Hey,
one day early this week but again lots of articles for you to read on the upcoming weekend, beginning with some great and some not so great news now. Enjoy the weekend and besides maybe reading a this letter and its content, take a day off (or two).
News
- Unicode 8.0 is out as the next standard, including diversity emojis, a unicorn and some more nice icons.
- Adobe released their 2015 edition of Creative Cloud with massive updates to their apps and the introduction of the stock market, bringing stock assets to you in their own ecosystem.
- Apple’s newly introduced weird icon mask syntax is already breaking the web. Can you imagine why open standards and discussions about standardization are so important? But at least it looks like Apple tries to fix it.
- Wikimedia rolled out HTTPS-only with HSTS on all their websites.
Concepts & Design
- Why the IoT scenario of freshly brewed coffee after waking up doesn’t work. As a rule: Don’t apply algorithms to analog tasks.
- Nicole Fenton takes you on a tour through the path of Interface Writing.
Generic
- Backblaze shares data from a survey in which they asked users if and how often they back up their computers. A frightening quarter responded that they don’t ever but at least the number is melting down each year.
- How to report bugs in your team.
Security
- GuardianRom aims to bring secure and private communications to the masses and is an Android-based open source secure operating system. Note: This link is currently broken but hopefully back soon.
Tools
- While Kirby Project Hub is intended for small freelance projects it can handle big project hubs as well.
- Gradify is a tool finding the most important colors in an image and creates a similar gradient for it. Very useful for image-loading states and fallbacks.
Web Performance
- With Polymer 1.0, the library shrinked its size massively and now has an acceptable load if you need a couple of those features. But to further improve your speed index and the user experience of your site, Paul Lewis shares how to make polymer even faster.
HTML / SVG
- Make your forms a little more accessible and add voiceover to your error states.
- SVGontheweb is such a cool resource to learn how to create, optimize and animate SVG for usage on the web.
CSS / Sass
- Improve the style of
:visitedlinks on your website with CSS blend modes. - Look at these nice little animated weather icons. Aren’t they a good example of well done animation in web? I think doing this in SVG icons would’ve been a better choice (regarding semantics) bit I like the concept of it.
- See which selectors are new in CSS Selectors Level 4. A couple of interesting ones but keep in mind to check compatibility and that when one selector in a selector chain is invalid, the whole rule is invalidated.
Work life
- I’m not keeping up with all the new libraries, tools and things springing up all over the place. And I never will be…
- See how a great job can turn into a toxic job by taking too much time and asking for too much engagement.
- As a caring company you should really have a plan for your employee’s families. Buffer shares what they do, offer and where they still have problems.
Go beyond…
- We’re increasing the barrier as developers and as the ones who push the web forward. And by doing so we exclude new developers.
- TPP: Why a global company says no to it. It’s a question of who benefits from the new laws and not as propagated about free trade.
- Kai Brach on why slow growth matters to him and the fast growing startup mentality is often no good for a great product.
- Oh yes, still using Uber? Here is another story of how mean they are. This time it’s about disabled people. And again they seem to play their always-green card that they’re a software company, not a transportation company and leaves customers alone with the individual drivers.
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