Roundup: quality content, styling cursors, misbehaving, side projects, and “Hey Siri”
Murray Steele
Nov. 3, 2017
The difference between quality content and surface content - Graeme M
Content is king. But what does that mean? Content Designer @ElisabethWard04 tells all. https://t.co/BKOmpdtBei
— PDS (@ParliDigital) October 19, 2017
Parliament Digital Service have done it again. This time on the difference between surface and depth content. The blog posts by their content team are not only great reads, but they provide practical tips for the reader to take away.
Buttons Shouldn't Have a Hand Cursor - Andrew W
https://blog.marvelapp.com/buttons-shouldnt-hand-cursor/
Pretty much everyone does cursor: pointer in their button CSS but Adam
Silver explains why we've all been doing it wrong and that the hand cursor
should be reserved for links only.
Why we don't act like we should - Elena T
http://www.npr.org/2017/10/23/559581601/predictably-unpredictable-why-we-dont-act-like-we-should
A podcast episode from Hidden Brain about why we misbehave, instead of doing what we're supposed to do. It's also a discussion about how the source of our money influences the way we spend it.
No I have no side code projects to show you - Elena T
https://www.codementor.io/ezekielbuchheit/no-i-have-no-side-code-projects-to-show-you-cz1tyhgdz
In my opinion, this is a very rare article written with a clear head and mature attitude towards quality of life for software developers. It feels like a lot of things described here would be damaging if people wrote them on their personal profiles or would say them out loud in interviews or professional settings. However, I think people would benefit from achieving this sort of balance in their life, more than they would lose by making this a subject of discussion.
How “Hey Siri” works - Murray S
https://machinelearning.apple.com/2017/10/01/hey-siri.html
In this article Apple explain how “Hey Siri” works. This isn't how the whole Siri service works, just how the always-on service listening for the trigger words “Hey Siri” (or non-english equivalent) detects the phrase and then triggers the full Siri service to wake up and process the rest of the audio. It's an interesting mix of hardware, software on the device, and software running on a server somewhere all working together. Equally interesting is that it has to work on both iPhones and Apple Watches, devices with very different performance and memory characteristics.
Track of the Week - Graeme M
I've been chosen for TOTW for the second week in a row. Clearly my impeccable taste in music has been noted. For this TOTW, let's go way back to a time in the very early 00's. Wyclef Jean was riding high in the charts, The Rock was known as a wrestler and it's the first time I'd been introduced to the electric slide...