Responsive Web Design and More

At the September meeting, held on the 8th, DaveK explained responsive web design and why it’s the future of the web. Robert gave tips on configuring the DuckDuckGo search engine and printing flyers.

Responsive Web Design

DavidK started this presentation talking about the history of the World Wide Web. He explained how the web was initially very flexible in supporting many types and sizes of display but gradually page design became more fixed, suited only to computer displays of a certain size. The advent of mobile devices with smaller screens was a challenge to web designers.

Responsive web design allows a single web page with one set of content to adapt and display well on all sizes of device including new ones which may come along in the future. An example of a site using responsive design is South Essex College (try resizing your browser window and see how it reacts).

If you’re interested to see how any website (including your own) looks on different devices then Dave suggested using Safari’s Responsive Design Mode available on the optional Develop menu.

Dave recommended the following links for those wanting to find out more:

DuckDuckGo

We’ve previously recommended the oddly named DuckDuckGo as a search engine which does not track your search history. One of DDG’s advantages is that it doesn’t customise search results so you know you’ll see the same results as others. However a problem with this is that DDG doesn’t default to showing you search results for your country or region.

Robert showed how you can configure DuckDuckGo to default to your preferred region as well as setting other options, such as safe search and themes, and then save them in various ways. The save options are designed to avoid compromising your privacy.

To set the default region and save:

  • Go to the DuckDuckGo home page select the menu icon (3 lines) at the top right.
  • Choose Other Settings.
  • On the Settings page, set Region as you wish, for example to United Kingdom.
  • Select Save and Exit at the bottom of the page.

This saves your settings in a cookie so they will be remembered when you visit DDG in future.

DDG has further help about its settings options.

Printing Flyers

Robert had been asked how to print 2 copies of an A5 flyer created in Pages onto one A4 sheet. He explained while Pages doesn’t offer this option you can choose print in Pages and then use the “Open PDF in Preview” option the PDF drop-down. Preview offers different printing options, so with the flyer open there you can use the “Copies per Page” option to print 2 copies on a sheet.

Free Apps

Members discussed the free apps which Apple regularly makes available both on the App Store and from the Apple Store app. The free app on the App Store changes weekly, Mac Rumors keeps track of this in their App of the Week articles.