Hey,
unfortunately some people here might have missed the last issue. To avoid this in future, please add readinglist \at/ helloanselm \dot/ com to your contacts. Tell other people to do so so they receive the letter again. Hopefully this letter will arrive at more people again.
Now let’s try it with another edition of the Web Development Reading List—the 46th already. Quite some news along with interesting reads about prequalifying clients, some cool JavaScript tools and other tricks. Let’s go, I wish you a great weekend!
News
- The H5BP Apache Server Configs have been updated to 2.5.0 and now compress cache manifests and have been re-structured.
- Unicode 7.0 has been announced and incorporates 2834 new icons. I’m not really sure when the new icons will be available anywhere though.
- The Microsoft IE Team announced that as of now, there’s a IE Dev Channel for developers similar to Canary / Nightlies of WebKit, Firefox or Blink. This is another huge step for IE towards being a super cool browser.
- Firefox 32 DevTools get a “Make Screenshot” button in the toolbar UI. This is pretty cool and gives you new possibilities to debug websites and get advice by third parties.
- Chrome 35 for Windows (beta) adds DirectWrite font rendering finally making Chrome font rendering so much nicer. Big yay!
- CodePen now has a blogging functionality to explain your CodePens. Cool extension to the already great service.
- Firefox DevTools now have new features: Pick elements via different shortcuts, an Audio API editor and user stylesheet support, code completion for JS in scratchpad.
- PDF.js got a major performance boost means Firefox will soon use much less memory for PDF views.
- Amazon presented the Fire Phone this week; it’s Android based, may use a Silk browser and seems to promote WebApps heavily. Of course it incorporates all of Amazon’s core goals: Finding products by scanning with the camera app on Amazon.
General stuff
- A repository and demo of the world showing actual weather conditions. An amazing demo but what I really would find useful is if this could become a new kind of forecast application.
- Dan Mall shares his experience on pre-qualifying clients and shares his common questions and answers to ask for when a new client want to work with you. This is a very useful set of considerations.
Design
- A Workflow for Vector Creation. Very interesting and in detail post, showing how to create icons.
- GitHub Icons for your Project, Octicons. Now updated and ready to be used by everyone out there, they’re open source now.
- A cool short tutorial how to build a nice and clean subscription form.
- Help homeless people by purchasing homeless fonts. A nice project helping other people!
Tools
- Google shared their web development best practices a few weeks ago and now added a Web Starter Kit. It’s a framework that incorporates all the best practices and helps you to set up a new project easily. As you might imagine, it’s heavily tool-driven.
- The New York Times shares an article in which they write about their internal Content Management System called Scoop, write how important it is to separate function and delivering and why their system differs so much from common CMS.
Git
- Ever heard of
git rerere? It’s cool to reuse recorded resolutions. What does that mean? It allows you to ask Git to remember how you’ve resolved a hunk conflict so that the next time it sees the same conflict, Git can automatically resolve it for you. Pretty cool, heh?
Web Performance
- The Box team shares their experience how to provide high availability with nodeJS on their servers. Pretty cool to see how such a service deals with performance bottlenecks, what products they use and how they harden their infrastructure.
HTML
- Learn about the SVG viewBox and viewport and how they affect the rendering of an SVG file in your markup or CSS. This is a good tutorial that helps you to understand how SVG works.
JavaScript
- Switch from Callbacks to Promises to make your code better.
- Do you use
Object.__proto__orObject.setPrototypeOf? It should better be avoided. - Odyssey.js is a JavaScript tool to weave interactive stories and visually enhance your article. It even has an editor mode and you write the story in JSON so this is a pretty library to use when you’re telling stories on the web.
CSS
- Everything and all about Bulletproof Font Icons, a slidedeck by Zach Leatherman.
Go beyond…
- “We aren’t supposed to complain about these things, because these things make our work seem difficult.”—Do your job, and do it properly.
- “Respect your users’ time and context. Don’t penalize people for how they choose to access your sites, products and services. Work towards universal access to content.”.
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Thanks and all the best,
Anselm