Hey,
Christmas and the holidays over, the new year started and it took of with a big list of new stuff already (as seen in the last issue). But who doesn’t want to de-clutter his home from unneeded stuff? At least for me, this is a new year’s resolution.
But instead of throwing it away, consider donating stuff that is still in good shape. The fact that you don’t need it anymore doesn’t mean it’s useless. For example, if you have an old device (smartphone, tablet or similar) spare, donate your dusty device to an Open Device Lab. Or if you have clothes in good shape, donate them to local charity.
This week’s letter is supported by the great Kirby CMS which is a plain file, simple to use and simple to develop with content management system. Enjoy it:
News
- Aaron Gustafson’s first edition of the Adaptive Web Design book is now free as he seems to work on a second, revised edition.
- Chrome DevTools got an update and now you can play/pause your CSS animations with a simple handler in DevTools, and you can even control the speed of it.
- The polyfill.io service now supports more polyfills, browsers, callbacks, and better debug output.
Concepts & Design
- The Code Model: Designing inside out for better results.
- Learn to create Pixel Perfect Shapes in Photoshop.
Generic / Tools
- Learn why Mozilla’s MozJPEG can be more effective than WebP or JPEG XR by the awesome Kornel Lesiński.
- Speaking about JPEG, here’s a method how to detect if a JPEG is saved progressively or not.
- How having a great support team can make a business or learn how Fastly is dealing with customer support. A lot to learn from.
Security
- Nearly no week nowadays without a security breach. This week in focus: SSH which seems not to be safe anymore. But hey, there’s a fix for it. Harden your shell.
Web Performance
- How Filament Group implements custom webfonts today. It’s a pretty advanced, though clever solution.
HTML / SVG
- You know this? Some SVG files are not easy scalable. Here’s the guide how to scale every SVG file.
- See how you can build a truly accessible, nice looking HTML5 video player.
JavaScript
- 6to5 converts your ES6 code into backwards compatible shimmed ES5 JavaScript. It’s extensible and has a large number of plugins for well known task runner.
- Wonder if you can cross-tab communicate with JavaScript? Yep, that’s possible.
CSS / Sass
- You can get excited when you read this list of what CSS technologies will be usable in 2015.
- You thought browsers are now doing a better job at implementing new complex CSS? Well, take flexbox which is very inconsistently implemented. But now Philip Walton wrote an article and created an open source component that normalizes flexbox across browsers.
- Why HTML and CSS can make sense for print. Especially books nowadays are often built on these web technologies. Rachel Andrew shares her experiences.
- Here’s a quick tip by Christian Heilmann on how to display conditional form fields with just CSS.
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.
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Thanks and all the best,
Anselm