276 karma · joined September 3, 2009
Disclosure: Helped work on the new Classic site. (http://cantilever.co/)
Of course the markup looks awful, you can't describe the Mona Lisa over the phone to your editor as "a portrait of a woman with long brown hair, sort of smiling" and capture anything worth telling. Nor can you describe the new iOS7 icons as "kinda the same, with duller colours and flat design".
Don't waste your time.
In these situations it can be helpful to use some kind of scale or domain reference.
"We've got some pretty exciting news coming up, and we think it could change the world"
vs
"We've got some pretty exciting news coming up, that should really fire up geologists"
vs
"We've got some pretty exciting news coming up, that gets us closer to understanding the history of Mars"
Set a level of expectation.
Love feedburner, but you have to wonder why they couldn't be themselves.
You need a decent portfolio site
Design and build in in WordPress or something similar. Prove your design chops here by having a well-design, functional, and more importantly clear message to potential customers. You want to let your customers have confidence. It doesn't have to be amazing. Mine certainly isn't. http://andrewheins.ca/
Your first job might be among your social circle
Mine was the Tae Kwon Do dojo I attended. They were paying WAY too much for hosting, so they let me make a site and change their hosting. They now pay 1/10th the hosting costs. Demo that site on your portfolio.
Next, you start bidding for work
FreelanceSwitch.com was the place that landed me the most work, but Craigslist and the bevy of other sites work well too. The ability to communicate clearly with your potential clients and bid within a reasonable range are key here.
Build your portfolio on low-end jobs
You will low-ball at first. That's ok. Raise your rates after each job. Quote by project, not by hour.
Find other freelancers with complementary skills
Being a dev, I latched on to a few designers who didn't want to have to code all their work. They can offer full solutions, I get paid. It's a great relationship.
It just seems weird to have a tld absent a host.
If you want to access Apple (generically), users will still go to apple.com because even if they know that there's a .apple domain, what's the root host?
My best guess is a conventional default emerges shortly.
If you have my.home, it makes sense. If you type www.home, it really looks ugly, but I guess it works, and we've spent the past few years moving away from including "www" as a whole.
Typing "com" into my url bar doesn't get me anywhere, so I'm assuming typing "home" won't either. If I bought "apple", is there going to be a conventional or canonical "default"? home.apple?
I really find this confusing.
Another example of a potentially great technology that loses credibility at a critical juncture due to execution details.
By supporting Obtvse, you're stating that a composer's work (the act of creating beautiful music) has no value.
I honestly don't understand how someone can say that stealing a design is fine but code isn't.
I'm extremely disappointed with the reaction of the HN community on this, and even more concerned about how designers will look at our community moving forward. Why would any designer participate if they know the community believes their work has no value?
If you give something away for free, I'll take it for free.
If you give me the option to pay $0, and give me a reasonable suggested price(this book), I'll pay the suggested price.
If you give me the option to pay $0, show me what others are paying(humble bundle), I'll pay the median.
If you give me the option to pay $0, and give me "bonuses" at certain price breaks (kickstarter, humble bundle), I'll pay at the most attractive price break.
It actually makes a ton of sense to adopt these kind of pricing structures because people actually pay!
I think the only thing that you lose here is access to an actual "diff", but visually, you get most of it.
Grats on a fantastic achievement.
Does anyone else feel this line is more suited to a Hollywood movie than a Reuters release?
The biggest exception is for anyone involved in graphics, front-end development, or often works with graphic designers. The lack of native installation of Photoshop and Illustrator wrecks it.
That's what largely spurred my decision to buy a Mac. There's only one OS that currently offers a Unix CLI with native Adobe Creative Suite installation. If Adobe ever offers native CS on Linux, I'll be Linux for life.
What we've got isn't working.
Either way, it's good to finally see them moving forward.
I'll be slightly disappointed because there's something appealing in the possibility that the universe doesn't fit nicely into an equation.
On the other hand, that our great minds were able to see a problem, come up with a solution, test it and then say "Yes, we accurately predicted an unobservable, and yet fundamental principal of our universe" would be damn impressive.
"Bill, would you consider returning to lead Microsoft?"
"No."
Became a 1000 word article. Amazing.
The "HN Dream" has always seemed to be:
1) Make a startup
2) Strike it rich
3) Acquire millions (billions? I forget which is "cool")
4) With [bm]illions, change the world
Gates personifies that. Why on Earth would he backtrack to step 1 again?
If we think about the future of touch and gesture interfaces, I absolutely think we'll see a hover state be implemented, but it won't be connected to a mouse cursor. That's moving backwards.
There will likely come a point where a touch or gesture interface will be able to tell if your hand or finger is quite literally -hovering- over a touch-enabled element, and will be able to give you context.
It's seems completely intuitive. If you're hovering over an element, you're likely hesitating, so give more context. Preview the next screen, provide info in a tooltip. Why wouldn't you take advantage of this?
I wonder if they're implying we should use html5 v2 for mobile now. I know v2 has a "mobile-first" focus...
With Chrome, my browser automatically updates for stuff like this. I never see it and always have the correct version.
For Firefox, I have to purposefully seek out the next version, and considering I'm still upgrading some of my machines to 4.0 from 3.5 (I downloaded 4.0 yesterday on one machine), this is kind of annoying.
I'm not sure a quick release schedule works quite as well if you've got to manually upgrade. I like Chrome for the same reason I sign up for automatic bill payments - I understand it's important, but I don't want to have to deal with it.
It seems to me that if you need a guide for the journey, you're already kind of missing the point.
Disclaimer: not a hacker, by any definition
A future market, if you're interested.