Hey,
in the past months some very unfortunate news came out, including surveillance of us, or Google buying domain names for internal usage. It’s hard to stay positive these days when you look at the big picture and the big companies who try to massively undermine laws or internet users’ rights. But we’re here to not capitulate and we must not forget about the good things happening every day in your life. The small things that make you happy, make you go to work, enjoy working and let you live life. We should more try to remember these little details and to do that I recently started to note down each day a few things that worked and made me happy. Maybe you should start doing that, too?
News
- Firefox experimentally uses its own Geolocation service instead of Google’s now. In my test it worked as fine as before so feel free to switch already.
- Google stops shipping Chrome updates to Android 4.0 so Chrome 42 will be the last update for such devices with no security updates following when Chrome 43 is released.
- Google tries to get the
.devdomain solely to use it internally. Despite the fact Google was advocating net neutrality, this is a counter argument and the application letter and letter by the CIO read like the statement on net neutrality by Comcast itself. - Brackets 1.2 is out and with some minor other features it adds SVG hints which is super useful.
- Firefox gets a Reader Mode (as Safari has) in Nightly.
Concepts & Design
- Frank Chimero with a well written piece on The Web’s Grain. We tend to use fragile solutions more often because we as inventors already know how to use it. But that doesn’t mean users can use it. And then, changing the topic, we might change our perspective and not see the browsers canvas as white blank canvas on which we build something.
- Finding a subtle, nearly invisible way to animate states and user actions is key to success for your web project.
- It’s only Color. How to choose a set of colors for your website and make it fit together.
- Here are a few Camping Essentials Icons you can use for free.
Generic / Tools
- Chalk – Terminal string styling done right is now 1.0
- Tenon, the accessibility testing tool has officially launched and you can use it via website, grunt, gulp, Wordpress or as browser extension.
- An interesting read on why this tech bubble is worse than the one of 2000.
- Your job is not to write code. Your job is to improve the product for its users.
- Paul Bakaus thinks we need better and smarter DevTools. Therefore he created a public Trello board with some suggestions and you can vote for them, add your own opinion or suggest another feature.
Web Performance
- As HTTP/2 is arriving nginx now plans to support it.
Security
- This week the FREAK Attack has been found revealing that SSL could be intercepted relatively easily for ten years.
- You may remember when Google announced in fall that Android 5 will be encrypted by default on every device. You know what? They quietly backed away. Another sad Google story this week.
- Hacking your own Smart TV is often an easy task and sometimes you even can get remote access through installed malware.
- Java’s latest update introduces adware on Mac OS X as well. Isn’t that another reason to uninstall Java from your machine?
SVG
- Ryan Brownhill shares his experience on animating SVGs from start. A great way to dive into this topic when you haven’t already.
JavaScript
- I don’t often recommend JavaScript sliders or similar tools but this one is done particularly great: Swiper has the usual slider features, swiping for Pointer and Touch Events, full and real RTL support, uses Mutation Observer, and is library agnostic.
- Osvaldas Valutis describes how to put your SVG sprite into localStorage so users don’t need to re-download it when re-visiting.
CSS / Sass
- Hui Jing shares how great CSS Shapes are and explains the little details you might not have known before.
- In some cases you can style native form elements with the power of CSS pseudo-elements. Unfortunately, the implementations vary broadly and you often only get weird prefixed pseudo-elements. Therefore you should be careful using it.
- This update on the state of web type is a rather short but well curated roundup on what’s working how in which browsers nowadays.
Work life
- The Origin of the 8-hour Work Day and why we should rethink it.
Go beyond…
The Lie We Live reminds us on the facts of our planet, of how we lie to ourselves to make things work but how important it is to remind yourself of that fact from time to time. Very much worth watching it:
- In the future of work it should be your effort to create purpose driven organizations and creating a positive impact on the world.
- Sand on beaches all around the world is slowly replaced by plastic sand. How can we save the world from death by plastic? Don’t think you can make a difference? In aggregate, you are the biggest force for this change in this world.
- We only see new phones and devices appearing but have you ever wondered what happens to old electronic devices? Well, most e-waste is dumped in poor nations where children work on the highly toxic waste deposits (unprotected).
- Did you know how GPS works? Well, here’s the story of an early activists attack on the satellites that now power our GPS system and the reasons why it has been built.
- Not Giving A Fuck Does Not Mean Being Indifferent; It Means Being Comfortable With Being Different.
- It’s easy to become inward looking in our industry; you see the same tweets by the same group of people all again and again. But you really should be looking outside to grow your personality and stay open-minded.
- We are not that important in our tech bubble and it’s easy to forget that the vast majority of the population simply don’t know or care about such things.
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