New toys

It’s been too long between home page updates. Here’s a little detail on a few new bits and pieces from the last year.

Grid tool

Most of my print design work involves mucking around to figure out a grid at some point. InDesign doesn’t make trialling options easy, so I made this.

I was running the first version of the tool locally in May last year and had a usable, mobile-friendly version online not long after. Stashing all the state in the – admittedly, unweildy – URL has been useful for keeping viable ideas with notes. It could use some finessing and a lick of paint, but is complete for my current purposes.

Board

This is the most interesting of the bunch: A minimal notes-in-a-graph tool.

FigJam, Miro and friends are infantilising and usually overkill. The whiteboard metaphor is tired. The emphasis on discoverability and collaboration prevents treating them like real tools, with, say, decent keyboard commands. This makes a start on those issues.

Board is functional enough to have been useful in meetings, but far from complete. Consider this a preview. The export format is so simple it likely won’t change, but I’m not guaranteeing that at the moment.

128km radar

The Bureau of Meterology’s 128 km Sydney (Terrey Hills) Radar Loop is an aesthetic triumph and better than your weather app in every way. I will weep when the BOM inevitably kills it in the name of modernity. In anticipation of that sodden day, here is a version you can paint on.

The rain brush really deserves a better implementation.

Simple QR code generator

Why make another one? I wanted to be able to directly save an SVG after adjusting the complexity and error correction levels to the bare minimum necessary to encode the URL.

You could automatically solve to minimise version and correction for a given URL, but mucking around with the two settings only takes a second so it’s not a priority.