Font Playground is built for three groups of audiences. The first group of audience is typographers and designers, who would like to play with fonts that are built with the latest font technologies, such as variable font. It is a playground to fully explore what these new font technologies can offer and how they can be beneficial to your creative workflow. The second group of audience is me, as a Type Tool’s UI/UX designer.
Patrick writes about Did.txt Time flies by when you’re learning how to code. Its super important to take a second every once in a while to simple write down what you did during the past mental sprint. Writing down what you learned solidifies the knowledge. Read full post. This is not a million miles away from what we do internally, where we have a concept of ‘snippets’. It’s up to you how you manage it, but it’s a great way of keeping track of what you did, but also shared across your team you get a nice picture of what your peers, managers and reports are also doing.
Atishay Jain on CSS Tricks writes about an area close to my heart, linking: Hyperlinks are the oldest and the most popular feature of the web. The word hypertext (which is the ht in http/s) means text having hyperlinks. The ability to link to other people’s hypertext made the web, a web — a set of connected pages. This fundamental feature has made the web a very powerful platform and it is obvious that the world of apps needs this feature.
Dan from Redfin has a great post about prioritising web speed: JavaScript Is the Web’s CO2 As a web developer, I find that most problems can be solved with just a little more JavaScript. Without someone or something to force the industry to cut back, web developers will continue to make web sites that only load “fast enough” via wifi on a fast laptop. The browser vendors can’t save us.
This project is a musical experience built with WebGL and WebVR. Inspired by the music track, we created an ever-changing environment composed of various geometrical shapes. These were generated procedurally in Houdini and exported to Three.js. All visual elements are randomized differently on each viewing. Read full post. I don’t have much to add, it’s absolutely amazing. Check it out.
Dean Hume’s been doing a lot great work with PWA’s recently, and he’s also been exploring a lot of the new platform API’s, in this case the Generic Sensor API: The Ambient Light Sensor API provides developers with the means to determine ambient light levels as detected by the device’s main light detector. This information is available to developers in terms of lux units. If you are building a Progressive Web App and you want to style it differently depending on the light levels in the room, then this could be the feature for you.
Jonathan Fulton, Videoblocks: The basic architecture concepts I wish I knew when I was getting started as a web developer Read full post. This is an amazing article that gives a really great overview of a relatively standard stack that is designed to scale many web apps. It also shows why a lot of developers also like Platform as a Service tools like Heroku, Firebase or AppEngine that can abstract a lot of the complexity at the expense of cost.
Eric Bidelman on Google Developer’s Web updates, writes: Building for the web is a rocky adventure. It’s hard enough to build a top-notch web app that nails performance and uses all the latest best practices. It’s even harder to keep that experience great over time. As your project evolves, developers come on board, new features land, and the codebase grows. That Great Experience ™ you once achieved may begin to deteriorate and UX starts to suffer!
Jeff Posnick writes, wrt to Workbox A common source of unexpectedly high quota usage is due to runtime caching of opaque responses, which is to say, cross-origin responses to requests made without CORS enabled. Browsers automatically inflate the quota impact of those opaque responses as a security consideration. In Chrome, for instance, even an opaque response of a few kilobytes will end up contributing around 7 megabytes towards your quota usage.
Sam Thorogood on Dev.to writes, Why did I write this post? Emscripten is a wonderful tool, but it has a long history (for asm.js), and isn’t perfect. I think it errs too much on the side of “magic”, and many posts rave about how it’s so easy to EMASM or use binding-fu, but this all comes at a cost, and can introduce huge amounts of inadvertent overhead—think copying huge memory buffers around because we’re trying to make them immutable or easily exposed.
Mustafa for Google Chrome, on Dev-Channel writes, The Gestalt principles are a series of laws that are used to explain why human beings naturally find organized patterns in objects they see around them. The goal with the principles was to explain why we group objects in some ways but not others. There are many different principles, but here I am going to look at the ones that effect grouping, these are; proximity, similarity, common fate, continuity, closure, and prägnanz.