◎ Missing the bloody point

After I posted my review of Hammer – the simple to use, GUI app that helps me design with HTML – this week, several people tweeted a few alternatives. Oooh, oooh, let’s go look!

Lakshan Perera:

Hammer for Mac (hammerformac.com/) looks nice, but Punch is open-source and comes with lot more flexibility laktek.github.com/punch

Punch huh?

Let’s take a look.

Punch is a simple, intuitive web publishing framework that will delight both designers and developers.

“Simple.” “Delight(ful).” I like the sound of that. And there’s a video too. I like videos. This could be…

  • Download and Install Node.js
  • Install Punch npm install -g punch
  • Create your site – punch setup mysite

Delightful. Yeah, I’m always delighted by a bit of node on the command line. Me and I bet countless other designers just love to create by typing punch setup mysite. Oh yes.

Next!

Nathan M Long:

I’m not sure I understand hammerformac.com/ when there’s jekyllrb.com/ and middlemanapp.com/ and others for $23.99 less…?

Well let’s compare, shall we? Oh yes lets!

Hammer installs via the Mac AppStore.

Jekyll on the other hand:

The best way to install Jekyll is via RubyGems:

gem install jekyll

Jekyll requires the gems directory_watcher, liquid, open4, maruku and classifier. These are automatically installed by the gem install command.

If you encounter errors during gem installation, you may need to install the header files for compiling extension modules for ruby 1.9.1. This can be done on Debian systems.

So. Totally the same fucking thing then.

Surely Middleman can’t be as bad. Surely that won’t assume that designers like me are comfortable with the command line or even know the bloody thing exists. Surely it won’t expect it, just because I know a bit of HTML and CSS.

Oh dear.

  • Tagged with: tools
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🔗 Mike Monteiro on What Clients Don’t Know

Here’s Luke Wroblewski with notes from Mike Monteiro’s talk this week at the final An Event Apart of the year, in San Francisco. There’s so much wisdom here, so much to like. In particular:

Your process is a mystery. Show people what it’s like to work with you on a day to day basis. Let them the sequence of events, when you’ll connect and how often. If you don’t control the process for the start, clients will start telling you how it should go. They’ll fill in voids when they see them.

(And if you haven’t already bought Mike’s book, you really should.)

  • Tagged with: business

◎ Hammer time

Summary: If you use OSX and write HTML, screw the trial version. Buy Hammer. You’ll earn back what you spent on it during the first hour you use it.

  • Tagged with: tools
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🔗 Remote Preview

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 Cmd+S, 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.

I’ll test Remote Preview for myself later this week. I hope it’ll be another reason for me not to renew my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription next year.

🔗 Cennydd Bowles on creating and refining

I’ve found that if you want rough indication of a designer’s experience, look at the time they spend on different stages of the design process.

Novice designers spend most of their time creating a solution, and maybe 20% refining it.

Intermediates split the time roughly evenly.

For senior designers, the ratio flips: 20% creating, 80% refining.

And the experts realise that creating and refining are actually the same thing.

This is a fabulous insight. Next week I’m heading back to Geneva to do exactly this with ISO, because ‘expert’ clients realise it too.

🔗 Rolf Timmermans: Responsive background images with fixed or fluid aspect ratios

It is possible to make any HTML element scale its height proportional to its width.

I’ll use the heck out of this.

  • Tagged with: responsive

◎ Contract Killer 3

It’s coming up on four years since I published my original Contract Killer over on 24ways. The reaction to it was astonishing and over the last four years the feedback I’ve received has been overwhelmingly positive. I feel very, very happy that so many people have found Contract Killer useful.

  • Tagged with: business
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◎ Backing Ormr

Although Adobe have said nothing officially, their silence says it all. Unofficially my little birdies tell me that Fireworks is not being updated for retina displays so the tool I’ve used and loved for a decade or more is effectively dead.

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◎ Touchy subject

Two great reads this week, on connected subjects:

  • Tagged with: responsive, design
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🔗 Ratchet

“Prototype iPhone apps with simple HTML, CSS and JS components.” From the fellas that brought you Bootstrap.