Issue 6

Hello

Welcome to the November issue, which we're betting you'll save for Saturday morning reading, which means to you this will feel like the December issue. Oh well.

It's that magical time of year where everyone is desperately trying to figure out how to finish all the work in the queue before the holidays. But, don't let busyness stop you from taking a few minutes to be inspired, encouraged, and/or amazed by the links in this issue of Rounding Third.

Enjoy!

Inside Baseball

November Update: A Review of Automatic Payment Reminders and Other Stuff

This month we started working on improving automatic payment reminders, and decided it might be a good time to talk more about what they can do for your business... Spoiler Alert: The 'Other Stuff' is a sneak peak at a new timesheet view.

Water Cooler

Accessibility is not a feature.

Y’all, this is so right. – JD

Enterprise UX: The HTML/CSS Specialist

Dockyard has a unique way of preventing good UX from getting lost in the shuffle: A dedicated UX developer. –Kyle

Moneyball

Corporate UX Maturity: Stages 1-4

Where does your organization land on this spectrum? User experience firms like ours help companies entering "Stage 4" as described in this article get the most out of their first forays into dedicated UX work. It's amazing to see–and sometimes, hear from customers–about how we helped make a product or system enjoyable to use. – Calvin

Tools of the Trade

MailMason by Postmark

A complete toolset for building email templates. If you've ever built email templates from scratch, you know that it is a truly awful, tedious task; this system will hopefully make your life a little easier. – Calvin

Free Gutenberg Blocks and Page Building WordPress Theme

This free collection of pre-configured blocks built for Gutenberg's new editor makes me think WordPress + Atomic Blocks could be a possible Squarespace replacement. – Kyle

Flowkit for Sketch

Flow Kit, a must-have UI library if you design user flows for a living, just got a major upgrade. It might also have the most impressive “used by” list I’ve ever seen. – Andrew

Pushing the Pixels

Navjunk = horrible hospital navigation (+ a solution)

From Edward Tufte:

Hospital way-finding is not a job for commercial artists, interface designers, marketeers. Their work recalls Erik Spiekermann's great poster: ‘Design will save the world. Just after Rock&Roll does.’

– JD

Awesome Falsehoods

What a neat resource - a list of "falsehoods programmers believe".

It's a great way to discover what you don't know about something before design or implementation begins on a feature. It can help eliminate edge cases before they happen and from the beginning. – Caitlin

Git Push, Git Paid

Letting Go

I've had many of the exact same thoughts that Ajahne shares in this article, so it's easy to relate. It's important to remember that when you become a manager, it's not all about you or your individual contributions anymore, it's about the team. – Kyle

Refactoring: Not on the Backlog

This blog post has some great drawings showing exactly how a code base gets messy. It also illustrates how incremental refactoring can be more beneficial than “big refactoring sessions”. – Caitlin

Inspirational Things

We tried the world’s first folding phone, and it actually works

As someone who loves gadgets, I’m conflicted about this foldable phone/tablet hybrid from Royole. On one hand, it’s pretty cool technology. On the other hand, it feels like it’s a) trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist by (b) giving you the worst of both worlds. That said, if history is a guide, in five years all of us will be entering time in Ballpark using our fold-out tabphones each and every day. Viva la future! – Matt

3D Scanning on iPhone - Tweet by Laan Labs

Honestly this video freaks me out, but you should watch it anyway. Imagine looking through your phone's camera, then duplicating objects by copy + pasting them into existence. – Calvin

The Graphic Art of Incredibles 2

Mid-century mansions. Psychedelic spinners. Pixar's Josh Holtsclaw breaks down the influences for the graphic art of Incredibles 2. – John

Closer

Thanks for reading! Feel free to forward to a friend or hit us up on Twitter with interesting links for our next issue.

See you in your inboxes next month!