Hey,
it’s nearly Christmas and I hope you’re not too stressed preparing and finishing stuff before the holiday. In the past two weeks I fortunately had the time to work on the project’s website and gave it a fresh color scheme. It also serves SSL now—that said I need to say it’s basic shared SSL by Cloudflare. It’s the easiest and probably best option for GitHub served content and I think it’s fine for my use-case.
My personal wish for the upcoming year 2015 is that this project can be kept alive just by donations from you, the readers. I’m not really convinced about including advertising and like the idea of a sustainable business model (if you can call it a business) just because people love what they use. I’m currently thinking about how to make donating more appealing and probably that means I need to rewrite the website to a node application that is able to do dynamical stuff but that is yet to be determined.
News
- Security Alert: Every Git user on Windows or Mac OS X should upgrade their git version as soon as possible and not pull any unknown git package meanwhile.
- Ouch. Seems ICANN, the global authority that handles most domain names, the master DNS zone and more has been hacked. Ironically, it was achieved using a spear-phishing email that looked like an internal. Fortunately the hackers didn’t get access to IANA which is like the heart of the internet as it manages the DNS root zone.
- Google moved their PGP browser extension to GitHub and teamed up with Yahoo to develop it. They also started paying for security audits.
- What’s new for developers in Firefox 36? That’s the version of the current developer edition and it let you inspect pseudo-elements (also shown in DOM tree), can show DOM properties, highlights box model in remote targets, shows Shadow DOM, and adds more paste options.
Work life
- Dan Carley wrote about the problem with working late and after office hours. He shares why we as developers often work late from home and how one still can achieve a no-pressure team culture even if people commit code late.
- Jeffrey Zeldman shares his holiday wish. True words we should read again from time to time.
Concepts & Design
- Checklists can help finishing a project properly. Now there’s also a UX Project Checklist reminding you on the most important usability points in a project.
- Not convinced yet about the delicious burger on all the mobile views that reflect a menu? ConversionXL tested various menus and analyzes the effectiveness of menu styles in their article.
- IBM shared its design language in a huge online styleguide. For example, here are the front-end fundamentals.
- Follow the logo design process of Aaron Draplin in this short video.
- Think SoundCloud already has a cool and working interface? Well, this guy rebuilt SoundCloud from scratch and decluttered the UI to make it more pleasant to use it.
- How to solve the problem of getting app reviews in a better and more subtle way than with the annoying pop-up alerts most apps use.
Generic / Tools
- Markdown Live is a front-end tool that lets you write Markdown and converts it live so you can see the output in your browser.
- There are a couple of image comparison tools but this one is the one used and built by Yahoo: blink-diff.
- Joni Bologna created the Apple Project in which she shares different clever front-end techniques, all under the motto Apples. Learn for example how to create a off-canvas nav, an apple counter, fill SVGs with the cascading color and more.
- Regulex is a pretty cool visualization of regular expressions. It may help you find errors and it also may help you understanding them better.
- Using WebStorm? Here’s a great list of things that enhance your WebStorm development workflow.
- Using Atom? Here’s a little plugin that beautifies your JavaScript using esformatter.
HTML / SVG
JavaScript
- Filament Group did a research on how MVC frameworks perform regarding their initial load times.
- ReactJS for stupid people. Because Andrew Ray wished he had found such a resource for himself. Now he wrote up what he learned.
- Google transferred the Pointer Events polyfill to the jQuery foundation. They will take on the work and start improving it soon.
- Vanilla PubSub is a pure JavaScript, no dependency helper that gives you a publication/subscription pattern.
- Did you know you can group console messages with
console.group()easily? Works in IE11, Chrome and Firefox. Here’s a guide how you can use it.
CSS / Sass
- Hugo Giraudel created the Sass Compatibility sheet where you can find about the differences between rubysass and libsass versions.
- Ever wanted to create an animation that feels and looks natural? Gravify mimics the gravity effect.
Web Type
- It’s here. Recently I shared the beta but now it’s live and polished: The state of WebType, the so called CanIuse for web typography which shares which typographic features you can already use in which browsers.
- TypeKit meanwhile offers you a new option called "early access" in your account settings. This adds you an option in your kit settings to use OpenType features like ligatures, alternate glyphs, fractions. But only add it if you really make use of them as it increases the kit size.
- If you use localStorage to serve webfonts, you also can serve WOFF2 to compliant browsers.
- TypeCast becomes a free tool. This is awesome! For their business you can still subscribe to a bigger plan which for example includes team access to the tool as well as a bigger commercial font library and no site badge. And there’s also a special plan in partnership with Monotype which allows you to share your fonts between all devices, desktop, website, ebooks and more.
Go beyond…
- Everything needs to be done fast these days and most people don’t take time for their tasks. This project took 300 hours and teaches you patience and focusing your mind on one thing for a long time. Besides that, it is a very beautiful result.
- Travis CI changed their open vacation policy (under which they didn’t track anything) to a minimum vacation policy. Read why they did it and what the effect is here. Some things need to be made as requirement to be effective. And I am sure this will turn out to be successful, similar to the case studies about four day weeks.
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.
Merry Christmas and a happy new Year!
Anselm