Hey,
this week is one of those where it’s hard to decide which articles to leave in and which to filter out for the weekly letter. And while we face tons of new tools, scripts, design approaches it’s also important to have a look beyond what’s going on technically. Without your mind, your body, your soul, your work will suffer. We need to find a way to not only work efficiently but also to live and to explore new things besides programming and work. You probably noticed earlier already but I added a section called “Work & Live” here which covers exactly those aspects.
But now towards some concrete reading before you hopefully can enjoy your weekend:
News
- IE has deprecated SSL3.0 in a step to better security for the users. And along with Chrome and Firefox they have announced to drop SPDY support and prioritize HTTP/2 with IE leading the timeline.
Concepts & Design
- As the human body is, we’ll all get older some day. And there are some of us on the world (hint) who already are. That is why it’s so important to think outside the box and design digital technology for the elderly.
- Translation and Multi-Language Sites are not easy to design. That’s why case studies on the topic are really interesting. In this case, we have a responsive navigation working with 73 languages or more.
- 64 ways to think about a news homepage. A great list showing the different methods of curating content of a site on the first page and how it affects what people read. A long analysis and research on existing models, user backgrounds, user experience and misassumptions by the makers.
- A set of transformable SVG Icons.
- Chad Thornton tells us a bit more about the design space at AirBNB and how he gets his work done.
- Have you ever tried to explain people how setting up PGP for mail enryption works? Well, then you might know it’s far from ideal. That’s why the guys from Whiteout Mail challenged the process and came up with a better user experience: Make PGP key management invisible.
Generic / Tools
- npm
semantic-releaseis a handy tool that automates your semver publishing of packages and even takes care ofnpm publish(via your CI). - node-sass 2 has been released, adding io.js support, Sass Graph and node.js 0.12 support. But I heard from a couple of people that node.js 0.12 isn’t very stable and causes some compatibility issues with some of your dependencies.
- BrowserSync 2.0 is out, introducing Browser Sync UI, dynamic sync options, remote debugging via weinre.
- CSS Buddy lets you write CSS for your Sketch layer. It’s yet in a very early stage of development and of course might have bugs but it’s great to see people writing such useful plugins that help developers get more productive.
- We repeat our mistakes from the era of Flash websites with web applications. This time we make everything dependent on JavaScript and use frameworks that emphatize this approach. But we don’t need to do it and we can do better.
- It was only a matter of time to see someone writing a webserver for Firefox OS and now it’s been done.
- You can now install all the fonts available on Google Fonts directory via CLI.
Web Performance
- Tim Kadlec’s opinion on client-side MVC frameworks that do not allow server-side rendering? It’s a bug.
- Flipboard for the Web is here and the tech team shares their approach on using a virtual DOM for better performance. Sadly they also chose a way to produce the layout as one big canvas which means it’s currently not accessible. I hope they fix this soon as I’m sure they could get a similar performance without affecting accessibility.
HTML / SVG
- There are considerations now for a Data Plan Info API which would be awesome as it would get information on how much data a user can consume.
- Ian Devlin startet to write a series of ARIA enabled templates, all shared under the name ARIAbones to guide you through the process of making websites more accessible when you code your own.
- The svg-sprite tool by Joschi Kuphal now has an (beta) online configurator that helps you setting the proper options and it also got a better documentation.
- Use WebP, APNG, JPEGXR or JPEG2000 today with picturefill and modernizr is a long read about the performance of all these formats and how you can use them today to get the best out of it.
JavaScript
- The holy grail of progressively enhanced data visualizations in a nutshell. Great to see post telling you how easy it is to not fully rely on JavaScript but progressively enhance charts or timelines with JavaScript.
- Pro tips on how to write efficient and high-performance JavaScript.
- Learn how to write a single page application without a framework. Because for small apps you might don’t need to throw a big framework on it.
- NunchuckJS will synchronize data between different hardware devices in node.js.
- The W3C published a first working draft of a WebRTC Screen Capture API which would be pretty handy as it would give us native screen sharing and broadcasting.
- Learn how to use ES6 template strings in this short article by Brad Daily. And if you think that’s cool (I do) here’s another post by him about
letandconstin ES6 and how to define variables in ES6. - Doing Web Animations can be hard and keeping them high-performance is even harder. I personally don’t like to apply crazy hacks to code just because browsers aren’t smart enough but in many cases you need to do it. And that’s where coding priciples can make sense: Paul Lewis shares how to get better performance of animations with the FLIP principle that uses inversion as a trick.
- Almost everybody knows a little JavaScript, but almost nobody really understands JavaScript. This is a very real, very serious problem.
CSS / Sass
- Because flexbox is really different from what we’ve been doing in the past we struggle with it. Chris Wright shares strategies how to use Flexbox today and how to deal with issues.
- Why all of us are used think CSS variables are a great idea and why in fact they’re not as great as you think.
Work & live
- “Work for nothing but work for something”—David Hieatt
- Well, working with people in different timezones can be challenging. But how Slack notifies you when someone might be sleeping is a pretty awesome little advice for how to chat and how to communicate in your work.
- It’s vital to put yourself on exposure, to target your anxiety. Kate Daly on rock climbing, big walls, public speaking, changing jobs and playing live music.
“We were told to surf the web, but in the end the web serf’d us.”—A Case examining tech recruitment, tech workers, tech leaders, social and humanity.
Go beyond…
Click the image to get insights on how the photographer Alex Cornell shot it and how it was to get hyped in the media.
- “Yup, the future is exciting. But it will be shaped by what you do today. How hard you work at something today. How much you try today. How much you learn today.”—Make time for now by David Hieatt
- It’s more important to share what’s worked for you instead of telling people what to they need to do. Because it’s probably a whole different story and limiting their creativity only hurts success.
And with that I’ll close for this week. In case you like what I write each week, please support me via Flattr, gratipay or share this resource with other people. You can learn more about the costs of the project here. It’s available via E-Mail, RSS and online.
Thanks and all the best,
Anselm