Hola!
A week in web development never stops producing new stuff and that’s why I can send you these emails every week containing many great tools and articles. This week is about browser news, a few cool new techniques, tools and some important articles about workflows, project management and improving the way to work.
News
- Firefox 29 shipped this week and brought the beautiful Australis UI to everyone out there. With it, major DevTools improvements landed, CSS Variables support, unprefixed
box-sizing,will-change(for animated objects),<input type="color">are all now supported. That’s a big release! - If you wonder how browser vendors decide if to implement a new web platform feature, here is a document to guide Blink developers.
- IE8 is still the most used browser world-wide.
- AppLinks helps you to link to mobile apps from your website.
General stuff
- Thoughts on “I’m not your recruiter” and on helping others to form their business for free.
- The way we build the internet is changing. Envato shares this article about smaller frameworks, components, living styleguides and other changes lately in our industry.
- Nicole Sullivan on optimizing code and get started to improve your skills by reading webstandards.
- How do web experts manage cross platform testing?
Design
- How to create a nice, readable typographic experience using some CSS and em-values.
Tools
stream-throttleis a nodejs tool that can throttle your network connection. There’s also a grunt plugin so you can test your grunt project.- Use grunt to directly publish to gh-pages.
Git
- These are some useful Git tips you probably didn’t know. For example, for comparing your branch to the current master use
git diff master...instead ofgit diff master. - How to deal with merge conflicts.
HTML
- Get started with web accessibility
- A great slide deck on Digital self-defense—mitigate clickjacking and XSS attacks with HTTP Headers.
JavaScript
- Velocity.js is a jQuery plugin that handles animation methods of jQuery, but just way better performance-wise.
- Chrome removed the click delay recently but this is now causing other issues like custom swipe gestures not working anymore. Because you now have to call
event.preventDefault()within 200ms. That’s why pointer events are so much better. - Be careful using jQuery’s
trigger()function and be aware what to do if this doesn’t work as expected. - Tests, like any code, should be deleted when their cost exceeds their value. Stay sane testing your web applications.
CSS
- Sara Soueidan wrote a CSS Shapes 101 on A List Apart. Quite helpful.
- How to tailor your CSS for performance by asynchronously loading e.g. background-images.
- Create adaptive placeholders for your form fields. They can massively improve the user experience.
- Understanding CSS timing functions from the ground up.
Go beyond…
- Work Life Balance: What changes could help improve yours? Sweden tests the 6hrs day, based on the success of a 4day week.
- Perfectionism is a beast or why finishing things is hard.
- Frank Chimero and his plan to not install, buy or create new tools but only making his work instead.
- Email considered harmful and impacting your work productivity.
- “Do it once, do it right”—some good thoughts on agile processes and iterations. Because iteration needs to be built into your product timelines.
- What your Project Manager should and has to do for your team and why you probably don’t want to be in this role.
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Thanks and all the best,
Anselm