Stuart Frisby and I will be there as part of the Booking.com recruitment bandwagon, handing out goodies and trying very hard to tempt the cream of the UK’s web design scene to up sticks and relocate to beautiful Amsterdam.

Hopefully we’ll be able to catch some of the talks while we’re there as well. I’m looking forward to hearing Brendan Dawes for the first time; Vitaly “Smashing Magazine” Friedman, Steve Fisher and Laura Kalbag will be the first non-Marcottes I’ve seen talk about Responsive; and the closing talks by Martin Beeby and Mark Boulton both promise to be inspiring.

If you’re attending, make sure to come and say hi – and if you overhear anyone complaining about their job, be sure to point them in our direction!

Browser grading, as a formal concept, was popularised by Yahoo! back in the day. At the time, their support matrix was understandably generous: IE6 and Firefox 2.0 were both “A-grade” browsers at the time, which by Yahoo!’s standards meant that they deserved the full, bells-and-whistles experience. Their policy has changed over the years; they no longer explicitly specify an A/C/X grade to indicate support, but instead use the woolier term “test baseline” to determine which browsers belong in their QA suite. IE6 and their low percentage ilk remain C-grade, meaning they receive:

…nothing more than semantic HTML, the content and experience is highly accessible, unenhanced by decoration or advanced functionality, and forward and backward compatible. Layers of style and behavior are omitted.

Progressive Enhancement in a nutshell.

Maslen’s hierarchy of browser needs

The BBC’s approach, while sharing the PE philosophy, is significantly more exclusionary. A single line of JavaScript leverages browser feature detection to decide whether you’re one of the chosen few:

if ('querySelector' in document
&& 'localStorage' in window
&& 'addEventListener' in window) {
// bootstrap the javascript application
}

The upshot of this simple check is that IE9+ and all other modern browsers get the progressive sugar. And, according to Maslen, it also means that (because you now know that your visitor’s browser supports such useful shortcuts as document.querySelector and window.addEventListener) you can avoid the need for large and slow-to-download JavaScript libraries. Instead:

…we can now develop JavaScript solutions that use native implementations of features that we have grown accustomed to using without having to download polyfilling libraries.

I have a problem with this approach.

Baby with the bath water

Reducing page weight is a noble aim. A recent article from Pingdom contains some statistics on the increase in average KB over the last year; it’s certainly true that the golden rule I grew up with – no page should ever be over 100Kb – has long since been mothballed. And, as Maslen’s and Pingdom’s articles indicate, the explosion in the use of JavaScript libraries is definitely a part of the problem, despite also evidently being the solution to many developers’ prayers. By abstracting away all of the cross-browser headaches and leaving novices with a single, easy to learn API, libraries such as jQuery have secured a place in almost every developer’s default template.

Maslen contends that, if the primary reason for using a library is to work around the lack of universal support for querySelector and the like, you don’t need it providing you are only targeting browsers with native support for that feature. Bang – well done, you just reduced your page weight by 32Kb or more!

I have two main issues here:

1. By excluding users on IE8 and lower, you are potentially cutting off a quarter or more of your audience from experiencing the intended experience. This proportion will also vary depending on what day it is (IE usage rises during the week when people are at work without the freedom to choose their browser) and from what part of the world your site is being accessed (IE6′s share of US traffic might be sub 1%, but could be closer to 50% in China according to Wikipedia).
2. Replacing library functionality with native doesn’t really gain you anything in modern browsers. Any decent library will be checking for the native functionality first, so the library function simply becomes a reference to the native function.

So, if ‘going native’ has no meaningful benefit for A-grade browsers, and you don’t want to exclude large swathes of your traffic, what are we left with in the “No” column for library usage? File size.

I accidentally a whole JavaScript library

jQuery and other libraries are attractive because they make it possible to do clever things with web pages without the need to actually learn or understand JavaScript. Novices can drop the core library into a page, throw in a few other plugins, maybe the jQuery UI module as well, and get started on making things appear, disappear, or fly around the page. And for the hobbyist or small business that might be okay, but at scale you naturally start to worry about download speed, concatenation, minification, and all the other site speed buzzwords. But I’m going to let you in on a little secret…

Nobody ever said that you had to use the whole library.

Don’t need to use any AJAX requests? Strip that shit out. Same for animation, event handlers you’re never going to use, dimension calculations – in fact, anything that you don’t actually need to use can be removed (or commented out, then minified using a minifier that ignores comments).

Of course, this approach requires you to know what you’re doing when it comes to native JavaScript; but so does Maslen’s proposal, and by choosing to keep the library you’re scoring some significant benefits:

• There is now no need to exclude older browsers that don’t support the native features simulated by the library;
• You can spend your time creating new functionality, instead of painstakingly recreating something that was already present in the library you threw away.

Library authors have put in many thousands of hours figuring out the most efficient, compact and bug-free way to do most of the things you’re likely to need on a web site. Ignoring that free labour in favour of doing it yourself to help fewer people just seems like the wrong decision.

Strangely though, Google’s most recent refresh of their apps have dropped this two-decade convention. None of their properties – GMail, Google Docs, Google+, et al – make the Google logo into a link; now if you want to return to the default view of the app, you must locate and click the much smaller “Home” link (or, in the case of Google+, the even smaller Home icon in the navigation bar).

I suspect that the reason is an attempt to train users that the top light-grey bar on all Google’s properties is not tied to the app you are currently using, but is instead a persistent area present across the entire range. The right-hand end of the bar is now home to your G+ notifications, avatar and share link, so perhaps they hope that by dedicating the top 100px of the page to their social network they can encourage adoption and/or use. I think that the loss in terms of usability and user expectation is disappointing.

I’ll be spending the weekend watching that video and playing the example games in the Game Theory Lab; for now, I’m boning up on mostly forgotten probability theory mathematics with the help of Wikipedia. I’m taking notes in my trusty moleskine, but I’ll also use this blog to record what I’m learning. Here is Wiki’s plainspeak rundown of the relevant terminology:

Consider an experiment that can produce a number of outcomes. The collection of all results is called the sample space of the experiment. The power set of the sample space is formed by considering all different collections of possible results. For example, rolling a die produces one of six possible results. One collection of possible results corresponds to getting an odd number. Thus, the subset {1,3,5} is an element of the power set of the sample space of die rolls. These collections are called events. In this case, {1,3,5} is the event that the die falls on some odd number. If the results that actually occur fall in a given event, that event is said to have occurred.

Probability is a way of assigning every “event” a value between zero and one, with the requirement that the event made up of all possible results (in our example, the event {1,2,3,4,5,6}) be assigned a value of one. To qualify as a probability distribution, the assignment of values must satisfy the requirement that if you look at a collection of mutually exclusive events (events that contain no common results, e.g., the events {1,6}, {3}, and {2,4} are all mutually exclusive), the probability that at least one of the events will occur is given by the sum of the probabilities of all the individual events.

The probability that any one of the events {1,6}, {3}, or {2,4} will occur is 5/6. This is the same as saying that the probability of event {1,2,3,4,6} is 5/6. This event encompasses the possibility of any number except five being rolled. The mutually exclusive event {5} has a probability of 1/6, and the event {1,2,3,4,5,6} has a probability of 1 – absolute certainty.

At the core of Allen’s recommendations is this idea of a “trusted system” and it’s that aspect that I have struggled with. I’ve tried everything from plain text documents to the flavour-du-jour piece of software, but nothing has ever really felt quite right. I sat down and wrote a list of the features that I crave:

• Access across multiple devices. I want to be able to pull up my projects and lists at home, at work, and when out and about on my phone.
• If it’s a web application, it should also be able to work offline – I don’t want to be rendered impotent due to the internet going down.
• It should do “proper” GTD, and not just be a fancy to-do list manager. That means regular reviews, tickler files, the whole works.
• Capture should be possible through a variety of different means – at least email, but anything else is a bonus: voice, calendar, or integration with other apps such as Evernote.
• The ability to function as a mini project management tool as well – somewhere to write notes, a scratchboard, lists of links and future plans other than in a list format.

Reviewing the options available, it’s extremely hard to find something that ticks all my boxes. Plain text (or even pen and paper) is a little tempting, but I’d much rather rely on some form of automated reminder system than my own memory. Wunderlist, which is what I’ve been using for the last few months, is okay but little more than a to-do list tool, lacking even a built-in way to manage contexts – and because of the flat structure, you can’t even create fake contexts as pseudo-projects, because each task can only live in one place. In fact, the only application I’ve really found that is explicitly a GTD enabler is Midnight Inbox, but every time I’ve attempted to use it it’s either been too fiddly and sensitive to setup in a way that works for me, or horribly buggy.

At the moment, my shortlist (and reservations) looks like this:

• Nirvana: Web application with offline support and add-by-email, and reasonable note-taking and tagging facilities. Lacks full GTD features.
• Midnight Inbox: Beautiful native application, sync-able with Dropbox, and a real GTD process. Has notes plus a “reference” filing area, and planned iPad and iPhone versions – but no Android! It also seems to have really stupid bugs every time I download a new version…
• Firetask: Another lovely looking application, although again mostly a glorified to-do list. Costs money.
• The Hit List: I was using this earlier in the year, and got on reasonably well with it – excellent notes area for every task, really well-integrated GTD aspects like adding contexts when entering tasks (but no actual GTD process). The main drawback with this one is no mobile access unless you use their iPhone app and pay a monthly fee.

Obviously the lack of a GTD process isn’t a real problem. Weekly reviews and filing is simply a set of habits I need to get into, and would not be all that hard to implement with some basic recurring tasks and folders in any of these applications.

One final option is of course to roll my own, a solution which of course comes with the freedom to add or leave out whatever features I like. I actually started putting together a GTD-meets-Scrum personal project management tool last year as an excuse to use Django, but it kind of stalled when I reached the limits of my Python programming abilities (or perhaps the limits of the book I was learning it from). I have to admit it’s tempting me again, although probably safely back in the reliable arms of PHP; building a simple to-do list manager would be an extremely fast exercise, then layering on functionality and features would be driven by my actual use of the setup on a daily basis. It might also prove a great opportunity to jump into some new tech, with things like offline and email-as-input method to figure out.

For now, I’m using Nirvana, despite the fuzzy border between contexts and tags they employ, and the weird addition of ‘Focus’ as a third meta-property of tasks and projects. But the more I think about it, the more making my own – and therefore controlling all my own data – sounds like the most attractive option.

Some things have been unexpectedly easy. Finding a school and getting the kids settled was probably our biggest worry, but they’re now virtually fluent (although curiously have not yet taken to conversing in their new ‘secret language’ at home). Signing on with a doctor was also a simple process, and – like the school – is just a few minutes away from our apartment.

Other things have not gone so smoothly. While we still have three children, we are down to just a single cat now; Tigger died in late summer, providing me with the first opportunity to try out my ‘telling the kids their beloved pet has died’ routine. They took it fairly well – it was at least thirty minutes before I heard: “Can we get a puppy?”

Living so close to the centre of a vibrant city is a balancing act at times. Both work and the city itself offer so many diversions and entertainments that it might be easy to feel one is missing out by staying home and early nights, but it’s also true that the best aspect of our move has been the greatly increased time I now have to spend with my wife and children. No more two-hour-a-day commutes and no more freelancing has translated into long walks in the nearby parks, trips into town and many more family moments; I think not having a car also contributes too, as the children have enjoyed both family cycle outings and solo trips on the tram.

The year ended with the most deranged New Year’s Eve we’ve ever experienced. The Dutch apparently have no words for such concepts as “health and safety” or “a safe distance,” and from our third-floor balcony we were treated to a deafening display as the neighbourhood set off as many explosives as they could find, mostly right outside our front door:

With Christmas and New Year falling on a weekend, I’ve only had a paltry nine days of unfocused, alcohol- and food-fuelled laziness; back to work tomorrow and time to think about some goals for the coming twelve months.

Further refining GTD

Over the last year I’ve tested many different GTD solutions or combinations of services, but the final result I’ve been living with for a few months, Wunderlist, still feels like settling for adequate when perfect is out there. A combination of occasional minor bugs (mostly sync-related), poor UI choices (task notes not easily accessible, no sub-lists), and just generally not using it at times when in theory it should be front-and-centre in my process leads me inexorably to the conclusion that my setup just isn’t working properly for me.

So, NYR #1, then:

Embark once more into the murky waters of GTD tools and techniques to find the perfect solution.

I should probably get around to finishing the damn book, too…

Be more creative, make more stuff

I have accumulated many gadgets and bits of software with which to be creative. Nothing which I’d be so arrogant as to call ‘semi-pro,’ but there are an embarrassing number of expensive toys gathering dust about the place. Like (it seems) virtually anyone daring to call themselves a web designer these days, I fancy myself a not entirely incompetent photographer, filmmaker or musician – and, possessing the tools to realise these pursuits, it seems wasteful to while away (all of) my free time bouncing between a handful of the same websites or killing dragons.

Of course, there are also plenty of opportunities to be more creative in my chosen field. I made a couple of abortive attempts to build semi-useful web apps last year; I’d like to either pick those up again, or perhaps some other new idea. The 12412 project is tempting, but personally I’d rather get good (or better) in one particular area than learn a little about a lot.

NYR #2:

Use the tools and skills I have to create something (or several things) new.

One project in particular that I hope to launch in January should stretch my writing muscle on a fairly regular basis, and of course I intend to keep posting here when the urge strikes. Who knows, I might even write something about the web one of these days.

Get fit Stay fit

I’m ending the year fitter than I’ve ever been (at least in adult life). I completed the marathon in October, and since then have explored new areas of the city each week while building up to a respectable distance once more.

So, while the rest of the world is setting goals to get themselves fit, my aim is simply to maintain my current and very enjoyable level of fitness. NYR #3:

Stay fit and keep running.

So…

So, no work-related resolutions, because who knows what this year will bring. I have the same problem filling in those “where do you see yourself in five years” questions on self-appraisal forms. At the moment, I’m happy, productive and relaxed – and I hope to be able to sustain this feeling well into 2012.

All of the data here comes from last.fm, which has dutifully collected my scrobbled tracks from both work and home, iTunes and Spotify, since 2005. Most links are to Spotify.

 Top 10 Artists listened to in 2011

1. Afghan Whigs
2. Arcade Fire
3. The Black Crowes
4. The Gaslight Anthem
5. Radiohead
6. Daft Punk
7. PJ Harvey
8. The Beatles
9. Foo Fighters
10. Elbow/Pearl Jam/Bon Iver

This was the year that I discovered The Afghan Whigs. I already had a copy of their album Gentlemen, courtesy of Jeremy Keith during the big Pownce shutdown of a few years back, but this year I obtained first digital and then physical copies of the rest of their back catalogue, and they are now one of my favourite bands. Lead man Greg Dulli’s current work with The Twilight Singers and (with ex-Screaming Trees and QOTSA Mark Lanegan) The Gutter Twins also ticks a lot of my boxes.

The rest of the top ten comprises a few new album releases this year (Arcade Fire, Daft Punk, PJ Harvey, Foo Fighters) together with some perennial favourites.

Top 10 Albums listened to in 2011

1. 1965 (The Afghan Whigs)
2. The Suburbs (Arcade Fire)
3. TRON: Legacy (Daft Punk)
4. For Emma, Forever Ago (Bon Iver)
5. Sigh No More (Mumford & Sons)
6. Amorica (The Black Crowes)
7. Wasting Light (Foo Fighters)
8. The Seldom Seen Kid (Elbow)
9. In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (Neutral Milk Hotel)
10. Play (Moby)

1965 had almost twice as many plays as the next album on the list, and would have been even more if my stereo scrobbled CDs as well. I also really liked Arcade Fire’s third album and Foo Fighters’ latest, and re-acquired a couple of old favourites lost in house moves or Spring cleans over the years. In particular, The Black Crowes Amorica has had a lot of love; for me, it’s one of those albums that reminds you of a particular time in your life.

Foo Fighters and Daft Punk were the only albums actually released in 2011, and the TRON: Legacy soundtrack was actually my first ever MP3 purchase from Amazon, a process that should be simple but is immeasurably over-complicated by their insistence on using their own download software.

The rest of the top ten – Bon Iver, Mumford & Sons, Elbow – reflects the realities of living with someone who doesn’t share 90% of your taste in music; inoffensive modern folk dominates our mealtime or evening listening.

 Track of the year

It should be no surprise that the track I listened to the most over the last twelve months (twenty-three times according to last.fm) is from the #1 album and band. The Whigs’ final album was recorded in New Orleans and has a real loose, sultry feel to it – “Uptown Again” is the standout track for me:

All of the albums above are available to listen for free on Spotify – I’ve collected them into a single playlist for easy exploration: 2011, My Year In Music.

Actually, that’s enough to put anyone off committing a crime on this street…

Finally the scaffolding and coverings have been (mostly) removed from the new Stedelijk Museum at the south-west end of Museumplein, and the new building is looking pretty impressive.

Like so much modern Dutch architecture it is big on counterweighted overhanging parts (see for example the various hotels and things up near the central library), and the material it is coated in has a strange, almost ceramic look to it. The doors have all been covered now so you can’t see the state of the inside, so hopefully it will all be completed in time for the planned 2012 re-opening.

The official website is a bit strange as well – the enormous fixed-position ‘T’ initially looks like part of the layout, until you start scrolling…