So my MacBook Air (mid-2009, OS X 10.8.3) When my computer wakes from sleep, it doesn’t immediately reconnect to my wireless network. What’s more, if I open up the wireless menu in OS X’s menu bar, it doesn’t show any networks nearby. Zip. Zero. Zilch. It’ll scan for new networks repeatedly, but won’t see a single one.

But here’s where this gets really, really annoying: if I open the Network panel in System Preferences, all nearby networks are immediately visible without delay.

Given the weird inconsistency between the two menus, and that I can reproduce this issue consistently, I figure this is a bug: either with 10.8.3, or with my aging little laptop. Either way, I’d love to fix it. So if you’ve come across this problem and know how a workaround, suggestions via email or Twitter would be most welcome.

Update: Charles Gaudette suggested on Twitter that it might be a couple , and pointed me toward a page showing how to clear out corrupted plist files. Deleting the com.apple.network.identification.plist and com.apple.airport.preferences.plist files seems to have done the trick—thanks, Charles! And thanks to everyone else who wrote in or twittered suggestions at me.

So with that disclaimer out of the way, I have to say I’m a bit disappointed to hear Opera’s news: namely, that they’re abandoning their browser’s Presto engine, and adopting WebKit/Chromium instead.

Other folks far, far smarter than I have already weighed in. And don’t get me wrong: I’ve had my fair share of gripes with various bugs in Chromium (especially recently), but it’s a fantastic piece of software; as a friend said recently, ten-years-ago-me would’ve killed to have browsers as fine as we do now.

But right now, what I’m most worried about is the lack of diversity: four rendering engines is not exactly a large number, and going to three is a significant shift, if not an outright loss. Additionally, I worry we’re already facing a rather “well, it works with -webkit, so why worry about anything else?” mentality, which is something we’ll have to work harder to combat. Especially with an engine as fragmented as Webkit.

Of course, since the news is all of, like, minutes old, this is all speculation. Hell, it’s not even that: this is all just a pre-caffeine ramble, and not an especially well-formed one at that. I will say that Bruce’s take leaves me feeling hopeful. And I hope he’s right, and I’m wrong to be a bit disappointed. But right now, I know there’s one less (fantastic) rendering engine in active development, and that makes me a little sad.

Not the words, mind you: those usually come easily. (When I remember to sit down and write them, that is; hellooooooo, sad and neglected blog.) It’s more the process of the thing, I guess. It’s a struggle for me to get ideas down quickly; I get intimidated by the promise of that final draft, of shipping, so I often feel every word needs to be perfect as soon as it’s typed.

(No, I’m not going to tell you how long it took to write this fucking blog entry.)

Anyway. So, yes: writing’s hard. But I’m learning how to make it easier. And, alongside a few friends, I’m working on something that might make it easier for you, too.

Last year, I had a long conversation with Mandy. She talked about this idea she had: an idea for a tool that would facilitate conversation, discussion, and, most importantly, iteration during the writing process. Not just an application, actually: more a set of features to support a workflow, one that would, if done right, make writing not just easier, but better.

She and Jason had already sketched out how it might work. Soon after, David joined our merry band, and turned our responsive prototypes a living, breathing application. And Rob joined our team recently, and has been, as Mandy said, effortlessly solving problems we once thought impossible.

I am beyond honored to be a small part of this team, and I can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on. We call it Editorially, and you can read more about it on our first blog entry.

Stay tuned.

Because let’s be honest: my absence isn’t going to do a damned thing to diminish how amazing this conference is going to be. Seriously, look at this lineup. Look at it. Learning from the likes of Scott Jenson, Stephen Hay, Jake Archibald, Lyza Gardner, and Jason Grigsby is too good to be true, and in Amsterdam? And if you haven’t already, watch Jeremy Keith’s epic mobile browser panel from last year, a performance he’s repeating again in May.

Yeah okay I’m officially depressed all over again about missing it.

Seriously though: while I won’t be there, you can be. If you haven’t already, go register for Mobilism 2012 in May. You’ll have one hell of a time.

How do you stay focused?

I’m not sure that I do. I’m kind of all over the place, with my attention split between web apps, iOS games and apps, and Safari extensions…. If I feel my focus waning, I let it wane. Curiosity or that unpleasant feeling of leaving something unfinished usually draws me back to a problem or task before too long.

“5 Minutes on The Verge: Shaun Inman”

This. Oh, so very this.

Now, you might have noticed the new site is responsive, which, given my obvious biases, I’m rather excited about. I played a small part in its design, and I’d like to tell you a little bit about it.

Honestly, I got excited in December of last year, as Filament Group dropped me an email to chat about a project they were about to start working on. Now, I’ve admired Filament’s work since Dan and I met them over beers and pizza a few years ago. But when they approached me with the prospect of working with them to design a new, responsive home for the Globe? Well, it’s like I said: with folks like Todd, Patty, Scott, and Maggie among their ranks, there are some people and projects you simply can’t turn down. (That Mat curmudgeon fellow has been contracting there as well. You try saying “no” to that guy.)

The Globe had also hired a local design firm called Upstatement, and they worked closely with Miranda Mulligan, the Globe’s adroit digital creative director, to establish the new site’s look. Filament’s Patty Toland has already provided a better write-up of the project than I ever could, but I’ll echo her excitement over the collaborative workflow Miranda cultivated between Upstatement, Filament, and myself. I can’t think of any project I’ve worked on that was nearly as fun as the months that followed, as they were a giddy blur of building, sketching, and thoughtful discussion. We tried to work as iteratively as possible, quickly moving from Tito and Mike’s goddamned exquisite mockups into responsive prototypes, in order to experience the design “live” in the various devices and browsers we were supporting. As Aarron Walter might say, we were letting the use of the site inform its design—vetting our early design assumptions with prototypes, which also allowed us to identify areas that needed further visual refinement.

The site you see today is the result of that more collaborative workflow. A process that occurred between two teams who, on a more traditional design project, might have never met, nor established the kind of rapport that ultimately shaped the final product. If you’ve read my book, the final chapter discusses this process in a bit more detail. Heck, if you’ve seen me speak this year, chances are good you’ve already heard first-hand how wonderful I think this more cyclical approach to design and development is.

And on that point: it’s been kind of a weird experience, talking publicly for the better part of this year about a site that hadn’t yet launched. I mean, I was—and still am—incredibly proud of the small contributions I made, of the talented team I collaborated with, but still: talking about a site that hasn’t launched yet? There’s some part of me that’s felt, well, odd about that. What if people’s expectations aren’t met? What if we can’t deliver? What if the Internet gets hit by an exploding unicorn and we somehow don’t finish the project because NO MORE INTERNET YOU GUYS.

(Also, it might be a teensy goddamned bit terrifying/mind-blowing to see the phrase “responsive web design” pop up in a mainstream news publication. I’m just saying.)

A few months ago, Mark Boulton said something on Twitter that really resonated with me, and helped the stress attacks abate: namely, that “design is the stuff around the end result.” Emphasis mine, but Mark reminded me that “design” is the means, not merely the end; the path we walk over the course of a project, the choices we make. And that’s a process that continues throughout the life of a site, even after launch. Because as with any site of this scale, there’s work still to be done. Some optimization is being done as we speak, both on the front- and back-end; some bugs are being tracked, isolated, and squashed; and as the Globe’s content producers become more familiar with the framework and start making bolder decisions, I’m sure the design will be refined to better meet their needs. And above all else, the Globe definitely wants your feedback.

And so, yes: while I’m impossibly proud of the new Globe site of today, I’m most excited about where it’ll be tomorrow. There are too many fine people on the Globe dev team to properly thank them all, but staffed by people like Dan, Jesse, Ian, Caz, Fran, and Adam, I know they’re primed to do great things. People like Michael Manning and Jennifer McNelis helped us chart paths through some challenging questions. And it’s worth mentioning that none of this would have been possible without Jeff Moriarty’s endorsement of a broadly accessible, responsive design; with a champion like that, we could do—and I think the Globe will continue to do—some truly exciting things.

There’ve been a healthy number of reviews already: Andy Boyle is tracking the ones he can find, and Joshua Benton at the Nieman Journalism Lab wrote up a few more business-minded thoughts and observations. More will follow, I’m sure. Some will (I hope!) see the Globe’s new site as a referendum for the merits of a responsive design; others will find plenty to critique, and justify a more device-specific way of designing for the web.

Me, I think the answer’s inevitably somewhere in the middle. But honestly, the response I’m most looking forward to reading is yours: what you see online at bostonglobe.com is the result of a particular process, tailored to the needs of one project, one audience. There’s much we’ve done that could easily be approached from a different tack, or executed in another, perhaps better, way. And if you do happen to stumble upon that approach, that alternate solution, I really hope you’ll write about it, and share it with the rest of us.

In the meantime, I’ll be exploring the Globe site, hopefully alongside the rest of you. So much of it’s new to me, and I really can’t wait to see where it goes next.

I consider myself fortunate to have known and worked with Erin Kissane for years, and I’ve admired her writing for quite some time before that. Krista Stevens has been a friendly fixture throughout my career; she used to run an impossibly tight ship at Digital Web, where some of my first articles were published, before doing wonderful and incredible things at A List Apart. So yeah, when they asked me to work with them on their New Secret Project©, I basically signed up before they could finish telling me what it was all about.

And with that, I’m thrilled to announce that Contents, a new magazine focusing on content strategy, will be launching this fall.

Here’s Erin’s introduction:

The conversation about content strategy, online publishing, and all the subfields and specializations that surround them is flourishing. Wonderfully, it’s no longer possible to keep track of the posts, comments, talks, and events that take place every week within our world. And it’s not just that we’re voluble: our community is extraordinarily generous with knowledge, help, and professional support.

After benefiting from this conversation in so many ways, we’d like to give something back. A bounded collection of ideas and connections. A place to catch up with the movement of our fledgling industry and the much older fields from which it emerged. An editorial lens.

As a designer-person who benefitted immensely from Erin’s and Kristina’s respective books on the subject, this is all music to the ol’ ears. Because I think Contents is going to be a wonderful, oh-so-valuable resource for those of us looking to better understand content strategy (myself included), and I’m excited to contribute a little bit to making that happen.

In short: because of folks like Erin, Krista, and the oh-so-capable Erik Westra, I know Contents will be something special. You should check us out on Twitter, and maybe contribute an article or eight if you’re so inclined.

So as it happens, I wrote a book. It came out today. It’s called Responsive Web Design. I really hope you like it.

…right, so. In the spirit of transparency I should probably tell you I rewrote that meager introduction about eight times, probably because I’m not sure how to introduce something like this. I mean, by my count I’ve coauthored five books, and writing for each has been a fantastic experience. I’ve written alongside some of my favorite writers—and people—in the industry. But I’m having a hard time articulating just how much it means to have published my first solo title. I’m giddy, nervous, terrified—but mostly? Excited.

“So what’s the book about and stuff I guess,” you ask. Well, Responsive Web Design expands on the ideas I articulated in the original article. It’s a crash course in how you can apply fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries to your own work, but let’s face it: design is so much more than those three ingredients. As a result, I’ve tried to share a few stories I’ve picked up from working on real, live responsive projects: the lessons I’ve learned, the questions that have been raised, the hard choices made. The result is a beautifully designed little book (take a bow, Jason) that contains everything you need to start exploring a more flexible, more responsive approach to designing for the web. And at 150 pages, it won’t overstay its welcome.

I have to say, I’m incredibly proud of the end result. And that’s made all the more valuable to me by the fact that it was published by A Book Apart. Jason, Mandy, and Jeffrey have created a special thing in their little publishing powerhouse, and I’m impossibly honored to join a lineup that includes the likes of Jeremy, Dan, and Erin, and will soon include Aarron, Luke, and Jason among their number.

(“Honored” is one way to put it. “Intimidated as all hell” would be another.)

What’s more, this book wouldn’t have been possible without Mandy Brown's careful, thoughtful supervision. She wrote a few kind words about the book, but I owe her a heavy debt: she is an impossibly talented designer, reader, and editor, and I can’t list the countless ways her efforts made the book so, so much better. I meant what I said on Twitter: if you ever have the chance to collaborate with her, leap at it.

So. If this little book sounds like something you’re interested in, I hope you’ll snag a copy. Personally, I’d recommend the paperback + ebook bundle, largely because I think both versions of the book are downright gorgeous: you get a lovely physical artifact, thoughtfully crafted by Stan, as well as an epub that has inline videos embedded in it.

(Seriously. A book. With goddamned video in it. We might very well be dealing with some profoundly flying-cars-and-ray-guns shit right here, people.)

If you’d like, you can read an excerpt from Chapter 3 right now. You can also read Jeremy Keith’s foreword, which might have made me well up a bit when I first read it. (Hush, you.) Dan Cederholm, who proved a thorough and brilliant and hilarious technical editor, also wrote up some wonderful words about the book. David Sleight, Jason Santa Maria, and Jeffrey have some thoughts online, too.

I guess I’ll close things out here, because I’m honestly touched by the reception thus far, that people I admire so thoroughly are excited about this little yellow book I spent ages thinking about. But that aside, I hope you’ll check out the book, find it relevant to your work, and maybe get a little excited. For what it's worth, the web's never felt more variable, more flexible to me than it does right now, and I haven’t felt more excited about designing for the web than I do right now. Things just feel, you know, fun.

Anyway, that's it from me. I hope you like the book, and as always, thanks for reading.

So that Trent Walton went and redesigned his blog. And it is responsive. And on top of all that? It is sexy.

I’ve been admiring the Paravel team’s work for some time, and especially their dabblings in responsive design; if you haven’t seen the Do Lectures site, give it a whirl. It’s visually and technically impressive, and is a joy to browse at any resolution.

But that’s not all: given Trent’s penchant for full-width, type-heavy headings, he and the team at Paravel decided to knock out FitText, a jQuery plugin to create full-width, scaleable headlines from, well, your headlines. I can’t wait to give this a whirl.

Of course, in the middle of this cornucopia of goddamned fantastic things, Trent has to go and drop beats like this:

My love for responsive centers around the idea that my website will meet you wherever you are—from mobile to full-blown desktop and anywhere in between.

Emphasis mine. That sentence—that sentiment—is so good, I want it tattooed on my knuckles.

(Hrm. Wonder if there’s a jQuery plugin for that.)

Words don’t deserve that kind of malarkey. They’re innocent, neutral, precise, standing for this, describing that, meaning the other, so if you look after them you can build bridges across incomprehension and chaos. But when they get their corners knocked off, they’re no good any more…. I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.

Tom Stoppard, The Real Thing

Anyway, the context’ll have to come later. Until then, something something cricket bats something.

Anyway, I’m a decade or so removed from my literature degree, and an additional year or two removed from that class in particular, so my command of various terms is, well, thoroughly shot at this point. But lately I’ve been noticing how many discussions about responsive web design revolve around the same fallacy.

Now, I realize “fallacy” seems like a loaded term. But really, it isn’t: in its most basic, rhetorical form, a “fallacy” is a structural flaw in an argument. A fallacious argument isn’t even necessarily wrong—in fact, it can be completely and utterly correct, factually speaking. But the logic used to reach the conclusion is just a little off.

Here’s a quick example. Let’s say I walked up to you and said,

“It’s raining outside. Therefore, the sun isn’t shining.”

The problem with that statement is the second sentence doesn’t follow from the first. The result is evidence (“It’s raining outside”) that doesn’t support the conclusion (“The sun isn’t shining”). Now, that conclusion could be completely correct: the sun might very well have ducked behind a raincloud. But the logic I used to reach that conclusion is flawed. In short, it’s based on a fallacy.

What about this one?

“Different devices always require different experiences. Therefore, responsive design is flawed.”

There’s no fallacy there: taken at face value, the premise supports the conclusion. Now, that doesn’t mean I agree with that reasoning at all—in fact, I’d disagree quite stridently, and we’d be off to the races with an entirely separate discussion altogether. And we can debate those positions ad infinitum, ad nauseam, or some other ad of your choosing.

But here’s the thing: with a few notable exceptions (this shoddy primer on logic terms among them), very few people are making that assertion. Instead, you’ll see something like this pop up:

“I need to design a different experience for different contexts. Therefore, responsive design is flawed.”

Now, I’m not quoting anyone in particular here; this point just pops up frequently in discussions about responsive web design. And yes, it’s a fallacy. Let me see if I can explain why.

When I’m speaking or writing about responsive design, I try to underline something with great, big, Sharpie-esque strokes: responsive design is not about “designing for mobile.” But it’s not about “designing for the desktop,” either. Rather, it’s about adopting a more flexible, device-agnostic approach to designing for the web. Fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries are the tools we use to get a bit closer to that somewhat abstract-sounding philosophy. And honestly, a more unified, less fragmented approach resonates with my understanding of the web on a fairly profound level.

But I’m not interested in a religious debate. And chances are good that you’re not, either.

I really do believe responsive design can be a great way to design for our ever-changing web. Sure, I’ve got some fairly evident biases on that front: but with the right planning, implementation, and forethought, it can be a damned compelling approach.

But let’s say that your project—or more specifically, your audience—is better served by a mobile-/tablet-/$DEVICE-specific experience. Heck, I’ve worked on a number of projects that benefitted from that approach: where a separate mobile site was needed, and where a responsive approach would’ve been less than ideal. That decision wasn’t driven by any “mobile vs. desktop” mindset, though: it was dictated by research, by our content strategy, and by studying the needs of that site’s particular audience.

A fair bit of the book’s conclusion talks about this process. Because maybe your site is better served by a separate mobile site than by a responsive approach. Or maybe the reverse is true: maybe a responsive approach is more appropriate. The moral here is that you should tailor the approach to the project, and put the polemic aside. Because nobody knows your project, your audience, better than you do. Anyone who suggests otherwise is committing a different kind of fallacy.

We can now design effective adaptive layouts that respond to their environment. If these layouts are based on a system that defines its ratios from the content, then there is connectedness on two levels: connectedness to the device, and connectedness to the content.

Mark’s thinking about flexible, content-driven grids has me damned excited about his upcoming talk at AEA Boston, and you know I’ll be flinging fistfuls of lucre at my laptop screen whenever his new book’s available to preorder.

The web really feels fun again.

Needless to say, I am having the time of my life.

We’re also learning a lot, too. A lot of discussions about approach and execution have come up, largely because processes for a lot of this stuff don’t exist yet. That will, with a bit of hard work and community discussion, change over time. Still, there has been a lot of brilliant stuff created so far.

Here’s just one example:

The goal of this technique is to deliver optimized, contextual image sizes for responsive layouts that utilize dramatically different image sizes at different resolutions. Ideally, this approach will allow developers to start with mobile-optimized images in their HTML and specify a larger size to be used for users with larger screen resolutions — without requesting both image sizes, and without UA sniffing.

Check out the script, download it, and kick the tires a bit—feedback and tweaks are most welcome.

I realize that there are always going to be philosophical differences around responsive web design. But for me, the solutions-driven discussions are always going to be infinitely more interesting to me than the alternative.

I was, however, emphatically raising my fist in the air when I read this:

While I’m well aware that things don’t have to look the same in every browser, it just seems to strike me as odd that CSS3 features keep getting touted on the front of browser homepages, and yet something as fundamental as a percentage would be rendered incorrectly (or, rather, not as well as would be expected).

Emphasis mine. Much of the behavior Steffan notes was outlined by John Resig in 2008, nearly three years ago. There are some incredible inconsistencies at play here, and designers really shouldn’t have to shoulder the burden of working around them.

In short, some broad consensus between the different rendering engines needs to be reached—and if it comes at the expense of pushing the Next Hot Bleeding-Edge Experimental Sexy CSS3 Feature™ to market, I’m all for it.

Over the past couple of years, my blog hasn’t felt my own, to a degree. It’s felt like I’ve been writ­ing for an audi­ence, post­ing stuff for oth­ers rather than myself. That’s arse-backwards. A blog should be about per­sonal expres­sion. The moment you start think­ing, and writ­ing, to please oth­ers then it’s a bind; it feels less like a per­sonal exer­cise and more of a job.

A beautiful, thoughtful redesign from Mark Boulton (and a responsive one at that). Go go, read read.