Let’s start this one out right: David Bowie’s Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station. Including playing guitar, in space…
Whether or not you like the upcoming upgrades to JavaScript (via ECMAScript 6), they are coming, and there are some great use-cases, and in fact, you can use some of the new features right now!
And with all that cool, new stuff you can do with JS in mind, let’s look at a few good bits to not do with jQuery.
I’m reminded again of the “someday” feature datalist, which offers several benefits over a traditional input or select all wrapped into one, but still lacks support in a couple large arenas. That said, you can always add a polyfill for those devices that lack native support.
Another easy one to forget about is the CSS pseudo-selector :empty, which has rather good support (except for IE<9), even in mobile!
It would be so great if we could simply test a device’s online/offline status. But we can’t. And the first real issue is determining exactly what online/offline means. So have a look at this (soon-to-be) 3-part series on the subject. Thoroughly written.
Okay, we all know this isn’t the kind of thing we should be doing with our CSS, but it’s so fun to look at!
Initially this article about WordPress Conditional Tags didn’t provide anything new to me, but near the end, where the author mentions a plugin that works with the GUI Admin page for Widgets caught my eye… Slick approach, and great for non-coders!
And speaking of WordPress, the soon-to-be-released version 3.6 will now offer native audio/video support, which means WP handles embedding or uploading your assets, managing the shortcode, and providing the best viewing option for your users, based on their device (thanks to the included MediaElement.js library), and no need to embed Vimeo or YouTube embed code…
Jason Grigsby expands on the idea of a performance budget for your sites by adding responsive images (specifically, each image’s file size) into that equation.
A rather thorough documentation (charted in a lovely spreadsheet, no less) for the various, and varying, styleguides, boilerplates and libraries out there.
From Guy Podjarny comes yet another data-dig, this time exploring the difference in bytes that are served via responsive sites across different device sizes. While we may be designing for different screen sizes, we’re clearly not developing for them…
Over the years I’ve spent my fair share of time with the Google Maps API, so I’m always a sucker for someone doing something interesting with it. And making a responsive, Retina-friendly, custom list/marker version definitely caught my eye. Great write-up!
And speaking of Retina, how about a little PhotoShop Action to help convert your layers into Retina-friendly images?
Violin is so much fun to play with! Now, if I can only figure out what it actually means… :-) Oh, and svg, you so sexy…
And finally, bureaucracy is such a hoot!
Happy reading,
Atg