Hey,
this week I’ve got quite a couple of news for you. Starting with the redesign of WDRL’s website which is now much cleaner and more functional. Hopefully you like the new design of it, but if not or if you encounter bugs, please let me know here. I added a few things as well: Here’s a page stating how you can and should support the project and what it costs. I finally figured out this Bitcoin thing as well so as of now you can support me with bitcoins.
So that is the news about the project, now let’s get started giving you the news from the fron-end scene. While some news have been announces, this issue has some design advice on mobile menus, interesting DOM JavaScript hacks, and how to encapsulate your widgets’ CSS:
Oh, wait a bit—did you know why the mouse cursor is slightly tilted and not straight. Here’s the historical reason.
News
- Chrome 39 Beta includes JS Generators, Animation Playback Control, and the WebApp Manifest.
- A bit unrelated to web but Ind.ie presented an open source challenger to Apple’s Swift—Phoenix. Bold move and hopefully they will have success.
- Android 5.0 (Lollipop) will include Chromium v37 as WebView which is very good news as the old WebView was still way behind and not updateable which it now is through Google Play Store. That means WebView will stay up-to-date even without OS releases!
- WebStorm 9 IDE is out!
General
- As OS X Yosemite is out now you might want to fix the default privacy settings according to this document. Oh, did you know about the history of Yosemite valley by the way? I saw a great film yesterday about the rock climbers there and were super impressed by the footage they re-created and how the valley was 50 years before and now is a tourist attraction heavily controlled by rangers.
- Stacey Mulcahy shared how she ended up talking less, doing more and teaching kids/students the stuff you know.
Concepts & Design
- Mike Stern, User experience evangelist at Apple, about Hamburger menus. Interesting to read.
- Google Design open sourced their Material Design Icons so you can use them. Bold move. Also available via Bower and npm.
- Design Accessibly, See Differently: Color Contrast Tips And Tools.
- The end of Apps as we know them.
- Beyond You. In client work, it’s our responsibility to ensure that our work lives beyond ourselves.
Tools
- CSS Clippy is an CSS
clip-pathmaker. - Coolors is a color palette generator which is very useful and simple to use.
Web Performance
- Does a print style sheet slow your site down? Here’s the research on it.
- Resource Timing practical tips by Steve Souders.
HTML / SVG
- Get an idea what W3C plans to improve and standardize the way we make payments on the web.
JavaScript
- “In the DOM, no one will hear you scream”—A slidedeck by Mario Heiderich about the pitfalls in the DOM showing you that you definitely should consider a front-end security engineer if you do anything critical with forms on your website.
- Zach Leatherman open sourced a WebFontLoader module that hooks into the native module or polyfills it for non-supporting browsers.
- Easy JavaScript Server Side Debugging with the mCAP® Platform.
- localForage vs. XHR in which Peter Bengtsson writes about performance of an AJAX call in comparison to a call to the localStorage method of the browser (i.e. IndexedDB).
- The Art of Creating Simple but Flexible APIs.
Sass / CSS
- See what to make out of the new media queries that are stated in the Media Queries Level 4 module of the specification.
- These are the native cursors you can trigger by just CSS.
- If you provide or create a widget that should be integrated into other websites but with your style it’s important to do a fews things. Bruce Lawson suggests to use
selector { all: initial; }.
Go beyond…
- How many days of vacation do you take? Is there a minimum or maximum limit to days off? Cameron Moll shares how cool it is to offer unlimited vacation as a company and why it even makes sense to require your employees to take a minimum of days off.
- There are already cool things out there for a independent web but it needs to be integrated by you on your own site. And hopefully, the documentation that currently still lacks of easy readability will be improved (maybe by you?).
- Despite what several influential people say, there are many reasons why email will never die.
- Aaron Parecki held this talk at border:none 2014 and talked about data silos and Back to the Web.
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Thanks and all the best,
Anselm