Hey,
what an inspiring week. I’ve been at the Beyond Tellerrand conference and a few side-events and met many lovely people, saw great talks and whilst that, the internet didn’t stood still. But first, a warm welcome to all new subscribers (and hell, it has been a lot—so many, that I reached TinyLetter subscriber limit. But the lovely staff fixed that very quick)! This week, I have a lot of browser news for you, a new open source font, designing for motion, best practices for JavaScript and, of course, some inspiration at the end. Have fun!
News
- DuckDuckGo launched a complete new version of its search now featuring a super clean design and most of Google’s features, too (Maps/Location search, Conversions, Wolfram Alpha stuff, etc).
- Modernizr 3.0 is shaping up nicely. Here’s a draft of the release notes to give you more insight on what is new and what changed. In short it means 75+ new tests, better touch / pointer detection, hardened tests, more and better APIs.
- Blink (Chrome) has shown intent to ship Subpixel font scaling which should scale fonts much more smoothly, especially in small font-sizes. Also interesting is they want to ship CSS Shapes and they added support for blending modes on background-images which is super cool (already shipped by Firefox).
- Firefox Nightly now supports
position: sticky;, has a new preferences layout which is clean and nice. Additionally, sandboxed iframes can soon open popups via a directive. - It looks like Chrome is going to provide a full code editor in/for DevTools?
General stuff
- Closing a service or shutting down a website is hard. This article want to lead you through the process and gives you advice on how to do it wisely. And if you have a user-base don’t forget to say what’s happening with their data.
- Writing for the user.
- “Everything is broken.” A story about digital software, bugs, attacks and espionage by everyone.
Design
- Oozled is a new place for curated resources for everything design related and it’s pretty cool.
- Adobe released Source Serif Pro as free font. A nicely shaped serif font completing the Source font-family by Adobe.
- We all know it’s hard to find colors, right? Here you get a set of well selected colors every day.
- Why 60fps in web? Why has TV 24/30? Paul Bakaus about the illusion of motion.
Tools
- How to split your Gulp tasks into separate files. It’s easily done with the
require-dirmodule. - How to create a maintainable styleguide that doesn’t run out of sync anymore.
Web Performance
- Good News: The average website is 5% smaller than it was six months ago, now 1491kb. That means we’re on the right way but 1.5MB is still way to much. Care about size!
JavaScript
- Why script injecting external scripts might not be a great idea and how performance is affected by it, written by Ilya Grigorik. For example, the common way we include Google Analytics is definitely affected and should be reconsidered.
- Fixing Layout Thrashing in the real world. Layout Thrashing occurs when JavaScript violently writes, then reads, from the DOM, multiple times causing document reflows. This articles shows how you can avoid it using instantiable-FastDOM.
- The Conditioner.js library got a new major version (1.0), now AMD ready and including many other improvements.
- Learn how to deal with
NaNin JavaScript and what you need to know about the risks dealing with it. - Bootstrapvalidator is a jQuery plugin to validate form fields easily.
- Philip Walton about the Dangers of Stopping Event Propagation. An interesting article showing several issues you will run in when using
stopPropagation()but might never recognize as problem.
CSS
- This Offset Mixin can help you positioning an offset of an element.
- Searching for a spinning animation that is of a single element? These CSS Spinners by Luke Haas might help you out.
- Chris Coyier updated his Complete Guide to Flexbox theses days to reflect all the changes and new insights.
Go beyond…
- The fine line between Hero and Zero. It’s easy to say you’ll do better if you’re not in the same situation but when you are, try your best to stick to your statement. Leading companies is a tough job if you want to do it good.
- Get over yourself. Your Ego can hurt yourself, your work and your creativity. Try to stop it.
- How to be consistent? Plan your failure. Being Consistent Is Not the Same as Being Perfect.
- Say no if you don’t really want it. Saying no in your mind doesn’t mean becoming ignorant. Instead it clears the fog and makes space for what is more important.
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Thanks and all the best,
Anselm