Bootstrap 3.0
Choosing the right tools can make your work delightful, but choosing the wrong tool often leads to difficult decisions and more work down the road. Walking the fine line of usefulness and capability, to be both simple but customizable, is difficult.
Deciding to use a tool set or framework, such as Twitter's Bootstrap, is no easy decision. You worry that its either too much or too little for your project. On top of having to learn all of it's behaviors and idiosyncrasies, you'll probably want to customize it anyways.
After using Bootstrap 2 to power a few one page websites, I've run it through my constraints and criticism successfully. That's saying a lot considering my usual skepticism, but it's beginning to look time tested. Really my only concerns would be that it's more than I need, or that it deprives some creativity. Remember when you'd go to a website and instantly realize that it was a FrontPage template? I don't want to build a sterile boundary void of creativity.
Despite my concerns, I'm now realizing this is another amazing open source project that is worth adopting. With almost 60,000 followers, this project clearly has legs, which means that I don't have to worry about fixing all the tiny bugs in IE or Opera that plague web developers.
With their recent major release of Bootstrap 3, it seemed like a good time to migrate what I had from 2 > 3 and reap the benfits of their reasonable defaults, thoughtful typography, responsive grid system, plus clean components like form inputs and buttons. With some extra goodies like tooltips, modals, and glyph/icons, it starts to feel like a relief rather than a bloat.
Now that it's responsive centric, it appears to be a solid foundation for most web apps that want to be mobile and desktop friendly without a lot of extra work.
It's exciting to see libraries of snippets, templates, and themes, and even an interface builder, to support creativity in the community. I'm looking forward to spot unexpected sites in the wild, built with bootstrap.
Deciding to use a tool set or framework, such as Twitter's Bootstrap, is no easy decision. You worry that its either too much or too little for your project. On top of having to learn all of it's behaviors and idiosyncrasies, you'll probably want to customize it anyways.
After using Bootstrap 2 to power a few one page websites, I've run it through my constraints and criticism successfully. That's saying a lot considering my usual skepticism, but it's beginning to look time tested. Really my only concerns would be that it's more than I need, or that it deprives some creativity. Remember when you'd go to a website and instantly realize that it was a FrontPage template? I don't want to build a sterile boundary void of creativity.
Despite my concerns, I'm now realizing this is another amazing open source project that is worth adopting. With almost 60,000 followers, this project clearly has legs, which means that I don't have to worry about fixing all the tiny bugs in IE or Opera that plague web developers.
With their recent major release of Bootstrap 3, it seemed like a good time to migrate what I had from 2 > 3 and reap the benfits of their reasonable defaults, thoughtful typography, responsive grid system, plus clean components like form inputs and buttons. With some extra goodies like tooltips, modals, and glyph/icons, it starts to feel like a relief rather than a bloat.
Now that it's responsive centric, it appears to be a solid foundation for most web apps that want to be mobile and desktop friendly without a lot of extra work.
It's exciting to see libraries of snippets, templates, and themes, and even an interface builder, to support creativity in the community. I'm looking forward to spot unexpected sites in the wild, built with bootstrap.