Hi,
at this time I hope you have not much longer to work before you have some short holiday break for easter. Exciting times are ahead and I have found some great articles again for your this week. From Scss Unit testing over more design / UX related stuff to Touch Events and finally about getting better at receiving critical feedback. Happy easter!
If you happen to be around Europe in May, I’d love to meet you at the Web Platform Doc Sprint in Düsseldorf right before beyondtellerrand conference takes place. I grant you it’ll be a great meeting where you can learn how to write docs for webstandards, meet cool people and have some delicious handmade burgers and drinks afterwards paid by Adobe. Come and join! :)
News
- Chrome Beta now offers more control over touch and zoom actions, supports Promises,
Object.observe, and unprefixed Shadow DOM. Also CSS Font-loading and SVG paint-order and unprefixed Audio API are included in Chrome 35 beta. Video Fullscreen API does not work prefixed anymore andwebkitRequestAnimationFrame, too.
General stuff
- After FiveSimpleSteps having been acquired by Monotype, the new homes of the books can be found here.
- Validate your ideas with quick, simple experiments. Because working on a project for half a year before recognizing it’s not working out is bad.
- How time tracking helps you to get better at estimating your projects.
- Jeremy Keith on Higher standards and DRM in browsers. A good read!
Design
- Frank Chimero’s transcript of his talk “Desigining in the borderland”. Read it because it’s a great piece of content, or at least, because the article’s so beautifully designed itself.
- Designing for the Web—get Mark Boulton’s free ebook here.
- Anna Debenham’s book about Front-End Styleguides costs £2 and is great if you want to know more about this topic.
- see how easy a credit card form can be for a user.
- “Typography is a practice.”
Tools
- A tutorial non End to end testing with CasperJS, PhantomJS and Grunt.
Git
- The guys from Git Tower App just made a super sweet and great guide for Git, available as ebook, video course and online training.
Web Performance
- Don’t serve images gzipped/deflated.
- Get the Web Performance Pocket Guide by Andy Davies for only £2.75.
JavaScript
- This SmashingMag article explains about ConditionerJS and the origins of it. It evaluates conditions like media queries, element queries, or pointer mode and can load assets / scripts depending on it.
- Image Lightbox, responsive and touch friendly. Simplicity and ease of use. And it’s just for images, nothing else.
- Build a map infographic with Google Maps and JavaScript.
- The impressive work of Patrick H. Laucke trying to figure out how touch and pointer events work in detail in each browser and a research on the accessibility of them.
CSS
- The CSSWG just published a new working draft for the CSS Line Grid Module. It provides features to align content to a baseline grid with the CSS
line-grid,line-snap,line-slackand other properties. - Basic but solid CSS performance optimizations shared by the ModernIE team.
- How to create your own styled
<select>form-elements with CSS and only a bit of JavaScript. - Val Head’s “The CSS Animations Pocket Guide” is available here and should be purchased via Pay what you like. (But you could get it also for free).
- The Power of the
emunit in CSS. Often neglected, replaced withrembut it’s also supercool to Size Web Components. - Work typographically correct in CSS, for example with hyphens and justification.
Sass
- About libsass and ruby-sass—discussing if libsass is ready for primetime yet? because it can be up to 41x faster.
- How to do unit tests for your Scss—yes, you heard right! And there is Bootcamp which is very similar to Jasmine, and True as frameworks.
- Prepare Sass extends to be usable within media queries. Because you just need to work around a little bit. Nice technique!
Go beyond…
- Get better at accepting critical feedback on your work…
- How to get better only by developers talking with designers and vice versa. Also, how to influence other people doing “just” your Front-End work.
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Thanks and all the best,
Anselm