Web Design: Game of Pwns

Wednesday, August 2, 2017

Sass Effect

Front-end

First up, a guide to getting started with Sass [sitepoint].

Fitty [rikschennink] is a nice little tool that’ll resize text to fit its container.

How to create a beautiful animated loader using pure CSS [codeburst].

An intro to CSS custom properties, that’ll allow you to make changes without the need for JavaScript [vanseodesign].

An up-to-date list of CSS Grid Layout bugs [github/rachelandrew].

And an intro to the Firefox Grid Inspector [jensimmons].

Time and Again

Back-end/programming

spacetime [github/smallwins] offers a lightweight way to handle timezones (AKA the worst thing in the world) in JavaScript.

How to use resource priorities to improve the speed of a page’s delivery [css-tricks].

StackOverflow Importer [github/drathier] takes the whole “copy and pasting from Stack Overflow” thing to its logical conclusion (with Python).

The Quick and the Dead

Design/UX/product

Next time you’re being asked to produce something good quickly, for little money, send the person making the request here [fastgood.cheap].

A designer’s guide to fast website and perceived performance [sitepoint].

UX’s salad days are over, here’s how to stay relevant [uxplanet].

Mistral is the real enemy here [magenta].

There’s a Kickstarter to reissue Humanscale, a classic human factors guide for designers [subtraction]. You should kick in some dough!

Game of Pwns

News/business

Windows is getting eye control to boost its accessibility [arstechnica].

A round-up of the news that new iPhone plans may have been revealed in a firmware update for Apple’s new HomePod [sixcolors]. Spoiler: looks fairly iPhone-shaped.

Poor timing for this article, perhaps: How Apple secures its secrets [bloomberg]. Or, at least, the names of the new products.

HBO got hacked and there are probably Game of Thrones spoilers on the way [ew]. Or Ballers spoilers, at least.

The Amazon Echo can be turned into a spying device, and that hack can’t be fixed via a software patch[motherboard.vice].

Bitcoin has forked [motherboard.vice]. Very hard to resist making many jokes about this.

A piece on the brothers behind Stripe [bloomberg] and their startling success.

A closer look at the glass ceiling [nytimes].

BookAuthority [bookauthority] has books recommended by business leaders like Zuck, Elon, Satya, Thiel, Jobs, all of the good ones.

Stay Woke

Everything else

Shotty [itunes.apple] is a tool for accessing all your screenshots from your macOS menubar.

Wakeout [wakeout] is a workout program that’ll wake you up. Good to do early in the morning or at 3pm, in my experience.

A feature article on the 1919 eclipse that affirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity [nytimes].

Finally, a tutorial for making a racist AI without even really trying [blog.conceptnet]. I think it’s making a point about the problematic nature of common neural network techniques, but I guess if you for some reason want a racist AI and you can't be bothered trying, there ya go.

That's Versioning for today. I'll be back tomorrow once I've woken up properly. That'll either take a few Wakeout sessions or being yelled at by a racist AI. Maybe both! Anyway, back then!