🆕 On the blog: How I built Calibre’s new dynamic hexagonal world map, in just 10kb.
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benschwarz
@benschwarz@front-end.social
mastodon 4.7.3Founder & Product developer @ calibreapp.com. Into sustainability, online privacy, cycling, photography, music, hiking, native country and creative pursuits 🌞
1253 Followers
526 Following
35 Posts
Joined November 06, 2022
My website:
Calibre:
GitHub:
I spent years manually taking product screenshots. Cropping them. Replacing them. Seeing many outdated images. Losing the will to live.
So I automated it with Playwright. 585 screenshots, every theme, every viewport, generated in minutes.
But the real surprise? Opening the output folder turned into the best design QA tool I've ever had. Inconsistencies you’d never notice while navigating suddenly become obvious when you see everything at once.
David Attenborough turned 100 years old today.
David spent some 70 years travelling to the most remote and far-reaching places in the world, and brought it to our living rooms.
To see the wonder and beauty of nature is one of life’s best gifts, one he shared with us all. What a rich legacy.
I was thinking about this interview question over the weekend, but was more thinking:
- User hits enter
- Dismisses email sign up
- Dismisses cookie notice, isn't sure if cookies got stored anyway
- Downloads 3mb of JavaScript that recreates a URL router, query string parser, date library, CSS rendering, buttons, accordions, and form controls
- Renders one page
- User closes tab
The long way around.
RE: @assaf@mas.to
I recall back to a time long forgotten, with Kathy Sierra’s excellent “don’t make the demo look done”.
This stuck with me since the day I read it, almost 20 years ago.
TLDR: if you demo looks complete, people will believe it’s complete. But it isn’t. It’s a pile of tradeoffs, three children in a trench coat trying to act like a real man.
RE: @benschwarz@front-end.social
I ran into a few people IRL who read this post and started talking to me about map projections. I see you map perverts!! There are dozens of us 👀 👀
🚀 Calibre’s Real User Monitoring has arrived
Session-based Core Web Vitals monitoring. See actual DOM elements dragging your site down. No cookies, no bloat, predictable pricing. Let's go!
RE: @benschwarz@front-end.social
I actually wasn’t sure if anyone would really be interested. Is that imposter syndrome?
TLDR: always publish. If you enjoy something, others will too. ✌️
A new calibreapp.com customer overnight shared a review that got me all giddy 🥰
"I never thought I’d really 'enjoy' using a performance tool, but everything about Calibre seems solid and makes identifying and trying to fix these issues quite fun in a way."
What a review. It made my day. Never doubt the lift you can give someone with positive feedback.
You are *not* imagining it — Airline websites really are the slowest and most frustrating to use.
Only 3.7% pass Google's Core Web Vitals. For comparison, 56.5% of news sites clear the same bar.
See how your favourite airline ranks:
https://calibreapp.com/tools/website-speed-leaderboard/airline-booking
Replying to
@cliffordheath I’m regularly shocked how smart some creative tech people are, building all sorts of clever tech for their homes, or building a better understanding of the world. Super cool to see what weird stuff people end up learning
Replying to
@decryption@aus.social it’s a $2000 phone, it should just be dockable. Make a $200 HDMI dock! 😁
Replying to
@ajft@aus.social @jessta@aus.social aye it’s super frustrating. I just try to remember that local council have a lot to do, and kind, respectful persistence is seemingly been a good way to influence what gets done.
Replying to
@slightlyoff@toot.cafe @mwichary@mastodon.online bankruptcy? customers who are tasteless boomers? the automatic punishments seem befitting
Replying to
@richiekhoo@hachyderm.io for a newsletter, button down https://buttondown.com/ for transactional sending, postmark is still ace despite the recent takeover
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@orangeacme it’s incredible that governments everywhere can be easily thwarted by a 10 year old
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@gnoll110@ruby.social afaik, no harm no foul, play on. facial recognition will continue. how nice they can identify you and how much you spend.
how much is a shovel?
how much you got?
$200
oh, it's your lucky day, this shovel is just $199
🫠
Replying to
@gnoll110@ruby.social floodgates open. I (mostly) avoid all of these businesses because of it
Replying to
@decryption@aus.social Its annoying when you have to explain to a customer that they're not getting the full refund (because they forgot to turn off a renewal or something)
Replying to
i suspect a lot of hardworking aussie tradies have no idea they could be videoed and identified
Replying to
@ajft@aus.social it sucks but sometimes they do have people on the road at the right time. If it’s repeated you can make a case for upgrades to the infrastructure, or have a ticket issued
Source: did this recently and some small changes were made by council. It took at least a few hours of my time tho and YMMV
Replying to
@ajft@aus.social Please report to council. They do respond… not always in time, but SOMETIMES they come and ticket 🦅
Replying to
data gets sent all over the world for processing and there is no mention of how long data is kept
or whom by
they have third parties, but they don't list them
Replying to
@implgeo I did not, but it might be worth considering for a future update. I like how it scales down Russia, Antarctica, scales up Australia etc. lovely.
✨ New blog post by me: All about Calibre’s new UX Rating metric and how it categorises overall user experience quality and distills into something everyone can understand.
You’ll learn how it works and why it’s a powerful paradigm for team focus.