fuzzyness

Organic loveliness

9·Feb·08

We received a leaflet through the door the other day from Abel and Cole, who deliver organic produce to your door. We gave the service a go this week, got our first delivery yesterday, and we’re absolutely delighted.

Basically, once registering you choose a regular organic box of fruit and veg. This could be a family box, a one person box, or many other variations. Abel and Cole fill these each week (or 2 weeks, or month, whatever you choose) with fresh, seasonal, locally produced goodies – no air freighting whatsoever.

The beauty of this is that you get a different range of fruit and veg each time they send you one, thus ensuring that you get an amazing variety. This week, for instance, amongst other things we got Jerusalem Artichokes, Celeriac, Raddichio, none of which we’d have dreamed of buying otherwise.

You can then add other individual organic items too – chocolate, butter, milk, etc – and set these to be delivered at a different individual frequency than your main box. So, you might want milk every week; bread only every 2 weeks, etc.

The website is a joy to use – dead easy to let them know what you really don’t like (we haven’t used that service cos we’ll scoff anything!) and really easy to put the order together.

It’s the added value that I love the most. The website is full of advice and recipes, so if you get something in your box that you’ve no idea what to do with, just consult the website for loads of ideas. We’re having a celeriac gratin tonight that looks wonderful.

I’ve already been eating really healthily the past few weeks and this is just going to make it even easier to eat loads of really interesting, fresh, seasonal stuff. Can’t wait!

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“What if Gmail had been designed by Microsoft?”

23·Nov·07

What if indeed.

Fantastic.

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A whole lotta framework hoo-hah

19·Nov·07

Been interesting to follow some of the discussions that have been raging (and even baking) over the last week about CSS frameworks: are they useful? are they to be trusted? will using them corrupt the moral fabric of society?

Much of the debate has centered around Blueprint, a stock CSS framework dealing with browser-styles resetting, fonts, typography and (most controversially) an off-the-shelf ready-made grid system, though other frameworks exist, including Yahoo’s UI Library, plus the less ambitious Tripoli CSS, and many others.

One step backwards for Web Standards…

As amusing, irritating and downright annoying some of the commentary has been, it’s certainly forced me to have a think about my position on the subject. My basic thinking on this is that while some of the browser resetting and typography styles are useful (albeit if cherry-picked and adapted – I much prefer the way the Yahoo UI CSS deals with this as a whole), using the ‘easy grid’ aspects of a framework such as Blueprint, even for rapid prototyping, is pretty bad news.

One of the huge benefits of HTML prototyping is that you’re all the time actually building the website, iteratively, and writing the code as you go. You don’t want to end up with a steaming stew of messy unsemantic code (or else Jeffrey’s book will have been in vain…) that you either have to scratch and start again once production proper begins, or at best work through to remove all that nasty presentational code.

What’s the point? Especially for prototypes it’s just so easy to create columns manually in CSS, and the advantage of having complete control of the semantic situation just sits much easier with me.

Although I don’t much care how anyone else does it to be honest, each to his or her own : )

Rediscovering the grid

Ironically, peeking at the grid CSS in Blueprint has brought me back to having another look at layout grids for design in general. As a non-trained designer, grids were pretty much news to me when Mark Boulton wrote his excellent primer on the subject a couple of years ago, and when Khoi Vhin revealed his grid to all back in late 2004.

Rapid HTML Prototyping R’ Us

I now have a far greater awareness of the grid when I’m designing, but still had a bit of a hit-and-miss mentality. That was until in the last year, at Definition we started using HTML prototypes almost completely in the place of writing spec documents or preparing wireframes. Doing this has really made me aware of just how handy it can be to have a really solid awareness (and methodology) for working with grids to aid speedy prototype development.

Grid layouts made easy

So I was reminded today of 2 awesome online tools which today have just ‘clicked’ for me: Grid Calculator and Grid Layout.

1. Play with the sliders of the Grid Calculator to get your basic layout framework (oops, that word again…)
2. Input the values into the Grid Layout tool
3. Save out the generated code to your HTML page-in-development
4. Hit CTRL-SHIFT-G

Et volia! An instant overlay/background grid (with subdivisions, no less!) to make quick creation of columns in CSS nice and easy – even easier than it already is in fact.

Ironic that it took a disagreement with Blueprint’s approach to development of grids in CSS to rekindle my own interest in them, and discover an excellent workflow for rapid web page grids in future. At least it’s been of some use to me.

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Mailplane

19·Nov·07

A long-time happy user of Mail for my email reading needs, I resisted the lure of Gmail for a good while, even after several early invites and abandoned trials.

I preferred the slickness of working in a desktop app, plus relied pretty heavily on 3rd party add-ons for Mail such as MailTags and MailActOn.

I also liked the tight system integration with my Mac Address Book, plus the convenience of being able to drop attachments right on the Mail icon or into the body of the message itself.

It’s only more recently I’ve actually begun to warm to Gmail, and now it’s replaced Mail as my primary email client. One reason is obviously the convenience of accessing my mail from anywhere, but another is the threaded conversation – surprisingly for some maybe, this took me a long time to get used to, but now I struggle with any other way.

But I do still miss the luxury of having a separate app, which is why I was delighted to discover Mailplane, a desktop app for Gmail. I actually like having a separate app for mail, rather than having mail open in a tab I frequently forget about or shut down. More importantly, Mailplane allows you to drag and drop attachments onto its icon or into the body of your email messages.

Hardly a necessity, but a nice addition to the dock.

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