The screen: more apps on each page, hugely improved reading comfort, yet the phone still easily fits into a jean pocket

One of the things I'd most enjoyed about the iPhone, from the start, had been its size: the three-and-a-half-inch screen and 3:2 screen ratio seemed so ideal that the gradually rising press speculation about the advent of a wider screen that gathered momentum over the past year or so had made me rather uneasy. The last thing I wanted was a phone/tablet hybrid, effectively a device falling between two stools, in my pocket.

As it turns out, with the benefit of hindsight after using the device for a few days, the new screen is an unmitigated improvement: it fits just as easily into one's front jean pocket, if anything more easily than the thicker iPhone 4S. Most apps—Mail, Calendar, and generally any and all newspaper apps—make for much more comfortable reading in the new format. The extra row of apps is also a huge improvement: my home page now includes almost all the apps I use on a daily basis. The phone is also 20 per cent lighter than the 4S iteration, and this is very noticeable: I find it feels as if it almost flies out of my hand every time I use it.

Aesthetically, the iPhone 5 is an unmitigated downgrade

Aesthetically, on the other hand, I'm definitely unconvinced and wouldn't put the iPhone 5 in the same league as its predecessor: even in black, the new aluminium back doesn't have the simple elegance of plain glass. It also attracts a lot of dirt and is a pain to clean. I've already ordered a case from Beyzacases, which makes the smartest iPhone cases, to keep the device protected before it starts getting scratched: the fact is that aluminium is not as scratch-resistant as the stainless steel used in the iPhone 4 and 4S.

On the day I'm writing this post, my excellent friend Justin Blanton blogged to say he regretted having chosen a black iPhone 5 and actually took his back to the store and swapped it for a white one. I basically feel exactly the same, and although I won't bother Parnasse to swap mine, if you haven't got yours, I'd definitely go for white:

The aluminum on the black model is anodized/painted black pretty much everywhere but the front glass, and that layer of paint so easily scratches off that I shutter to think what these black models are going to look like after just a week of use by a "normal" person.

The white model is painted only on the mid-back portion of the body, and so the sides and chamfers, while still overly susceptible to nicks and scratches, don't advertise their warts as much because there isn't a glaring silver color sitting under a matte black coat.

The hardware is marginally improved in the new phone, though the coexistence of devices with different dock connectors is going to make our daily lives rather drearier

The transition to Lightning cables, too, however understandable given the thirty-pin connector used for the past nine years is technologically obsolete, is turning out to be a pain. I like docking my iPhone everywhere: on my desk at he office, and by my bed at night. Having to lie it flat feels like a regression, and Apple's apparent plan not to issue a dock for the device at all perplexing: I've backed ecoustik, a Kickstarter-funded third-party dock that actually looks quite attractive, but more will probably emerge in time. I ended up popping into the Apple Store on Saturday to buy a handful of $19 Lightning cables just so as to keep them plugged in alongside my existing 30-pin cables to charge my iPad and iPhone without needing adapters. The transition until all one's devices have been migrated to the new connecter is going to be a slow and painful one.

The new, A6 processor (Apple claims that the A6 doubles CPU and GPU performance relative to the A5) considerably improves performance: apps open faster and stability is noticeably better. Screen legibility and crispness, even when set to low levels, is quite a bit higher: Apple claims that the iPhone 5 has 44 per cent more color saturation, making photos, icons, videos, games, and other elements appear more vivid.

The camera isn't noticeably improved: Analysis by Chipworks reveals that the sensor is still provided by Sony and is similar—if not identical—to the Exmor R sensor in the iPhone 4S. Having said that, he slightly wider angle, and the improvements due to the dedicated image signal processor embedded in the iPhone 5's A6 processor, as well as improved software, mean the iPhone now takes superb photographs. I usually transfer them to my iPad for processing using Nik Software's excellent Snapseed processing app. The camera is also noticeably faster (Apple claims by forty per cent, but that may be slightly exaggerated). The larger camera button made possible by the bigger screen also makes photographs a lot easier to take. Low-light images are definitely much better than with the iPhone 4S: this is because Apple added a dynamic low-light shooting mode that automatically gets activated when light levels get below a certain threshold.

I can't comment on the LTE aspect of the iPhone 5 because France, where I now live, doesn't currently have a 4G-enabled carrier at all—but users in the US have been reporting download speeds of anything between 4Mbps and 10Mbps, which is pretty impressive. Battery life, however, as far as I can tell, is noticeably better, but I haven't tested it extensively.

iOS 6: Apple's mobile software has reached maturity

That leaves perhaps one final aspect: iOS6. The now-traditional concomitant release of new hardware and software always adds to the rather childish excitement one experiences at each new iPhone iteration. Most of my readers will by now have tried the new features out, so there's no point in attempting to make any sort of comprehensive review of them, particularly as with Apple's mobile OS now in the full bloom of maturity, the novelty comes in subtle improvements rater than bold strides. Still, a few of the new features do stand out.

I for one am not joining the ranks of the doomsayers regarding Apple's current Maps fiasco. If the choice had been mine, I wouldn't necessarily have embarked on it ^[i], but I suspect Apple will allot a massive amount of its rather substantial resources into righting the issue, which has quite justifiably earned it a fair amount of ridicule (when using the routing feature to take a metro trip in Paris on Saturday, Apple Maps gave my location as the South Atlantic Ocean). The eventual competition it will provide to Google will be a good thing in itself. And the addition of routing with the plug-in role devolved to third-party apps will, once it matures, provide a substantial improvement to user experience.

One other feature I'm a huge fan of is the new Do Not Disturb: it's subtly different from the Silent function connected to the physical switch on the side of the machine, and puts an end to the annoyance of being unnecessarily woken up for the pettiest of reasons, or for no reason at all, by anything from text messages to actual phone calls. You just decide once and for all what you want to sift out, and over what duration, and then just forget about it. The physical switch remains available for the distinct, but equally crucially necessary, function of stopping your phone from embarrassing you with noise during meetings, church services etc.

I've on the whole become quite addicted to Siri—I of course use the British, resolutely lower-middle-class male voice version, rather than the perkily cheerful American female most people reading this will be familiar with, but finds me quite impossible to understand. And while his rather drab accent is a tad irritating, as is Siri's reliance on a rather patchy server-side back end, I've grown used to using it for setting simple reminders (which then get pushed seamlessly to Things), appointments and wake-up calls. What people haven't quite realised, however, is that the list of things you can do with Siri has been significantly broadened with iOS 6. In particular, you can now send tweets with Siri, which I find quite enjoyable.

Another much overdue improvement that finally made it to iOS 6 is the App Store: you no longer get kicked out of the store when you complete an app purchase or update, leaving you free to carry it another operation—which, in practice, happens nearly every time. The store also no longer systematically prompts one for one's password—it still does so from time to time, and there's no way of disabling the feature, but it seems to only kick in when the store hasn't been in focus for a while.

All in all, whether you actually need to upgrade to the iPhone 5 from the iPhone 4S is pretty debatable: the improved hardware makes it worthwhile—but the flimsy materials arguably make it more of a downgrade than anything else. For me, they took much of the excitement out of an otherwise worthy set of small but useful improvements to the device.

1. This of course reminds one of Churchill's famous quip on hearing that Anthony Eden had decided to withdraw from Suez: 'I'm not sure that I would have dared to start it-but I certainly wouldn't have dared to stop it!'

Facebook is indeed, as Blodget says, extremely expensive relative to its expected earnings over the next year or two. But, unlike most businesses, Facebook’s long-term upside has nothing to do with its expected earnings over the next year or two. It’s believed by many to be extraordinarily valuable not because of its advertising income but because it has a real chance of becoming a company unlike any that has ever existed before, with the possible exception of pre-breakup AT&T.

It's amazing how the idea that Facebook somehow succeeded in abolishing the traditional business model (its 'upside has nothing to do with its expected earnings over the next year or two') is surviving even the most botched IPO in stock market history. Despite this article being almost surreal in its naivety, it makes fascinating reading.

★

The platform wars have created the following paradox; in order to compete with Facebook, Google attempts to build a social network, In order to compete with Google, Facebook attempts to build a phone — both diverging away from their core competency in their efforts.

The rise of Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook was so Schumpeterian in both style and substance that it had the seeds of its own destruction planted in it from day one. The bohemian-intellectual image successfully pioneered in the early 2000s by the founders of Google effectively vaccinated the markets, for better of for worse, against the idea that tech companies were subject to the same valuation and/or reporting constraints as old-economy stocks. But Mr Zuckerberg is of a different generation, and a different type, to Mssrs Brin and Page—and Ms Sandberg, likewise, is no Eric Schmidt. What has consistently characterised Facebook has been its superficiality: emerging, more accidentally than by design, as the off-hours toy of a college dropout, its strategy has never conformed to notions such as customer service, integrity or transparency.

And while it is unlucky for Mr Zuckerberg that his toy's IPO coincided with the jitters induced by the euro crisis, the fact is that its valuation, at about 65 times consensus 2013 estimated earnings per share, was, by any stretch of the imagination, absurd. Indeed, it still is.

Yet beyond the rather trivial fact of overvaluation—unfortunate, perhaps, for those who bought securities supported by nothing more than hype, but on his own systematically short-term assumptions hugely beneficial to Mr Zuckerberg who thus achieved his childish ambition of valuing Facebook at one hundred billion dollars—the most astonishing thing is that the world's largest social network, like Myspace which was in that position just five years ago, has no strategy. Ms Totsis, who has seen through Mr Zuckerberg's main weakness—his attention-deficit syndrome—rightly puts the likelihood of Facebook succeeding in a move into the phone sector as rather on the low side:

This kind of project, as others have speculated, requires the kind of execution Facebook isn’t known for, and the company will most likely have to work with a third-party in order to actually ship. Some have suggested that it buy a beleaguered hardware startup like RIM or a stalwart like HTC because the kind of long-term focus required here is just not endemic to Facebook company culture.

Facebook isn't staring into the abyss—yet. But Mr Zuckerberg, like many of his generation, appears structurally incapable of long-term planning. I'd be interested to read something—anything—making a serious case for the company pulling out of the hole into which it has got itself, entirely through its founder's childish unbearable lightness of being.

When Microsoft set its sights on a market, it would squeeze the life out of the market leader like an anconda wrapping itself around its prey. Before it was done, the company struck numerous segments, including personal computing (Apple and IBM), word processing (WordPerfect), spreadsheets (Lotus), databases (Borland and Sybase), networking (Novell) and Internet browsers (Netscape).

It’s not hyperbole to say that Apple’s phoenix-like rise and Google’s ascent are directly and positively correlated with Gates’ decision to step away from running his company as CEO in 2000.

A remarkably prescient look at Apple and Google’s recent strategies compared with Microsoft’s in times now past.

★

In the last twelve months I’ve actually been steadily moving away from the notion of stuff, and material things—so it’s a bit harder to get enthusiastic about it than I used to. But for what it’s worth, here’s an update of my previously-listed categories and items.

Hardware and accessories

iPhone 4S

No surprises here. And, yes, I use (’British’ English) Siri for some stuff and, on the whole, he understands the Queen’s English even if he doesn’t really speak it.

Macbook Air

I can’t even remember the time when I didn’t have one of these, and literally every single one of my friends who’s bought a new computer in the last year has got one. I don’t expect anything new here—bar an increase in hard disk and RAM when the newest iteration is made available, inevitably, at some point later this year.

Beyzacases

One of the hardest things about owning a piece of Apple hardware is how difficult it is to find a decent case for them: I’m not quite sure why this is, but cases are a market segment in which the hoi polloi’s inclinations towards bad taste seem to flourish well beyond reason. Beyzacases’s zero series Macbook Air case and the matching iPhone version (some Apple stores also sell their own rather nice custom version of the latter) solved my problem nicely. They’re made from the finest leather, are delightfully cheap and service is superb.

iPad

I still don’t use one, except an old iPad 1 for reading my RSS, tweets, The Spectator and The Economist. I hate the inordinate amount of time it takes to type anything on the iPad, or send anything to Facebook or Twitter, and just don’t buy the lack of keyboard that slows everything one does to a trickle. I may yet convert it to update my supermarket shopping lists if I can find a suitable hook to fix it to my kitchen wall.

Software

Sparrow Mail for iPhone and Mac

The hottest software I’ve seen in years, now on my iPhone as well as my Mac. Enabling notifications on the iPhone for Sparrow, despite despite everyone complaining about it and despite Apple trying to make it not happen, is a child’s play if you use Boxcar for iPhone, with the added bonus of being able to switch off notifications at night.

Google Search Duck Duck Go

I extolled the virtues of DuckDuckGo last year, but in the intervening period, Google Search has actually been getting massively better and Duck Duck Go worse, despite being very effectively ramped by the Fred Wilson propaganda machine. Having said that, it still makes sense to set DuckDuckGo as your default search engine on Safari, so as to use its powerful !bangs syntax to carry out searches… in other search engines (it makes your Google searches anonymous by default).

Byword Writeroom

I switched to the fabulous Byword minimalist, Markdown-enabled text editor for Mac last year. Since then, it’s been belatedly discovered by Shawn Blanc, who swears by it, and by Ben Brooks, who prefers iA Writer ^[i]. It’s also been successfully ported to iOS: read my excellent friend Brett Terpstra’s review of the mobile version—and bear in mind that iA Writer for iOS doesn’t even support Markdown. And, yes, I use my iPhone 4S to dictate texts using Byword: it works really well and is much faster than typing stuff on an iPad.

Google Apps Premier

No change here. I’m not using iCloud—Apple’s mail server is a joke—except for contacts, which it does a rather good job of syncing. ^[ii]

Dropbox

On the subject of shunning iCloud, I’m sticking with Dropbox—if only because it has become the de facto standard for syncing most server-based applications, such as 1Password, Byword, etc. I also use it to sync most of my Application Support data, using symlinks, so that my iMac and Macbook Air preferences are always in sync for all my apps. iCloud support is, however, growing and I expect within a few months it may be worth taking a second look at this. But at the moment Apple’s solution doesn’t seem to have proved itself yet.

Reeder

Still the best—indeed, the only—RSS client out there. I also still don’t see any good reason to ditch RSS and rely only on Twitter for reading new blog posts: Twitter offers no good way of hadling the flow once it’s stale—and many sites aren’t mechanically posted to Twitter in the way that they are to RSS.

Sublime Text Coda

The most exciting new app of 2012. Sublime Text, which I hope to review in detail soon, is a fantastically powerful coding tool that’s replaced Coda almost overnight after I tried it out a few weeks ago. I now use it for all the code I write.

MarsEdit

Still the best way to draft and publish blog posts. I still wish it offered a Byword-style distraction-free full screen mode—but, that minor gripe apart, it’s pretty perfect.

1Password

No change here either. This has saved me several times this year. I’ve gradually switched all my passwords to 22-character-long items and tend to change them every six months. This superb, beautifully-maintained application is one of the best investments I’ve ever made.

Evernote

As I’d expected, Evernote, which I’ve used since it launched, has gradually become a core component of any serious geek’s online presence. I’m still lukewarm about their rather uncertain design choices, but the app has unquestionably improved dramatically since I started using it. You can store absolutely anything you like in it and find it later pretty easily.

WordPress

Periodically, new, competing platforms such as the very clever Octopress or, more recently, the ultrahyped svbtle (membership by invitation only) crop up, but no one has convinced me to shift away from the solidity, flexibility and reliability of WordPress. Recent versions have been notably more responsive and user-friendly than previous ones. No bloat here.

Edgecast Amazon Cloudfront

Around the middle of last year, I started noticing issues with the static assets in my site (images, css and javascript files) which I’d been storing and serving on Amazon’s cheap and effective Cloudfront service. I took advantage of my switch to a new (ve) server at Media Temple to move all these assets to an Edgecast CDN, resulting in much faster performance, albeit for a lightly higher cost. The guys at Edgecast’s support team have provided some of the best assistance I’ve ever received while I was setting up my new installation.

Things Omnifocus

I recently moved my todo lists from the venerable, but rather clunky and finicky Omnifocus, to the minimalist, ultraflexible Things—which finally implementated over-the-air sync between its Mac, iPhone and iPad clients last year (currently in open beta).

Real-world stuff

Although I hate changing my custom for real-world stuff, the last twelve months have seen a few long-standing suppliers bite the dust, for a variety of reasons.

Hermès

I actually hardly ever need to go there any more, as I fully expect my ties, wallet, belts and briefcase, all made to the highest standards in the days when the nouveau-riche clients who now throng the place were still a reasonably unthinkable prospect, to last a lifetime and more.

Uniqlo American Apparel

Superb Japanese cotton jeans, cashmere jerseys and down-filled jackets at absurdly low prices, although I’d feel happier wearing them if I knew exactly in what conditions they were made. I’d still go to American Apparel for hoodies and tshirts, of course, but there comes a point when one has so many of those that one just doesn’t have room for any more, let alone need any.

Turnbull & Asser New & Lingwood

Unquestionably the most traumatic experience of 2011 was a summer visit to New & Lingwood, who have been supplying shirts to the male members of my family since (at least) the 1930s. They have recently started ‘branding’ the mother-of-pearl buttons on their shirts—effectively turning their customers into sandwich men—and in the process appear to have recruited some absurdly young salesmen who seem to think making this outrageous change is cool. I was thus compelled to cross the road to Turnbull & Asser, which my father regarded as rather flashy, but which has maintained traditional Jermyn Street standards unchanged.

Kikoy

While visiting Kenya last summer I bought a stock of comfortable, super-trendy and elegant sarongs from Kikoy. Wearing them them for luncheon in New York or Paris will probably not be simple (London is not a problem), but I’d definitely recommend giving them a try.

Thresher & Glenny

My tailor, Mr Deone, has now retired, and the City branch where I had my habits has closed—a victim of the financial crisis. But the firm is still doing strong. A welcome spot of stability in an ocean of change.

Converse

If I had a valet, I’d ask him to wear them for the first couple of years (a tip given to my father by the late Duke of Norfolk—for suits, of course, not for plimsolls): I simply can’t bear them when they’re new and end up wearing ones with holes in them.

Cassina

I’ve recently become totally addicted to this wonderful Italian furniture. It really sets off my Apple stuff to the best possible advantage.

1. Just for the record, the reason I don’t buy the admittedly very hyped-up iAWriter is that the developer refuses to enable spelling suggestions in it. He does this, apparently, in the name of providing a pure minimalist experience. But any ism taken to extremes is just plain silly.
2. Syncing of Google Contacts has actually finally improved last year, at long last segmenting names into prefix, first, middle, last and suffix—so my previous objection to using it has vanished, but there still doesn’t seem any good reason for ditching iCloud for this now that it’s free.

We launch about 500 changes to search a year, more than a change a day. So if you look at search like a complicated machine, like a giant jumbo jet—although it's probably, in some ways, more complex than that - this is sort of like changing the engines in flight before you land.

It's been fashionable dissing Google recently. Their search has actually been getting massively better since I pinpointed a low point last year. This must-read article explains why.

★

It only took a couple of minutes before I’d installed it and another ten before Mail App for the iPhone was archived in my ‘undeletable Apple apps’ folder and Sparrow had taken its place in my dock.

I’ll start of right away by saying that Sparrow for iPhone only has one major drawback. It’s a major one, but it isn’t at all the Sparrow team’s fault. It doesn’t do push notifications. To find out why, I’ll simply quote their press release on the subject which couldn’t put things more clearly or concisely:

There are 2 ways to deliver notifications on an iOS application:

• On our side: if Sparrow was to do Push today, we would have to store your credentials (login/password) on our servers to frequently poll your accounts, and send you notifications.

  This is a responsibility we’re not ready to take. As a startup focused on iOS/OS X development, we do not have the skills to secure your data on our servers and we do not want to put sensitive information at risk. That’s why Sparrow iPhone 1.0 doesn’t do push.

• Directly from your mail provider: on Sparrow for Mac, your credentials are secure because we communicate directly with your mail provider via SSL.

The difference between the Mac and the iPhone is the Mac version is awake at all times. On the iPhone, iOS systematically suspends all apps activity after 10 minutes maximum making it impossible to send you notifications.

However, Apple provides an API that allows an app to be woken up in case of a network event meaning it is virtually connected at all times like Sparrow on the Mac. For example, VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) apps take advantages of this specific API so you can receive calls even when the app isn’t opened.

This solution is the most secure because Sparrow iPhone will be directly communicating with your mail providers via secured protocols.

We submitted a first version of Sparrow iPhone using this API but it was rejected.

Leaving that aside until it’s solved (and in the mean time, all you need to do is leave your email settings untouched in Mail App (which you will have to do anyway, see below), and you will get notifications from Mail App, which you can then follow up in Sparrow. I did the same using the Tweetbot notifications for Twitter when Twittelator Neue did not have them yet. Bar this issue, my initial impression is that, as I expected, the app is going to be a sensational success and is massively better than Mail for the iPhone. You won’t, however, be able to do without Mail App completely. It remains the default email client on your phone, so it will always be opened (as is the desktop Mail App in similar situations) when you need to send email from an external app—e.g., when you want to send a photo from your photo stream. But that doesn't necessarily happen very often, and the iPhone Mail App is not as bloated as its desktop cousin.

It presents you with a simplified unified account with all your main folders. For Gmail users this means an immediate improvement over Mail App as you can quickly move between folders, especially the crucial All Mail folder in which all your archived email resides.

Archiving email once you’ve read it is a snap, as it is on the desktop version. My only (minor) gripe is that, on the iPhone, you don’t have the option to apply a label (I use ‘hold’ for anything I don’t want to or can’t deal with right away but needs to be followed up and thus stored separately from anything I don’t need to see again).

As in the desktop version, Sparrow provides a powerful and effective search function, something Apple for some reason has signally failed to come up with.

Those are my first impressions, but I haven’t ever felt so positive about an iPhone app: this comes as close to perfection as I believe was possible, especially in a field (email) which comes with quite a steep technical learning curve and in which the competition—especially Google with their laughably bad attempt at an iPhone Gmail client—have all failed. If you want to discover the app before purchasing it, there’s an excellent interactive demo on the Sparrow website.

Basically, Dominique and his colleagues have just made Mail for the iPhone obsolete.

The difficulty of maintaining several stylesheets at once

Until now I hadn’t invested much thought in the tools I used for writing and maintaining my code: I did switch from a Textmate/Transmit combo to the all-purpose Coda a couple of years ago, and last year complemented this with Espresso as a way of testing CSS before it went into production. But the current spate of frequent design revamps has put strain on this carefree approach, essentially because I have been maintaining three separate stylesheets for (i) the home page, (ii) the contact form and (iii) posts and pages: there wasn’t that much overlap between these three stylesheets, so it made sense to keep them separate and small—but this came at the cost of considerable pain whenever new versions were required. Ensuring the three stylesheets were consistent ended up wasting so much of my time I spent some time looking into ways of getting the job done more efficiently.

The tech sector isn’t lacking in imagination, and quite a large number of new tools have emerged in the past few months to make code editing and maintenance more efficient. The ones I’m actually using include the following:

• html5boilerplate;
• Modernizr;
• OOCSS.

What CSS preprocessors can do

Reading about the latter, in particular, set me thinking about ways of making my CSS leaner and more future proof. Essentially this meant making the static content in my stylesheets dynamic, so that the process of drafting, storing and updating them could be made automatic and consistent: and the solution was to switch to using a CSS preprocessor ^[i] with this exact purpose. My objective was pretty well summed up by Aaron Ackerman on his blog NittygrittyJS:

CSS preprocessors are starting to become more apparent to a lot of developers. The point of them is to write less source code that maps to greater source code, but is hopefully more readable, understandable and programmatic. For example grid layout are very easy when a preprocessor can divide a full content width into a number of columns. Using variables can help keep colors consistent by always referencing a number of preset variables. Using mixins can prevent us from having to rewrite code and letting the preprocessor do it for us. Preprocessor are simply reaching for what CSS should already do. There have been proposals for this to happen in CSS but the indecision for the CSSWG has slowed this down considerably. But why not use some form of it now? We can use a preprocessor syntax can compile to CSS that works today.

LESS or SASS?

When Alexis Sellier’s LESS, was launched I had taken a close look at it, liked it but, doubtless through sheer apathy, never got round to using it. I eventually got kicked into action a couple of weeks ago, after reading a rather thoughtful post by Ken Collins, who makes a forceful case for SASS and Compass over LESS:

I want to treat CSS as a language and use features like loops, lists and custom functions.

Smashing Magazine published a rather good comparison by Jeremy Hixon, An Introduction to LESS, and Comparison to SASS, which decided me in favour of SASS as being the easiest way to migrate my existing CSS, into which I’d already put a lot of effort, to the discipline of a preprocessor.

The reasons for using Compass

I chose to apply SASS using Compass, an open-source CSS authoring framework: it comes with a number of built-in modules that you can choose to include in your build, or you can build your own if preferred. I decided to install Compass.app, a powerful yet unobtrusive menubar utility meticulously developed and maintained by Handlino for Sass and Compass that helps designers compile stylesheets easily without resorting to command line interface. Compass.app brings support for two additional design frameworks, 960 Grid and html5boilerplate, in addition to Compass’s built-in extensions, Blueprint and Compass ^[ii]

Compass will set up a directory structure corresponding to the type of project you’re building (960 Grid, html5boilerplate, etc.) and you can then work from those files—in which you’ll be able to use the powerful SASS markup—to achieve the desired stylesheet while keeping control of it.

Fine-tuning your code with partials

To make the most of Compass, I found it best to divide up my stylesheet into ‘partials’, prefixed by an underscore and stored in a separate partials folder. Each partial file can be made up of styles fitting a pattern. My current list looks as follows:

• _author-reset.scss
• _banner.scss
• _base.scss
• _basic-reset.scss
• _contact.scss
• _fonts.scss
• _helpers.scss
• _home.scss
• _media.scss
• _mixins.scss
• _overrides.scss
• _primary-styles.scss
• _search-box.scss
• _sidebar.scss
• _single.scss
• _sitewide-styles.scss
• _style.scss ^[iii]

The Compass client will continually ‘watch’ the folder in which you’re working for any changes to any of your .scss files. Whenever you save them, it will update your actual .css files, which are stored in a separate folder:

If a bug finds its way into your scss files, it’ll never get into your css: SASS will flag them when you save the file, and Compass.app will display a warning message, usually explaining what you got wrong. This is an incredibly useful feature.

SASS’s most powerful features turn it, effectively, into a dynamic language

SASS is incredibly powerful and there’s almost no limit to what you can make it do dynamically to your css. I made most leverage of two features: variables and conditional statements.

Variables

In my _base.scss, I created a wide range of variables, effectively allowing me to update my css by just applying the change to a single item—with SASS and Compass then doing the hard job of meticulously impacting each selector in all my style sheets accordingly, if required:

The variables stored in my _base.scss file include:

• paths for the CDN and image folder;
• the main site proportions and sizes (body width, page width, etc.);
• variables for each colour used, where possible expressed in relation to one another;
• colour definitions for any text not in the default body text colour;
• font sizes and definitions;
• data urls.

Conditional statements

Possibly the most powerful feature of SASS is its ability to follow conditional statements.

In SASS, after the @if keyword, we can put a statement that will be evaluated as either true or false. If the statement is true, whatever is inside the following declaration block will be executed. I made extensive use of this to turn the stylesheets into, effectively, a dynamic code component in much the same way as PHP.

First, I declared three different values in each of my scss files for a variable called $stylesheet-type: basic, contact and home. For instance the content of the home.css file was as follows:

/* Define the stylesheet as the home page sheet */
$stylesheet-type: "home";
/* Include all the content of the _style.scss file after processing */
@import "partials/style.scss";

I then scanned my scss partials, marking up (a Textexpander shortcut made it painless) code according to whether it was required in one, two or three of my css style sheets, like this:

// < - - - - ONLY INCLUDED IN STYLE.CSS

@if $stylesheet-type == basic {

    /* Any styles appearing here will only be included in style.css */

}

// [END] < - - - - ONLY INCLUDED IN STYLE.CSS

// < - - - - NOT INCLUDED IN HOME.CSS

@if $stylesheet-type != home {

    /* Any styles appearing here will ONLY be included in style.css and contact.css */

}

// [END] < - - - - NOT INCLUDED IN HOME.CSS

In this way, once I’ve applied any changes I need to the variables, added, removed or amended selectors in my partials files, the mere click of a button will result in Compass.app compiling three perfectly-drafted stylesheets,one for each scss file in the project. Compass.app can be set to output CSS in compressed, compact, extended or nested format, depending on taste. I personally like to put them in production compressed, since the process of drafting and editing them is so heavily automated that this involves no extra work or risk at all. I find that I’m now able to work on new projects much faster than I did before. It’s fair to say that using SASS and Compass has radically changed the way I organise my life.

Bibliography

• Hampton Catlin and Michael Lintorn Catlin, Pragmatic Guide to Sass, The Pragmatic Bookshelf, 128 pages, December 116th, 2011, ISBN: 978-1-93435-684-5
• Sass (Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets): The Sass reference is the most complete documentation for Sass. It contains information on every language feature, all the options, and how to install it as a Rails plugin.
• Wynn Netherland, Nathan Weizenbaum and Chris Eppstein, Sass and Compass in Action, Manning Early Access Program, 300 pages, Began: April 2011, Softbound print: May 2012 (est.), ISBN: 9781617290145
• Jeremy Hixon, An Introduction To LESS, And Comparison To Sass, Smashing Magazine, September 9th, 2011

1. This article by NetTuts gives the clearest possible definition of what a CSS preprocessor is and what the various options on offer are.
2. You can also add your own additional third-party extensions to Compass.app if desired.
3. _style.scss (with an underscore) is different from style.scss (without an underscore), since partials, unlike full scss files, are only used as feeders for full SASS files and will not be compiled into css files.

I like trying pretty much everything when it first launches, so I installed Readability clients on my iPad and iPhone and created an account with them. And since I happen to be a publisher (of this blog), I thought I'd also register as a publisher—not that I was expecting this to make me instantly rich: publisher accounts, which started last year, have been reported to earn their holders as little as one dollar a month.

It then turned out, rather curiously, that you can't. In fact, I couldn't log in to my brand new Readability at all ^[i]. Grumbling about the issue on Twitter brought an immediate response from Readability support:

To their credit, Readability support reset my account credentials to reader (you can't do this out of the box) within less than twenty-four hours, and I was able to log into both my iOS accounts (though I had to delete them and carry out a fresh reinstall for this). My publisher account, alas, is now no more as I can't really fathom the idea of having to maintain two separate accounts for the same service.

I use Reeder for all my online reading—one of the reasons I like it being that it has built-in support for sharing anything you've read on pretty much any link sharing or storage service under the sun, Readability having been on the list, from day one. Sharing worked with Reeder for iPhone (though not, Reeder's developer may care to know, with the iPad version). But once that content was in my Readability account, there wasn't a lot I could do with it, other that read it, archive it and share it on Twitter or—you guessed it—Facebook:

By contrast, here are the options I'm presented with when I want to share content on Instapaper:

Because of Instapaper's built-in 'like' feature, I can also control seamlessly which of my links I want to share with my social network contacts who are also users Instapaper users. This really clever feature works in the background, out of the box, and my only grippe about it is that it isn't more widely known and is thus rather under-used.

The ability to store links in folders, and the wider range of sharing options, mean there's no reason other than the admittedly beautiful interface (it's already seduced Justin Blanton) for switching. And the interface aspect rather neatly brings me to my third point, which is what one should feel about Readability when one goes beyond the interface and looks beneath the bonnet.

Joe Clark, a Toronto-based tech blogger, yesterday posted a rather thoughtful article that actually goes beyond the scope of this short review, provocatively titled 'Hot new iPhone apps by irresponsible developers':

Nº 1 with a bullet: Readability. You can’t actually read with Readability, since most icons are unlabelled, you can’t switch fonts, and none of the navigation gestures, all nonstandard, actually work. Plus each article page secretly holds a plethora of hidden buttons that VoiceOver errantly reads out. Skill-testing question: Who was the developer on this one? (UPDATE: I filed a bug and got a form-letter response).

While he focuses on the fact that Readability fails under Voiceover (which, to be frank, most people haven't even heard of), he effectively makes a wider point: the app was designed first and foremost with an aim to be as pleasing to the eye as possible, to the detriment of real usability ^[ii]. Not labeling icons, is just sloppy. And I couldn't help wondering whether the bugs I encountered when signing in, which went beyond the fact that I was using an 'incompatible' publisher account.

None of the above negatives is irrevocable: Readability support is clearly attentive to user comments, so it could easily fix the broken code, add new sharing service, etc. But the wider point here is the bizarre trend towards superficially attractive apps that attract raving reviews from the likes of, say, Robert Scoble, and yet haven't been thought out to be easy and powerful to use: the list includes of the recent successes, starting with the much-hyped Clear. For the time being therefore, I reserve judgment and will be sticking with Instapaper.

1. If you try to log in with a publisher account on the iOD apps, the application hangs: no error message, you're just left wondering what went wrong.
2. Joe Clark followed this post up with a further look at Readability, 'When Readability harms readability', which makes further rather damning points.