Links from 2014 (497 links)

My third post about typography in sci-fi has been gestating for a while now...

All too often mobile forms make use of drop-down menus for input when simpler, more appropriate controls would work better. Here's a few alternatives.

Native select boxes are rubbish and I have the user research videos to prove it.

A next-generation code testing stack for JavaScript.

Unless you have been residing under a rock for the last month (and I’m starting to wish I had been) you’ll be aware of the impending EU VAT Place of Supply change. Much of the noise has been made by those businesses who will be forced into VAT Registration because of it, and rightly so. However, for those of us who are VAT Registered and so must update our systems to cope, the issues of implementation loom large.

Crucially, if you’re rendering templates to a Style Guide and you want it to be maintainable then they can’t just be identical to your application templates, they need to be the exact same templates. This is easier said than done.

In September I was introduced to Codeship at a presentation by Paul Love. These are some of the learnings I have from using their hosted service primarily for Continuous Integration for the last couple of weeks on a client project.

Coworking, shared & private offices in London

Anything that doesn’t make you happy or isn’t absolutely necessary should be touched, thanked and sent on its way, the bestselling Japanese author says

A code-searching tool similar to ack, but faster.

Icon fonts have a few nasty problems that icon font makers rarely make you aware of. Here’s a few of these problems...

Via ttscoff.

Lo-Dash is a low-level utility library that offers consistency, customization, and performance.

...brings the hygienic macros of languages like Scheme and Rust to JavaScript.

Building an interactive accessible website is often thought of as a black art. A look at the learnings from building the Government's website, GOV.UK. I will talk about real world accessibility and practical tips and tools you can use today. Covering the mistakes and pitfalls we made building GOV.UK I will explain how to check to see how you are currently doing, and how accessibility isn't,as scary as you first thought.

Via ttscoff.

Seems I'm not the only person who's recorded the flyer guy. soundcloud.com/london-sound-s…

I walk past the "drum and bass, dub" flyer guy in a different London location every few months. Always makes my day. soundcloud.com/ohskylab/drum-…

tl;dr: unless all dependencies use the same module format, dependency tree of depth > 1 is so painful nobody does it. Nobody agrees on a solution to this problem. We are all fucked.

The Office Club facilitates hot desking for workers who cannot commit to being in the office all week. Just let us know when you need a desk and we’ll allocate one of our hot desks to you on a day-by-day basis.

A modern approach for crafting beautifully maintainable stylesheets. The csstyle method is implemented using a set of SASS mixins that make your CSS readable and semantic, generate your selectors for you, and automatically handle things like specificity and nesting.

TL;DR We are crushing the web. Dedicated client-side rendering sucks. Polyfills are used for all the wrong reasons. Those hideous-looking hash routers are bad and we should feel bad. We have been telling each other for years that progressive enhancement is great, and yet we're doing very little about it!

Good stuff on testing and also excellent section on Style Guides vs Component Libraries.

Keeping You Awake is a small menu bar utility for OS X Yosemite and above that can be activated to prevent your Mac from going into sleep.

Caffine alternative.

There is clearly a negative correlation between file-size and the amount of filesize you save by minifying and gzipping compared to just gzipping. As an HTML document gets bigger minifying makes less of an impact. This is consistent with the way gzip works, the further the tokens from each other the less efficient the compression is.

Ultimately it looks like gzip eats html documents for breakfast whether you minify or not. I would say this is a self-confirmation of my original gut feeling: I would not trade minified html for even one minute of lost productivity due to some subtle bug introduced in the build process.

Five rules for employing scrolling effectively.

Console for debugging web apps right on mobile device

I basically now have both the simplest and most sophisticated multi-language ebook production and distribution setup on the planet.

Beautiful, if you like this sort of thing.

A curated list of Web Performance Optimization.

Right now, the biggest family tree on the Internet – and one I happen to be part of — is mind-bogglingly huge. It’s got 79 million people in 160 countries. This tree has every U.S. president. It has everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Albert Einstein. The links are often lengthy and sometimes through marriage, but it’s fun to figure them out. (Abraham Lincoln is my aunt’s first cousin 8 times removed’s wife’s second great nephew!) And that’s when I decided to see if we could gather all these relatives together, at least the living ones.

pngout bin-wrapper that makes it seamlessly available as a local dependency

Nng.

We’ll explore how browsers handle CSS Animations and CSS Transitions, so you can develop intuition around whether an animation is likely to perform well.

Typography utils for javascript