Hey,
this week a couple of things happened, especially if you look into some newspapers but in our industry the week was again a good one: New stuff arrived, companies opening up, advice on strategies, planning and designs. And while my dear U.S. subscribers probably are celebrating black friday today, we can all celebrate the 9th birthday of Sass today. Yes, it already exists since over 8 years now.
News
- The IE team is moving IE web development support over to Stack Overflow. This is particularly great as this means opening up the whole Q&A to everyone. Probably we will also see more IE devs at Stack Overflow responding to issues there.
General
- Are you selling digital goods in the EU? Well then you should be aware of the new tax rules starting January, 1st 2015. Also, here’s a quite comprehensive list of who has implemented it already and other resources.
Concepts & Design
- If you work with agile methods it can sometimes be hard to create meaningful, good user stories. What this is about, how to create good user stories–you’ll find it out in this article.
- How the iPhone 6 Plus Impacts Where We Read & Watch. One example: The bigger your phone’s screen, the more time you’ll spend reading / watching on it.
- There exist a lot of concepts for good form designs and label management on forms. But it still can be improved, fore example like this concept of interactive floating labels.
Tools
- Having issues writing your gulpfile all on your own? Well, here’s a visual online editor for your gulpfile.
- Want to drive PhantomJS from Grunt? Here’s how you can do without adding another layer of tools like CasperJS.
- Annoyed by npm’s release process? Here’s a cool helper called
npm-releaseby Tom Ashworth. - Building stuff on Squarespace? Here’s how you can use Grunt on the platform.
Web Performance
- Scott Jehl is writing about Planning for Performance on A List Apart and you should read it.
HTML / SVG
- An Iconfont that displays payment icons? Here you go....
- scientiamobile wrote an interesting article about Responsive Images and its real world scenarios and how they as service provider want to help you with it (and even test automatic art direction at the moment).
- Annoyed by all these heavy tools for editing SVG? You might want to try this amazing online SVG editor instead.
JavaScript
- If you’re into SVG, Alex Kaul, creator of SVG Circus, published his new project: SVG Morpheus—a JavaScript library enabling SVG icons to morph from one to the other.
- Shaking hands with RequireJS explains how to deal with larger bits of JavaScript in your project and how RequireJS can help you dealing with it.
- Medium built a simple charting library.
- If you’re like me, CSS compatibility of specific properties is relatively easy to remember whereas in JavaScript it’s often much more complicated and harder to find useful information on compatibility. Gladfully Louis Lazaris shares the best resources to look at to find JS compatibility tables.
- Rapid LoDash is now available. If you’re a JavaScript developer, and you aren’t using Lo-Dash yet, you really need to check it out.
- James Halliday shares his thoughts and solution to a better decentralized, offline sign-on in the browser.
Sass / CSS
- How to put Dropcaps into your text with CSS.
- Keep your CSS short with
currentColor. Supported in IE9+ that was your first thought. - For the WebAnimations API, the polyfill codebase has been renewed and now the first version (1.0) of it can be used.
Go beyond…
- Chris Heilmann questions "What if everything is awesome?"
- What will happen if you aren’t around anymore and your rented server is shut down? Reminding thoughts about the thought ever-long life of content on the web and the issues we’re usually forgetting about.
- What do you think if I tell you paper can glow? Yo, it can. Rohinni invented a thing called lightpaper which sounds really interesting.
- Ever thought you’re too old for something? Read this.
- See our Planet Earth in 4K as timelapse film created by a student and added up to a 121Megapixel picture in summary.
And that’s it again for this week. If you liked the content, please consider support by using Flattr or gratipay me or share this resource with other people. Learn more about the costs of the project here. It’s available via E-Mail, RSS and online.
Thanks and all the best,
Anselm