Start using preload and its required as attribute today, because as soon as some browser implements it, your users win!
Sticking with standards for a sec, the sizes attribute is now required for any image that uses the srcset attribute, due to some performance hits that most developers were creating.
By now I’m sure everyone has heard the hubbub about Facebook’s new Instant Articles, created to improve the speed of browsing shared articles. Well now that this is live, maybe they could do something about the parallax image double-load happening on their own site, too (check in DevTools, note that each parallax sections has a background image, such as screen_fast.jpg, and an inline img tag, with a src something like screen_fast_mobile.jpg, and that both get downloaded by the browser)… I assume this is an attempt at doing something special for mobile, but there’s no need to ding everyone else.
Maybe a better approach would be to use something like Lazyr.js, to postpone the downloading of all images until you know the environment, and your user needs them (though, the old-curmudgeon in me wonders what happens for the 3 people on the planet that don’t have JS while browsing…).
Several great examples of Functional Animation In UX Design. I love what the long-overdue acceptance of SVGs has brought to our browsing experiences!
Bing will follow Google by giving mobile-friendly sites a boost in search results
Google and Bing… Reminds me of this Saturday morning cartoon…
And speaking of Google, huge news: Green lights for our self-driving vehicle prototypes. They will be hitting the streets of Mountain View (with test drivers, still) this summer! Cannot. Wait!
In two alternative-power-related stories:
- When it was announced that The Netherlands would install solar-generating bike lanes, many scoffed, but the early results say they are “generating more power than expected”; and
- Typical wind turbines get flak mostly for two reasons: 1) They are an eye-sore, and 2) They tend to kill a lot of birds that don’t expect huge, hard things to come swinging into their path seemingly out of nowhere. Well, vortex-based bladeless wind turbines that “shake to generate electricity” are here to help. (And the fact that they “cost around 40 percent less” to maintain ain’t nothing to sneeze at neither!)
Freaking awesomeness!
Although this video is slightly more than 10-minutes, and although the instructor only really offers a single loop optimization technique, and although most of us are probably sick of hearing and thinking about “What’s the fastest way to loop in JS?” (especially when the instructor starts off by telling us he had to use 500,000 items in his loops because browsers are so fast at iterating), this video on JS loop optimization has some interesting moments. Most interesting to me is that the data type you are looping through actually affects the loop speed, and changes which loop alternative runs fastest in each browser…
This re-introduction to JavaScript is fun to scroll through, if for no other reason than to remind yourself about all the little quirks you already work around, but forgot that you do… :-)
A “small” step up from that list, is JavaScript: The Extra Good Parts. My personal favorite from this bunch is getters and setters, so powerful. Also love the classic photo at the end of the article… :-)
And now that we’re all familiar, once again, with the “basics” of JS, How do you judge a Javascript programmer by only 5 questions? Yup, good questions… How did you do?
And finally, who doesn’t love a good map? So we should all love this interactive map that tracks rat sightings in NYC, right? And the only reason I can imagine there is so little red is that most NYers do not bother calling 311 when they see a rat, they just quickly hand over their lunch money and hope they don’t get assaulted by it…
Happy reading,
Atg