Hey,
in weeks like this I know that people are back to work. The web has been filled with so many good new articles and resources that it’s sometimes hard to distinct which links to use for the list. Besides the high quality articles that have been written over the past few days, I’ve got quite a couple of good inspirational links for you. Here we go:
News
- Microsoft revealed their plans for Windows 10 this week and announced their new browser. Forget your UA Sniffing, the new string looks like this:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.4; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.143 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.0. ‘Spartan’, that’s how the new browser is called, will be always up-to-date and has a non-legacy new rendering engine (still Trident based). It seems IE will be still there, too. - Firefox 37 (we are now at 35 in stable channel) DevTools get a Security panel. This is dedicated to show you how your website performs security-wise and shows you information on your SSL certificate, HSTS, fingerprints, and protocol versions. Pretty cool and I believe that’s just the start and they will include CSP, CORS, Frame injection issues and other stuff in there.
- Firefox Nightly experiments with WebVR now it seems, so you’ll be able to use your Oculus Rift in Firefox.
- In the U.S. Obama administration is proposing legislation that endangers privacy and security. A few days before reading this article I found this interesting piece on how the NSA prepares and tests cyber wars and how they try to get hold of every computing machine, just in case. But hey, cameras are everywhere and that’s how it rolls.
Work life
- Whether we you are a freelancer, owner of a small agency or run a website single handedly, too many of us work alone.
Concepts & Design
- Why and how Mailchimp redesigned their navigation in the app.
- The viewport. One of the best secrets of browsers today. People working on Chrome now decided to alter the way of the virtual viewport that is applied when you zoom into a page (for example when the site isn’t mobile optimized). With that, they follow the IE team to make better assumptions on what the user wants to see.
- Why Stripe still accepts your replaced credit card when it‘s not valid anymore. That is a great case of user experience revealing that the card networks auto-update your information anyway. But don’t loos your card or just throw it away when replaced. Now you know why.
Generic / Tools
- How dangerous it is to build products without first identifying and testing the value of it. That’s a good piece on our modern start-up culture and sustainable businesses.
- So there’s now a trello clone and it’s open source: Libreboard. While I wonder why they stick so similar to Trello’s UI, I love the idea of having a self-hosted easy to use Kanban board.
Web Performance
- Understanding why so many webfonts don’t scale well and how live font interpolation works on the web.
- Finally, after months of work, the Wordpress Responsive Images plugin has been published and if you’re using Wordpress I highly recommend to use it.
- Bruce Lawson explains why we can’t do real responsive images with CSS or JavaScript.
Front-End Architecture
- How AirBNB maintains their code quality at scale in their team of 130 developers. An interesting case with many strong arguments for styleguides, reviews, testing.
- Ian Feather, front-end tech lead at LoneyPlanet, shares what they would change in Rizzo, their online styleguide.
- How NASA engineering changed over the past decades and what we can take away from it for web development projects.
- Only slightly front-end related but still worth a read: How to make a normal website bulletproof for a big amount of requests. Insights from the Kim Kardashian story at PAPER. Yet I find it weird that this is why you need to scale your architecture and serious content mostly isn’t an issue.
- The discussion of wether to render on the server or the client is going on but Malte Ubl shared some insights on both parties here.
JavaScript
- Create well behaving sites with the Page Visibility API and stop heavy animations when the page is not active. Though I don’t agree with the video example the author states it gives you some good possibilities for other actions.
- When you offer bigger forms that users often re-fill only slightly edited, this technique is gold. Auto-filling forms with jQuery and the Web Storage API.
- The untold story about CSS animation performance. This is a good round-up and reminder of what you should consider when working with CSS and JavaScript animations.
- Earcut is a lightweight polygon triangulation library using WebGL.
CSS / Sass
- See why it can matter how you sort your CSS.
- Center and crop images with a single line of CSS.
- PubCSS is an approach to format academic publications in HTML & CSS.
Go beyond…
- Chris Coyier writing about the Web Devvy Ways to Practice Gratitude and Empathy.
- The habits of happiness, a talk in which Matthieu Ricard tells you about meditating, mind training and how happiness works. Very inspiring!
- Brené Brown: The Power of Vulnerability.
- In Praise of Limits. How setting yourself some limits should be worth a try.
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