Top picks — 2018 January
Introducing Web Payments: Easier Online Purchases With The Payment Request API
Peter O’Shaughnessy — developer advocate in Samsung’s web browser team — published a great explanation post for the Payment Request API. Few companies use it by now and observe a significantly improved user experience. API is promise-based and easy to understand.
Additive Animation with the Web Animations API
The new property added to the Web Animation API configuration object — composite — allows us to do something that previously was almost impossible (technically it was possible but the amount of multidimensional matrix math needed is crazy). Dan Wilson explains the magic behind it, how it is calculated and presents all the possible values. Really informative article.
Array Explorer
Sarah Drasner built an incredibly useful resource to help you find a method from Arrays prototype. Just few days latter the same helper tool for Objects prototype came out — Object Explorer. It is way quicker to digest than traversing through all props / methods on mdn! Thanks Sarah!
Apple Developer Program Membership Fee Waivers Now Available
Apple now offers a free of charge dev accounts for nonprofit organizations, accredited educational institutions and government entities. For the time being new rules are only valid for US residents, but I’m sure it will be extended to rest of the world in next few months.
HDR Photography in Microsoft Excel by Kevin Chen
This is probably the most hilarious talk that I have ever watched. Funny but very informative! You can learn a lot about photography, dynamic range, lightning reciprocity and Microsoft products performance.
The Rise Of The State Machines
Krasimir Tsonev explains the concept of popular in computer science state machines. Clear explanation and very well introduced concept on minimal JavaScript example.
State machines are good firewalls. They protect us from reaching unknown states because we set boundaries for what can happen and when, without explicitly saying how.
What’s New in HTML 5.2?
HTML 5.2 just hit a status of W3C Recommendation — perfect time to review whats new in its spec. Ire Aderinokun reviews it all in this short article. The native dialog element excites me the most for sure.
Careful Now
Chris Coyier shares his thoughts about websites build specifically for Google Chrome. It is a natural continuation of the “Chrome is turning into the new Internet Explorer 6” by Tom Warren from the prism of a web developer.
A letter about Google AMP
AMEN!
The Ultimate Guide to JavaScript Frameworks
It is not another comparison of React, Vue and Angular — it is much more comprehensive than that. John Hannah did a really great job for people who are joining the JS frameworks game. Interestingly there is a lot about fresh technologies / languages like Elm and Reason that take a big part of this complex post.
CSS Print API
Surma from Google explains something that I am well excited about — canvas for CSS stylesheets (kind of). I can think of number of great use cases of this one and can’t wait to play around with this API. Expect an article dedicated to this one very soon.
Bootstrap 4
Personally I don’t use any frameworks, but working as a front end developer, it is hard to not to do something related with a Bootstrap. Version 3 came out in 2015 and about 3 years and 6000 commits later, there it is — Bootstrap 4.0. Nice Mark Otto and team!
Vanishing boxes with display contents
The CSS display: contents is on its way — Firefox comes with it since version 37, Chrome 65 and Safari 11.1 are joining very soon. You can leave your vote to speed things up for a Microsfot Edge. Very useful value when we work with a flexbox or grid type of a layout — allows us to follow the best practices for a markup, keeping the layout in place. Rego Casasnovas explains the details behind display: contents really well too. For a first glance it is looking like a right solution for a sub-grid problem — Rachel Andrew explains why it is not in a separated article.
CSS Grid
Wes Bos added another free course to his collection — it is about CSS Grid layout this time. I haven’t finished it yet but as I know previous content recorded by this dude it must be second to none! Highly recommended to all CSSers!
Puppeteer 1.0
Puppeteer — node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chromium — version 1.0 is ready now! If you want to programmatically generate screen shots of your web projects, crawl a single page app, scrape a content or automate form submission for testing — Puppeteer is a right tool for your usecase. Easy to read and write moder API is waiting for you to play around with on try-puppeteer.appspot.com.
Laws of UX
Well done! This website is just beautiful and contains so much useful knowledge for all UX designers! Pleasant animations and transitions, a great typography and tons of valuable content! Simply beautiful!
Laws of UX is a collection of the maxims and principles that designers can consider when building user interfaces.
Mental Illness in the Web Industry
Brandon Gregory on A List Apart meets few contributors who would like to share their stories about mental illness that they went through. This is a global problem and we don’t talk about it enough. Thanks Brandon for this fantastic collection of stories. Hopefully this article will reach masses of people in our industry.
Using page speed in mobile search ranking
Something that Google calls the “Speed Update” is staring in July 2018. Essentially a mobile searches speed ranking is going to be a big factor for the google results. It will harm owners of slow websites with a poor performance on mobile devices.
“We encourage developers to think broadly about how performance affects a user’s experience of their page and to consider a variety of user experience metrics.”
Secure Contexts Everywhere
HTTPS everywhere — and this is going to be required even to test a new browser feature. Firefox is bravely starting to introduce this reasonable requirement to a market and hopefully the other vendors come out with the same conclusion sooner than later.
iOS 11.3 and macOS 10.13.4 include Service Workers
This is one of the most exciting news this month for me. Mac OS and iOS version of Safari gets a full support for Service Workers in a next big release. Really can wait for mac OS 10.13.4 and iOS 11.3 to arrive. By the way — I’m working on offline support for this website and it is going to be enabled very soon — stay tuned.