Medium has brought some interesting ideas to the idea of reading as user experience. Among them: estimated reading time.

A developer or designer using Jekyll who wants to add a Medium-style reading time estimate to a blog template will likely find that accomplishing this a simple matter of getting Jekyll to do some math and output the result – sorta.

The reading time equation is the number of words divided by typical reading speed of words per minute. The only catch is that Jekyll’s math syntax is a bit uglier than syntax used in programming languages such as... More

I find myself drawn to clever solutions for common problems.

One recent design I built called for side-by-side buttons. The user could click a button, which would maximize while other the choices would minimize. One solution would be declare CSS styles – btn -- default and btn -- active – and then toggle states on click using JavaScript or jQuery.

Even though the controls were buttons visually, functionally they behaved like radio buttons, something devs already have in their HTML toolbox.

Styling forms can be tricky, but it is possible to apply a little CSS... More

Marco Arment drew ire – and admiration – for his blog post arguing that Apple software had lost “the functional high ground.”

Arment isn’t a typical user – as a developer his view is somewhat more like a mechanic with a car up on a lift – not the person who drives it every day. His view may not be that of a typical user. In addition, he wrote later that he “looked back at what I wrote with regret, guilt, and embarrassment.” But further statements suggest he stands by his central idea that Apple software has not... More