Welcome back!
I hope all of you had a great Christmas holiday and a good start into the new year 2014. Since January, 5th, I moved from Munich to Cologne (still Germany) for around six months to work on a new project. For me this is a great change in the new year and I have many more things I want to do in 2014. Be inspired by this list to change things.
News
General useful links
- Rodney Rehm compiled a best-of list of conference talks in 2013. These talks really are amazing!
- Axel Rauschmayer wrote about five technologies to look forward to in 2014 (mostly JS related).
- Who is it and what is it—beautifully unique products from the world's best designers. Made by Naomi Atkinson.
Tools
- This Chrome extension links all dependencies listed in
package.jsonon GitHub to their project’s pages. - Cozy, a personal cloud you can host, hack and delete.
- Convoy is a nice SublimeText theme.
- Finally, a Unicode Browser Support Table has been created by someone. Great work!
- Nicolas Gallagher shares a simple git deployment strategy for static sites.
Design
- Rethink mobile advertising by the newly founded company AdTile.
- The best typefaces of 2013.
Performance Matters
- Kornel Lesinski tested the automatic image compression by mobile network providers and found workarounds.
- Vimeo redesigned and refactored its video player and achieved 50% faster performance.
HTML
- Responsive iFrames are still harder than one think. Here’s the roundhouse kick which solves all your problems you’ll likely never experience.
- Ten reasons why we switched from Icon fonts to SVG shows what is the problem of iconfonts.
JavaScript
- A super cool technique by Soundcloud engineers for smooth image loading. Damn clever!
- Everything you wanted to know about JavaScript scope.
- Why Google prepends
while(1);to their JSON responses in their private APIs. - And again a useful “How to animate SVGs” tutorial.
- A JavaScript UI library with no dependencies that enhances lists with drag gestures.
- There is now an OCR library that is only ~1MB big done in JavaScript.
CSS
- UnCSS v0.1.6 is out.
- Create Polygonal image shapes with SVG.
- If you like the style Harry Roberts creates CSS, here he provides you a small Sass library for setting type on the web.
- How to create flexible cover images.
New Year Resolution Proposals
- Maybe you want to work with Agencies? Don’t stay in your own light.
- Help make more things just work.
- Contribute to the Indie Web idea: Meet the people who want to jailbreak the internet, 2014 the rise of the Indie Web, and just help to decentralize.it! We can do it and therefore we should do it. Help where you can and let it only be spreading the word.
- Give healthy benefits for the long run.
I wish you the very best start into a new, bright and shiny year called 2014! Take a breath, enjoy it and make everything better you want to.
All the best,
Anselm