Hey,
Recently I saw a question asking about the most useful change/addition to the web platform in recent years. And it made me thinking quite a lot. Intuitively, I immediately thought about all the ECMAScript stuff, about JavaScript libraries and frameworks like React.js and vue.js. After some thought I realized that this is quite far away from what had the biggest impact on easing my daily work. It’s not npm, it’s not any JavaScript module—it’s CSS Flexbox. If I remember how things were before I was able to use Flexbox widely, writing layouts was much harder. Flexbox takes away a lot of stress, a lot of thinking about hacks to e.g. center an item vertically in an container or distribute objects in a row. It’s one of the things I just use daily but don’t embrace its value enough. And with CSS Grids it’s a bit the same. I still use it rarely but it’s saved me already a lot of time and allowed me to write clean code for complex code. And that’s what this week’s case-study of rewriting the slack.com website with CSS Grids shows. It’s not about using the latest technologies because they’re cool. It’s about using them and discover that after all the code is faster, cleaner, easier to read and maintain and the performance of the website benefits as well. This isn’t about minimizing the impact of ES6,7 and all the amazing JavaScript tools we got in the past years but about reminding that there are other little things that might have the same or even more impact on our work.
Generic
- Learn everything you need to know about FLIF, a new “Free Lossless Image Format”. Offering nearly the same featureset as HEIF, the format has a free license, and great lossless compression. The main disadvantage though is that it’s not supported in any browser or operating system yet and you can only use it with a JavaScript polyfill. But depending on what your goal is, it might be something to look further into.
UI/UX
Tooling
- As we now have iOS11 and macOS High Sierra out there and captured photos usually will be in the new HEIF-format, it’s great to have a HEIC Converter that allows us to convert HEIF images and HEVC videos to JPEGs or GIFs. Made by Sindre Sorhus for you, for macOS and for free.
- Sketch 47 is out and brings libraries and smooth corners, two new major features. Especially libraries are huge because this allows us to sync, share and update symbols from any Sketch document and even with other people.
Security
- If you sent a S/MIME encrypted message via Microsoft Outlook in the past 6 month it’s quite likely that nothing of the email was actually encrypted. The latest version of the software from this week fixes the issue (v1705+).
- Carl Chenet explores the very problematic situation with Slack as communication tool for many secrets in a company. He shows why a data breach is not an issue because of any financial data being compromised but rather all the content we write there and which is not encrypted. In summary: Better never, ever, share any business secrets or credentials via Slack.
Privacy
- Whoops, this week an incredibly huge privacy issue has been found with OnePlus OxygenOS phones. By default, it has built-in analytics enabled that is able to track and send information about every single activity you perform or that is captured by a sensor to the vendor. And it’s not that no sensitive data leaves your phone to some servers of OnePlus, but there’s evidence that data such as you opening a new tab in the Chrome app is send to them with a specific timestamp and your unique device indentification information. If you own such phone, gladly there’s help and you can deactivate the tracking, as described in the article.
CSS
- Mina Markham shares why and how Slack engineers re-built the website of Slack with CSS Grid. Interestingly, this change resulted in leaner, cleaner code with more predictable CSS specificity, and drastically improved performance.
- Heydon Pickering adds a new reference article to the Inclusive Components blog that explains how we can build tabbed interfaces in an inclusive, accessible way.
Work & Life
- More and more people working at Google, Twitter, Facebook and other tech giants disconnect themselves from smartphones. By radically limiting the featureset to a normal wireless phone, they want to gain back control over their lives. Paul Lewis spoke to some people and researched why tech insiders who actually build the apps and operating systems for smartphones and other smart devices fear a smartphone dystopia. A good read on mental health issues.
Anselm