Today’s Readings

calc promises to be a powerful ally in creating truly responsive sites, but while the desktop support is surprisingly good, mobile, arguably where we need it most, is sadly lacking…

A checklist for your web performance optimizations. Handy!

How do you annoy a web developer? Way too true…

On the heels of Google Plus’ redesign, comes this demo that animates your page header on scroll. I like the effect here more than I do on Google Plus… :-)

Is it too early for me to start dropping Christmas present hints???

With all the buzz about Google Glass, OrCam is offering a set of glasses that have a pretty great feature for helping those with sight limitations. Hopefully that audio is pushing into an earpiece, and not a speaker…

A nice run-through on 3D landscapes in CSS.

And a nice run-through on CSS pseudo selectors.

Home automation has always been a fun, futuristic pipe-dream, as we all dream of the day our bed dumps us into the shower, and a conveyor belt delivers carries us through our closet and to the breakfast table, all without us actually waking up. Google says we’re closer, but I had to chuckle while looking at the garage door lock during the delay of the “Lock the garage door” command… “Or, lift your arm and turn the knob…” :-)

Maybe I should be nicer to my computer

We already knew that WebRTC is cool, but how about a motion-detection WebRTC security camera? Now that’s cool!

A Dutch designer asks if can we re-imagine our public spaces into something more fun and alive? Yes, please!!

Want to make your website faster? Or how about just appear faster? Ok, how about only appear faster when your users scroll?

Solid collection of web design/development videos.

Need high-quality images for your next project? Want them for free?? Then check-out Unsplash

I’ve posted Unicode character pages/sites before, but this is one of the best interfaces I’ve encountered… Easy to find a character, easy to copy it, easy to grab Unicode.

If you’re familiar with FlipBoard, you’re going to be impressed with FlipboardPageLayout. Nicely done! (Though while the Back/Forward buttons do skip through the flipped pages, it doesn’t go back to the home page, at least not on my latest Chrome.)

An interesting approach for reducing/removing forks from your JS logic.

Can I Use has proven to be huge benefit to the web-world, helping us know what we can expect to work, where. And now there’s a widget that you can use to add that info to articles you write.

The Holy Grail of web design/development has always been the site-builder-GUI-WYSIWYG-type-thingy. And you either get something that makes ugly pages, or something that makes ugly code. Or both. Now Google is throwing their hat into this ring. Will be interesting to see what the geniuses from Menlo come up with.

From comes a nice walk-through on how to find performance issues using your Web Dev Toolbar.

For my designy-peeps out there, while we coders have Git to store and keep revisions of our work, what do you use? Maybe have a look at LayerVault.

I certainly rant about performance enough, and images are always one of the most offensive pieces to the performance puzzle. Using progressive JPGs is a fairly easy, and very powerful, option.

Gesture-control is on its way, no question. Whether it will overtake mouse/touch is yet to be seen, but I imagine it will (why touch something when you can not?). But thus far gesture control has been kind of shitty. Until researchers at the University of Washington created a wi-fi system they’re calling “WiSee” that detects gestures using nothing but wifi, from the next room, with an “average accuracy [of] 94% with a standard deviation of 4.6% when classifying between our nine gestures.” Oh my…

Has your airline lost your luggage? Do they need help finding it? There’s an app for that

Windows 8.1 will apparently offer native fingerprint protection that can be applied to individual folders. I am not so afraid of biometric security for the sake of my info being stored on someone’s system, as I am of that system being hacked by someone else, and my info then being used. Am I supposed to feel comfortable storing my info on a Windows-based system???

And finally, a reason for geeks to finally embrace yoga!

And finally, finally, yet another advantage of having The Force

Happy reading,
Atg

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