Web Design: News to Me

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Mad Props

Front-end

Answers to common questions about render props [tinyletter/kentcdodds]

Tips for optimizing site load time [designmodo].

Go on, build your own React clone [javascriptjanuary].

Once you’ve done that, build your own Giphy clone, with React [scotch].

An intro to the CSS Paint API [developers.google], about to be enabled by default in Chrome Stable.

How to create Vue components programmatically [css-tricks].

Swim with the Stream

Mobile/back-end/programming

Facebook open-sourced Detectron [github/facebookresearch], its AI research platform for object detection.

An intro to Uploadcare, a super-powered CDN [sitepoint].

How Alibaba’s tech team produced a stream system capable of handling millions of feeds [medium/@alitech].

The latest Firefox Quantum release is now available with opt-in tracking protection [blog.mozilla].

Mocktales

Design/UX/product

An interview with illustrator Mimi Chao, doubling as an intro to the art of storyboarding [medium/@conceptsapp].

The information architecture, patterns and flows of YouTube [medium/swlh].

Mockuptime [mockuptime] offers beautiful, realistic PSD mockups for showing off your work.

A designer’s guide to AI [heydesigner].

10 great, free monospaced fonts [1stwebdesigner].

News to Me

News/business

Here’s Facebook’s news survey [buzzfeed]. Two (yep, just two) questions, big consequences.

Facebook’s gonna make it easier for users to manage their privacy, ahead of the European Union’s new privacy overhaul in May [reuters].

Tinder doesn’t have HTTPS encryption for photos [wired]. The photos sent in that app are usually pretty boring, from what I understand, so who cares?

Stripe’s dropping support for Bitcoin payments [motherboard.vice].

Science fiction and fantasy author Ursula Le Guin died on Monday at 88 [nytimes].

This is really intense [spectrum.ieee]. Briefly, sound waves can make objects move in incredibly minute ways. Now high-speed cameras, plus a special algorithm (naturally) watching objects’ movement, can reverse-engineer the initial sound. Guess I’m going to have to start having my secret conversations in a wind tunnel again.

A charter for using email [emailcharter]. NNTR to that.

Top of the Morning

Everything else (apps, fun tools, gaming, culture, funny stuff)

This new-ish, excellent episode of Reply All [gimletmedia] serves as a Rosetta Stone/encyclopedia for all the weird stuff on the internet right now. Essential.

If you’d like a Homepod, Apple’s entry into the “let’s just talk to expensive inanimate objects” stage of late-capitalism, they’ll be available February 9 [theverge]

About 30% of smartphone users in India (so, a lot of people) run out of space every day, thanks to everyone sending out “good morning” messages to each other [thenewsminute]. Cutest. Tech issue. Ever.

You can now add animated gifs, sourced from Giphy, to your Instagram Stories [theverge].

Meanwhile, Snap now has a web player, meaning you can share your stories with the wider web [theverge].

Lastly, and speaking of naming things: Botnik Studios created an algorithmically-generated Coachella poster and it’s quite funny and good [dailydot]. Looking forward to seeing whether Mega Bathman’s new guitarist is any good. Billions of Mario? Nah, a bit old school for me.

Good morning! (If it's not morning for you, pretend it is) I actually do think I'll start doing the good morning thing, I think it's a very wholesome way to fill up your phone.

I've got a bunch more links for you which I'll send through tomorrow morning. Until then, don't speak to anyone about anything sensitive, unless you're in a concrete cell or a cave or a formless void. Shouldn't be too hard.