Weekly Recap

Happy Easter everyone! It was a slow week for me and thus it’s the shortest list since starting the Weekly Recap series, I apologise. Nevertheless, enjoy the links and don’t forget so spend some time with your family. Cheers!

  • CSSconf EU 2014
    After the huge success last year, the CSSconf EU is coming back this year. I hope to be there this year.

  • gulp – The vision, history, and future of the project
    Interesting background information on gulp.js.

  • Picturefill
    Picturefill Version 2 (Alpha) with native picture element support by Scott Jehl is here.

  • WordPress 3.9 “Smith”
    Version 3.9 of WordPress was released this week. It features easier image upload and editing and much more. I use it on this blog since it’s early alpha and recommend you update you blog, too.

  • Hassle Free Responsive Images for WordPress
    Interesting and well done solution but I’m hesitant to using it because if one would ever disable this plugin, all the shortcodes and therefore all images won’t work anymore.

  • IcoMoon
    If you work with icon fonts, this is THE web app for you. I use it all the time to create custom icon fonts.

Weekly Recap

Hello everybody! It’s sunday again and this means it’s time for some link tips for you guys. A lot of good stuff this week. Let’s do this:

iGNANT.de Redesign

Over the past two months I worked on the redesign of iGNANT.de on my weekends. I took over the existing code base and build upon it which made me realise that a lot of things do take quite a while longer if you have to work with a codebase you don’t know. (Surprise!)

Nevertheless I think we did a good job and we can improve on this base in the future. It was a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to working with Clemens and the iGNANT team again in the future.

Screenshot 2014-03-05 15.46.06

Weekly Recap

Hello and welcome to another Weekly Recap. This week is a nice mix of CSS, Javascript and general topics. Let’s dive in:

  • Responsive Javascript
    Most of us know a lot more about responsive CSS than about responsive Javascript. So go ahead and have a look at this one-pager that answers questions like „What is Responsive Javascript?“ and „What are the Browser APIs?“.

  • Use zero-width spaces to stop annoying Twitter users
    Harry Roberts has a simple trick for you how to write @import or other @-statements in tweets without mentioning users.

  • CSS animation-fill-mode
    I recently searched for exactly that: Being able to stop an animation at 100% and don’t have it going back to 0%. Works in IE10 and newer and all the cool kids on the block. I also created a CodePen.

  • Adaptive Backgrounds
    Cool jQuery plugin that extracts dominant colors from images and applies them to their parent elements.

  • Single Line Comments (//) in CSS
    I’m writing CSS on a daily basis for years now and I wasn’t aware of CSS not really supporting single line comments. Probably because it always worked for me because I either didn’t minify my CSS in the past or Sass is now doing some magic for me which allows me to use single line comments. Either way, necessary read.

  • DevSwag
    Need some new webdev related stickers or T-Shirts? Here you go.

  • 30 years of Macintosh
    On Friday, January 24th 2013, the Macintosh turned 30. This is the video and page Apple put together to celebrate. Well done.

  • Sitespeed.io
    This is an awesome tool to analyze your sites performance and get helpful tips how to improve it. You need to handle it via the command line but it’s really worth to learn it.

Weekly Recap

Hello and welcome to the second Weekly Recap. I like the format and from what I’ve heard, you like it too. So here we go.

Weekly Recap

Hey guys! Instead of posting a lot of small link posts throughout the week at clutter up the feed, I thought it might be better to post one article at the end of the week that highlights the best articles, tools, thoughts, etc I found over the past week. So here we go. What do you think?

  • Web Standards Killed the HTML Star
    Are HTML and CSS gurus no longer needed in todays web?

  • Use your Mac vhosts with your iPhone and iPad
    Incredibly helpful for local development. Could be a little annoying if your Mac gets a new IP address often and another problem is that for me the normal internet connection isn’t working.

  • iOctocat
    Pretty good GitHub iOS App with a nice iOS 7 design. It’s free but has two in app upgrade options for more functionality.

  • Ten reasons we switched from an icon font to SVG
    Ian Feather explains the reasons and thoughts behind switching the Lonely Planet website from an icon font to svg images. Very interesting read.

  • Combine Google Fonts
    A handy trick for saving http requests if you use several different Google web fonts.

  • Smooth state animations with animation-play-state
    It’s still an experimental technology and needs some vendor prefixes and is generally subject to change, but being able to stop and start an animation with CSS is pretty cool.

  • Finding real happiness in our jobs
    I think the title of this article by Christian Heilmann is a bit misleading, but nevertheless worth a read. It’s about the state of the web, what we’ve done with it and what we should do.

  • Cascading HTML style sheets
    Almost 20 years ago — a proposal for CSS. A lot has happened since then. Without this proposal I’d perhaps be an Astronaut or a Rock Star.

  • Best of CodePen 2013
    The guys around Chris Coyier put together a page highlighting the most popular CodePens of 2013.

  • The Value of Content
    Andy Beaumont says we are fighting the second world pop-up war. He might be right.

Fluid Apple.com Homepage for iPhone 5

Apple made a subtle vertical responsive Design for the iPhone 5 homepage on apple.com. Nice.

Sticky Menus Are Quicker To Navigate

Hyrum Denney for Smashing Magazine:

Participants were then asked whether one of the websites felt easier to use. Six of the 40 participants had no preference, but of the 34 that did have a preference, 100% of them indicated that the website with the sticky navigation was easier or faster to use.

As we redesigned the header of QUOTE.fm we also tried sticking it to the top so that you always have access to the menu and your notifications. We felt that it’s really good to use and doesn’t distract too much and also doesn’t take away too much screen space even on a 11″ MacBook Air. It also works great on the iPad and especially on the iPhone it’s very handy. Seems like we made the right call on this one.

There is no such thing as CSS4

Tab Atkins:

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS CSS4. There has never been a CSS4. There will never be a CSS4. CSS4 is not a thing that exists.
The term „CSS3“ refers to everything published after CSS 2.1.

Read that and spread the word.

A Front End Engineer’s Manifesto

Every Front End Engineer should read and follow this Manifesto by Zach Leatherman.