I wrote in 2015:

Also, I wrote this article about what I did in 2015.