Hey,
welcome again to this issue of the Web Development Reading List—this time already the 47th issue. Please add readinglist \at/ helloanselm \dot/ com to your contacts or whitelist the address.
This week, some interesting articles arrived here and I’ll share the best with you.
News
- Chrome 38 (currently is Canary channel) introduces the Responsive Design view in DevTools, similar to what Firefox has since some months already. Chrome also has a network throttling tool to emulate slower connections. But be aware that this is only a “stupid” emulator and does not reflect what really happens on mobile networks, so ensure to test your site on real devices and real networks.
- Firefox now includes the WebIDE in Nightly builds and therefore offers you a bunch of cool editor tools, including remote debugging with Firefox DevTools in other browsers.
- Opera finally published the long awaited Opera Mini 8 for iOS, leveling up the UI, the featureset on their servers and a switch between the Mini (all rendering done on Opera servers, less features) and Turbo mode (rendering on client, iOS WebKit features). The servers rendering the stuff from Mini mode will soon see an update supporting flexbox, rem-unit, and other things…
- GitHub added a Revert Button in their UI to revert merged pull requests easily.
General stuff
- Using SublimeText, use
command + shift + kto write an opening and closing tag at once. - Peterson Ferreira on the importance of refactoring your code to ensure your code is easy to understand, bugs are easy to find, the application has a solid structure.
Design
- Elliot Jay Stocks from TypeKit about Google’s Material Design, embracing the beauty of the new styleguide documentation.
- Create a stunning reading experience. But how it’s done for the web, you can read in this in-depth article.
Tools
- Framer Studio and framer.js are tools that let you create interactive prototypes easily. While the code framework itself is free and open source, the UI app has to be purchased but has a reasonable pricing.
- Regression Testing with Resemble.js is a great alternative to PhantomCSS if you want to be more flexible and experiencing problems with false-positives.
JavaScript
- Ampersand.js—a highly modular, loosely coupled, non-frameworky framework for building advanced JavaScript apps.
- A Medium like commenting system built in JavaScript and available for you now is SideComments.js.
- Epoch is a general purpose real-time charting library for building beautiful, smooth, and high performance visualizations. Yay, it’s great to see a nice and good library open sourced.
CSS
- Giving Animations Life is a good resource how to bring life to user interfaces with CSS and BounceJS.
- Some good advice by Hugo Giraudel to improve and simplify your Sass mixins and functions.
Go beyond…
- Well, how does a company work without managers? A controverse try but Treehouse did it and this is how it went…
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Thanks and all the best,
Anselm