Today’s Readings

ZOMG!!! A Bluetooth-connected Star Trek communicator… Too bad (or maybe Thank God!) the pre-order link in the article is busted, and the company’s own website is rather junky… I have been saying since the very first flip-phone came out, that someone needs to make one that makes the communicator sound when it opens, but this is SO much better!

points out a common pattern that can be found on the web: breaking the web with shitty code.

And speaking of shitty code, ever tried to copy and paste something from a website (not code, but the actual rendered content), and have some shitty code blocking that via JS? Yeah, it sucks. And it’s stupid, because it’s so easy to get around. Well it just got even easier, because present us with a very simple bookmarklet to add to our browsers to break that behavior! :-)

As a follow-up to his Limitations on Styling Visited Links article, offers a couple more options for styling visited links, including using inline SVG and Unicode characters.

Here are a couple Interactions for Draggable Elements. While I am inspired by the tech, I find the interactions completely unintuitive, and could not suggest using either in a production site. But again, nice animation, and good inspiration for a better interface.

Hey nature-lovers, this free (and ad-free!) app helps you identify the plants and animals around you! So go get your nature on!

Basket.js: A simple (proof-of-concept) script loader that caches scripts with localStorage

Interesting concept!

The text from ‘s 2015 CSS Summit presentation Designing with Progressive Enhancement. Using “design” in the broader scope, as in “planning”. Long read, but well worth it, some really great bits in there; the article links to the slides as well.

The Web’s Cruft Problem. Certainly not news to anyone, and a hard battle to fight. Not technologically, as developers we can pull bullshit out, push the remains together to reduce requests, minify those requests, then distribute it all around the world via CDNs for nice, fast, reliable content delivery. The hard part is that our bosses always want to make money, so we can all get paid. The examples of “solving” this problem (Flipboard and Facebook’s Instant Articles) aren’t doing it for free, but businesses should realize that the faster people can get things, the more they will consume, and the more they will return, and the more they will consume.·. And they won’t have to pay Flipboard or split ad revenue with Facebook…

YWebCA. Fan-freaking-tastic!!

Atomic OOBEMITSCSS. Scary, but yeah. That’s it. As it should be. Love it.

Pretty sweet CSS-powered animated Ajax page transitions.

Seven Surprising JavaScript ‘Features’. Although several of these are ES6, and I am trying hard to ignore that for now, some are older, and all are still interesting.

Slick technique from to merge one JS array into another, without creating a new array in the process.

And finally, with all the hub-bub focusing on New Horizon’s fly-by of the (non-)planet Pluto, let’s talk about how well you know the other (actual) planets

Happy reading,
Atg

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