Johan Ronsse

I can’t believe I’m about to ask this in 2016 but I am looking for a new word processor.

I am currently using Mou but manually writing file references and not having a preview of what your document will look like feels a bit 1989.

I tried MarsEdit but it doesn’t suit my needs. It should be rich text like Pages and Microsoft Word, but:

• It shouldn’t mess with my original image files i.e. when I drag a JPG inside the editor, I should be able to still access that JPG in its uncompressed format.
• I would also like it to export to clean HTML e.g. a paragraph is a paragraph, headings become h2 etc., without extra weird styling tags.

Anyone knows something out there built for this purpose?

It’s funny how we think that “everyone knows” something, and it turns out that that really isn’t the case.

I was having a conversation about what I want Mono to be, and I referenced 37Signals (now known as Basecamp).

The other person didn’t know that company, and I thought: huh? How can you not know 37Signals?

For me, 37Signals is a company that inspired me at multiple points in my career. I’ve been reading their blog Signal v. Noise since what feels like forever. They wrote some brilliant books that have influenced the way I think about software. They have some extremely smart people on the team.

So, I was yammering on about what I want to do with Mono; and the topic turned to 37Signals. They are a great inspiration for how things should be.

As we are growing, there are decisions to be made about how we deal with certain work aspects within the company: software buying, holidays, the tools we use etc.

I like 37Signals’s approach to a lot of things. For instance, they have this policy where you work a bit longer in winter, but in summer you only work four days out of five. That just makes a lot of sense.

At Mono we don’t really have a holiday policy: you just take holidays when you want. The idea is that you let the team know in advance, and you don’t overdo it (e.g. take a three month retreat every year).

This works for now but at one point we might formalize it more. I’ve been having discussions with other founders and one problem that they point out is that some people just end up not taking holidays, which is not really something we want to promote.

Another thing I always liked about 37Signals was their policy to give every employee a credit card that the person could use for work related expenses. That implies a high level of trust and cuts down on the red tape.

There’s so much more to say about 37Signals – for example the fact that they operate as a remote company and wrote a book about it – but this post is already lengthy enough. Onwards!

I am compiling a list of high quality icon sets. Here’s what I have:

• AIGA symbol signs
• Glyphish
• Nova
• Geomicons
• Font Awesome
• Helveticons
• Entypo
• Glyphicons
• Picons
• Maki
• Octicons
• Pictos
• Symbolicons

Any favorites welcome in the comments!

These days I am getting all these e-mails to join hackathons about certain topics. I wonder what the organisations that set up hackathons are actually hoping to achieve.

They are usually set up by government funded organisations (like MIC and VRT) and by big government funded companies (Proximus, Bpost)

I once participated in Apps for Ghent. I thought it was a nice idea, and I had fun building something quick in an afternoon. We made an app called Doctors in Ghent which, now that I think about it, is totally useless, because a directory of doctors should not be city specific, much less contained in an “app”.

The event mostly showed how bad the public data was at that point. I think things have improved in recent years thanks to the efforts of some great people (thanks Bart and Pieter!)

But anyway, back to hackathons. Why would I go to a hackathon? The only reason I can think of is to meet new interesting people, but in that case, why don’t you just a) throw a party or b) host coding nights where people can meet and work together on meaningful projects?

The people at 10to1 used to do these coding nights and that was pretty cool.

What I dislike about hackathons is that they always seem to involve the same structure in which meaningful work is impossible: find a random group of people, brainstorm about an idea, and start coding it. In a single day.

Developing an idea into something meaningful takes months. Actually doing something real takes years. So why would you sit down and try to do something in a single day?

To me, a lot of this smells like organisations that don’t really know what to do with their (government) money, who have an internal brainstorm session about how to “innovate“ which leads to somebody coming up with a hackathon to “get people to innovate”.

I recognize that a lot of connections have been made through hackathons, startup weekends and even startup buses, but isn’t the innovation aspect of it a bit of a sham?

Remember that post about the new Belgian Railways signage? Apparently they added a tutorial.

Photo via Rik.

Some time ago, I used to make a lot of these “brochure” type websites.

What frustrated me back then was that more often than not I was forced into an uncomfortable position. I had to make a good website, but the client’s branding would be subpar.

Their logo wouldn’t be any good, they would have chosen a cheap font somewhere, and basically they didn’t have a good brand to start with.

So I hear you say: that’s your job, isn’t it? To fix that?

I don’t agree. I think branding is a separate project. It needs to be done before the website project. For me, branding is a combination of a logo, a brand message and assets (illustrations, icons, patterns, etc.)

As a web designer, you’re confronted with this situation often, so you just roll with it and do the best you can. Maybe you nudge the client that they really need to improve their logo, and they need work on brand assets, and also they need better copywriting.

Because you are “the designer”, before you know it, this is your work: fixing the client’s brand. You are hiring illustrators, you are working with copywriters, you are organizing photo shoots and you are employing logo designers to figure the right brand for the client

Or, if you are starting out, maybe you just do the best you can with iStockphoto.com, whatever you can find using a Creative Commons search. There is no font budget so you look for open source fonts, or you are “creative” (I really hate that word) with what you have. You write the copy yourself because nobody else cares and the dummy copy that you wrote becomes the main copy of the final website.

The problem with all of this is you are wearing 2 hats: brand designer, and website designer. Branding is important, but it’s a separate craft. It can’t be sneaked into a website design project.

I mention CRUD a lot, and then people have this look on their face like they don’t know what I’m talking about.

So I think I’ll explain CRUD, this way I can always link back this article.

In software there is this term called CRUD, which stands for Create, Read, Update and Delete (sometimes called Destroy).

Think of a photos application: you can read your photos, update them, destroy them. Then you can create albums, update the albums (put photos in them), and if you want, you can delete them. Deleting sounds a lot nicer than destroying.

I like to think when you can spot these CRUD-like patterns, you could call what you are making an application. When what you are making is mostly about accessing content, you are making a website.

But I can easily shoot down my own argument here: there are also apps for primarily accessing content – like the Kindle reading application.

For years I’ve argued there is a difference between “apps” and “websites” but ultimately I have to agree with Jeremy‘s thoughts here. Website vs. app is a false dichotomy; it’s better to think of things as being on a sliding scale. And even that is hard to define. His Wikipedia example is very good: a page on Wikipedia is a document… until you start editing it. Is it an app now?

I love Modernizr to check if a browser support a certain CSS feature, but I found myself in the situation where I only had to check for flexbox support.

In this case, it seems a bit ridiculous to load Modernizr. You can use the following code instead:

var doc = document.body || document.documentElement;
var style = doc.style;

if ( style.webkitFlexWrap == '' ||
    style.msFlexWrap == '' ||
    style.flexWrap == '' ) {
  doc.className += " supports-flex";
}

Via Ethan Marcotte’s article “Putting My Patterns through Their Paces”.