Vim window movement
The Ctrl-W gives you the “windows command mode”, lets see:
Ctrl + W + R - To rotate windows up/left.
Ctrl + W + r - To rotate windows down/right.
You can use the Ctrl + W + navigation keys to change windows’ position too:
Ctrl + W L - Move the current window to the “far right”
Ctrl + W H - Move the current window to the “far left”
Ctrl-W J - Move the current window to the “very top”
Ctrl + W K - Move the current window to the “very bottom”
Wirify
With tools like Wirify you can transform webpages into wireframes with the click of a button. I think this can be useful when prototyping in HTML. Complete the prototype using everything level of fidelity you need, then create a wireframe from the prototype to use for discussion. Kind of backwards but seems nice to me.
Agile Prototyping
This is a short extract from a podcast with Jared Spool interviewing Dave McFarland on how important it is that designers starts to realize the benefits of developing interactive prototypes with a little help from som javascript-libraries.
Listen to it and read along in the full transcript here: http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2012/02/17/dave-mcfarland-jquery-for-agile-prototyping/
Jared: I was with a team and we were doing sketches, and then we went home for the day. We came in the next day, and one of the guys had worked for a couple hours and he actually had a rough working version of what we had sketched out. I asked him how long he’d spent on it, and he said, “It was only about an hour, because everything we were doing was already ready-made in terms of plugins and base functionality.” I said, “Have you been doing this for a long time?” He says, “No, I just picked it up a few weeks ago. I just got into jQuery for the first time. I’ve never written any programs before in my life. It’s just so easy.” Do you think that’s typical or is that unusual?
Dave: Oh no, I hear that all the time. It’s incredibly empowering for technically inclined designers to jump over that hurdle where they feel like they can’t program to being able to do really, really amazing things. I see a lot of people sort of say, “Oh, these plugins, what a handicap they are. Basically you’re not learning the underlying technology.” I see all of these kind of enabling technologies as really a starting point for real programming. I see a lot of people who sort of–they get into jQuery. They start using the plugins. They’re learning more and more about JavaScript and jQuery, and at a certain point they become dissatisfied with what plugins can do, because they now grok the entire JavaScript world.
They start programming their own. They start making their own plugins. Or they’ll take a plugin and they’ll rewrite it. I think this sort of entry level enabling technologies are amazing. They help generate a new breed of programmer that we wouldn’t normally have, because the barrier to entry was so high in the past, and now it’s so low that people can get really jazzed and they start to ramp up their own skill set in a way that’s really comfortable for them. They become better and better programmers.
Jared: Yeah, I mean this makes perfect sense to me. Do you have a Trader Joe’s near you?
Dave: Oh, yeah.
Jared: We have them here and one of the things that I’ve recently learned is that you can do amazing things with Trader Joe’s stuff, right. One of the first recipes I learned involved taking their tapenade, which is this mixture–I don’t make tapenade. It’s got…
Dave: Olives, right?
Jared: Sometimes it’s olives, vegetables, and–I don’t know. It’s just this sort of relish, I guess, is what you would think of it as. You take a jar of that and you put it in pasta and chicken, and all of a sudden you’ve got this amazing dish. It’s a restaurant-quality dish. And the thing was, when you were talking about plugins for jQuery, I was thinking of the same thing. I actually don’t know how to make tapenade, but I can actually delight my family with this amazing dish that I throw together after work in about 10 minutes for no effort. And they’re like, “Oh, my gosh, this is awesome.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I emptied a jar of tapenade…”
[laughter]
Jared: “…whatever that is.” That’s like programming with plugins. I don’t know how the plugin works, but it does everything I need it to do, so who cares?
(R)Evolutions per Minute: Cargo Bikes in the US - a trailer for the crowdsourced documentary (by LIZCAN)
