Hey,
I'm writing this week’s reading list the last time for this year already. It has been amazing how fast this project evolved and how supportive my readers like you are—big hugs to everyone out there supporting me. It all keeps me up writing this list nearly each week now.
Therefore I wish you a merry christmas, calm winter holidays and a happy new year!
News
- Google now caches all images included in an email. With that tracking will be impossible.
- Firefox 29 will support CSS Variables.
- Firefox also has done massive work in their DevTools again: App Manager, Web Console, Debugger, tooltips.
- Chrome on Android has no 300ms delay on button press anymore.
- The Jasmine framework got five this week and with that the team just released version 2 of it!
- Friends should help friends to get amazing jobs. Now there’s a platform for that.
Tools
- DevTools Terminal might be a useful Chrome Extension to use a terminal in your DevTools. But don't be disappointed, it’s a bit limited.
- Raymond Camden wrote a Brackets extension which directly gives you hints on browser compatibility while you're writing code.
- The guys from Information Architects who built IA Writer three years ago, just released Writer Pro. It’s the bigger and evolved version of IA Writer and from what I know and could see, it’s worth every penny if you write a lot of texts.
Design
- SVG Generation provides you cool backgrounds and serves them customized by you (colors, etc) as SVG or base64.
- You know this meetings when the first 30 minutes are searching for files, emails etc.? Solve this by providing Project Hubs. And there’s also a template by Brad Frost.
Performance Matters
- A performance comparison between client-side and server-side rendering for markup including BackboneJS and AngularJS.
- Don’t optimize JavaScript and find the real culprit because JavaScript is rarely the cause of slow applications—you know, “Optimising JavaScript is not about the syntax”.
CSS
- Multi-line padded text with very clever tricks.
- Ever fully understood
z-index? Here’s a guide to fix that. - Although
z-indexcan do much, it’s not enough for web-apps and different views. Here are thoughts how to solve that. - Cool stuff will be available with CSS Selectors Level 4 — this is a roundup.
- The (probably not) definitive list of CSS features in non-CSS specs.
- Create a great mobile navigation that works from the ground up on all screen sizes and has a nice fallback for old browsers.
- Last but not least, Jeremy Keith wrote a piece of text about Sasstraction in which he says “CSS isn’t voodoo, it’s a simple and straightforward language where you declare an element has a style and it happens.”. Keep that in mind.
New Year Resolution Proposals
- …Think by Making.
- …Help to Decentralize the Web and make it great again!
I whish you Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
All the best,
Anselm