Something new. We’ll now post our weekend reading newsletters the week after they go out via email as a post. So if you want them fresh, with the chance at giveaways, quizzes and more, why not signup now? It’s just once a week, and very high signal-to-noise.
Big ideas
Art predates humans
An incredible prospect, that it was our distant human ancestors, and not modern Homo Sapiens, or Neanderthals, who first demonstrated conscious artistic impulses.
85 World Changing Ideas
To celebrate turning 85, business week lists the 85 most disruptive ideas in those 85 years. Not huge fans here of the term disruption and the fetish with it, but an interesting collection of not just technologies and products, but ideas (political, business, technical) from the last century or so.
The Group That Rules the Web
Paul Ford celebrates the HTML5 Specification reaching official W3C Recommendation status with a fantastic history of the W3C and Web technology, in the New Yorker. Yes, the New Yorker. A great day for the Web.
Design/Product
Planning for Performance
In an excerpt from his new book ‘Responsible Responsive Design’, Scott Jehl looks at how web pages are requested and loaded. A great primer on what might seem a black art, but something in our increasingly mobile world is essential knowledge for designers as well as developers.
Your favourite app isn’t native
The next time a boss, client or colleague says “we need a native app”, or some wiseacre quips that “native apps are inherently better than web apps”, point them to this survey of some very popular ‘native’ apps that are in fact built with Web technologies.
Type Resources for Designers and Developers
Here at Smashing Conference Whistler where I’m speaking this week, Typography is certainly front and centre. Jen Lukas gave a wonderful type-focussed presentation “The Developers Ampersandwich”, and has collected a heap of great type related resources for designers and developers alike.
Designing for the Space Between Devices
One of our favourite speakers here at Web Directions is Josh Clark, and a recent article of his on ‘designing for the space between devices’ definitely resonated.
As devices multiply, the new opportunity is less about designing individual screens, and more about designing interactions between the devices — often without using a screen at all
Style Guides
Again at Smashing Conf, Style Guides are also getting more than a little attention. Responsive Design wunderkind, Brad Frost recently surveyed the different kinds of style guides, and their various uses.
Engineering/Development
Web Sensors
Over the last few years, the Web platform has got increasing access to underlying device capabilities, from gyroscopes and accelerometers to cameras and even light sensors. Boris Smus however thinks we could be doing much better.
Are We Responsive Yet?
Guy Podjarny, one of the fine speakers in our Engineering track at Web Directions 2014 surveys the top trafficked sites in the world, and asks ‘how many are using Responsive Web Design techniques’?
Objects in JavaScript
It got stuck in my “must tweet” list for too long, but this epic 3 parter on Objects in JavaScript by Kyle Simpson dives deeply into every aspect of objects in JavaScript.
JavaScript Modules and Package Managers
An impassioned spray on the JavaScript mobile landscape from Trek Glowacki, from a few weeks back.
Books We’ve noticed
In what may become a new section of this newsletter, we’ll round up some of the new books we’ve spotted of late.
Design for Performance: Lara Hogan
A prediction for the coming year. Performance will increasingly become everyone’s problem. Lara Hogan’s recently published book may well in future be seen as the first major step toward recognising the importance of performance in the design process. There’s also a related presentation and resources.
Responsible Responsive Design: Scott Jehl
From the guy who built the landmark Boston Globe web site along with Ethan Marcotte comes a new book from A Book Apart (and the second edition of Ethan’s Responsive Web Design book, also for A Book Apart is just out as well). You never know, he might just end up in Australia some time early next year.
Geek Sublime: Vikram Chandra
From one of my very favourite fiction authors of all time (Red Earth and Pouring Rain would rank in my top two or three books to be ship wrecked with), comes a work of non fiction, Geek Sublime: The Beauty of Code. If only Amazon would let me buy the Kindle version from their Australian store, I’d have read it twice already!
The post Weekend Reading: December 12th, 2014 appeared first on Web Directions.
