A List Apart’s From URL to Interactive series just concluded, and I think it’s worth a read for any web developer.

It’s structured in a way that reminds me of one of my favourite books, Charles Petzold‘s Code, moving from the bottom of the stack to the top.

This is a really interesting technique from Netflix to fake English strings to look like ones in other languages, in order to make sure long strings aren’t being truncated disruptively.

An interesting report, but I kept wondering about this:

Apple decided to go a step further and just begin hiring these creatives directly into Apple

What do these people actually work on? The story makes it clear it’s not Hollywood stuff (because they’re understandably hesitant to bring that work in to Apple), but then what? Does nothing actually come out of this and are these just the world’s most expensive testers?

A turn-by-turn description of how Julia Evans reverse engineered the proprietary image format used by the iOS Notability app.

As she says:

People don’t usually invent totally custom file formats! Nothing in here was really complicated – it was just some existing standard formats (zip! apple plist! an array of floats!) combined together in a pretty simple way.

Doing the Lord’s work (finding the perfect Unicode arrow to illustrate an external link), I stumbled upon ↯, which I can only assume is a tribute to Harry Potter.

An eBook by Addy Osmani on everything you could want to know, and then some, about the most efficient ways to serve images in browsers.

It serves to Google’s credit that existing goo.gl redirects will remain (for the time being…), but this is just another in a seemingly list of tales that all boil down to: You can’t trust Google with this sort of thing.

Fascinating story in The Blizzard (an excellent quarterly football publication for the uninitiated) about the takeover of Notts County.

The Kasper Schmeichel angle (and the general superstar allure of Eriksson and Campbell) meant it was covered in the Danish media, but I had always just assumed the funding dried up, not realising the extent of the scam.

Ned Batchelder on the grey zone between ‘interpreted’ and ‘compiled’ languages where Python (and most programming languages, really) is.

This is the sort of problem which on the surface seems so simple, but where the immediate solution is so wasteful, and can indeed be hard to pull off; my side project Oversigter has been doing this incorrectly for years.

The solution is elegant, although it can be difficult to pull off in practice if you don’t have a lot of control over your hosting environment, as I don’t where Oversigter is hosted.

Via Simon Willison