A reminder for people interested in the joint W3C/IAB “STRINT” workshop: The deadline for submitting position papers is Wednesday 15 January 2014. The workshop pages explain how to submit.

The main theme of the workshop is pervasive monitoring and how (future) Internet protocols can be protected against it. See the workshop pages for additional topics and details.

The STRINT (Strengthening the Internet Against Pervasive Monitoring) workshop will be held in central London, just before IETF-89, on Saturday March 1, and, if necessary, on the afternoon of Friday February 28. The workshop is organized by the STREWS project, with financial support from the European Union.

Sometimes I literally can't remember how to write a for loop. Not like funny ha-ha I can't remember how to spell "psychology" but really I can figure it out in a few seconds. Like, go to Google, type in "for loop PHP", click on a promising result, copy and paste, then alter it.

I'm mostly a front-end guy, but I'm essentially a professional programmer. Isn't that ridiculous and embarrassing? Meh.

I'm in and out of a lot of different languages in any given day. A for loop is different in all of them. Here they are:

for i in 1..5
      puts i
    end

for (i = 0; i < 5; i++) {
      console.log(i);
    }

for ($i = 1; $i < 5; $i++) {
      echo $i;
    }

@for $i from 1 through 5 {
      .n-#{$i} { color: red; }
    }

- (1..16).each do |i|
      %div #{i}

for i in [1...16]
      console.log(i)

They are all different. None are very difficult to understand, but the for loop is probably the simplest construct you'll need to write in a language, so you can imagine it gets worse.

So what.

All those languages have perfectly good reasons for why they do that the way they do. It is a minor inconvenience to maneuver the correct characters into place to get them to do the job.

What matters is:

• I know what a for loop is
• I know when to reach for a for loop
• I know the difference between a for loop and other loops
• I know the potential dangers of a for loop

Nevermind the syntax, it's the spirit that counts.

The Syntax vs The Spirit is a post from CSS-Tricks

A roundup of the most interesting stories from other sites, collected by the staff at MIT Technology Review.

Reading the Artist’s Mind
Artist Lisa Park uses the technology of electroencephalography to perform her own silence of mind.
—J. Juniper Friedman, editorial assistant

A new smartphone app from a Twitter cofounder makes it easy and fun to get your friends’ advice on everything from shopping to Chopin.

There are plenty of places to seek answers to questions, including search engines like Google and Q&A sites like Quora. Most recently, Jelly, a new startup created by Twitter cofounder Biz Stone, is squishing its way into the fray with a free smartphone app that lets you ask questions appended with images, and give answers to people in your extended social network.

Another chance to catch the most interesting, and important, articles from the previous week on MIT Technology Review.

The developers behind UX Archive want you to build better mobile experiences. To that end, they find and present mobile’s most interesting user flows so you can “compare them, build your point of view, and be inspired.”

Documenting user flows is probably something many UX designers already do to some degree. Now a great collection is in one place, and wired to grow as new discoveries are added to the archive. Even more useful, the site is set up so you can easily filter user flows based on specific tasks, such as onboarding, purchasing and sharing, and compare just those.

UX Archive recently added a feature that allows you to compare iOS6 vs. iOS7 (for now, user flows are only archived from iPhone 4S and iPhone 5). A dropdown menu allows you to filter apps by name, but there are now so many, the device has become unwieldy. With such a beautifully designed site, it’s likely to be replaced with a better solution soon.

A side project of Feedly co-founder and designer Arthur Bodolec, and developers Chris Polk and Nathan Barraille, UX Archive is a lean, clean site that just does one thing and does it really well. Even the About page introduces the team and explains the site with brevity and zero frills, which is part of its appeal.

Even the most carefully documented user flows aren’t meant to replace the experience and insights that come from actually interacting with an app. UX Archive provides AppStore links to all the titles it has indexed (click on the app name at left to see all its documented user flows, as well as links to its seller and AppStore page).

If you know of an app that should be included, you’re invited to contact the team and let them know.

What are the keys to good mobile UX? Can app UX inform mobile site design? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Featured image/thumbnail, mobile UX image via Shutterstock.

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