Mozilla Hacks: Designing the Flexbox Inspector

With the upcoming release of Firefox 65 (due January 29tgh), its DevTools will sport a new shiny Flexbox Inspector. The new Flexbox Inspector, created by Firefox DevTools, helps developers understand the sizing, positioning, and nesting of Flexbox elements. Victoria Wang details how they UX challenges that came with this tool were tackled. Built on the …

Speeding up Your PHPUnit tests

Some nice tips by Tim MacDonald on how to speed up your PHPUnit tests! Having a fast test suite can be just as important as having a fast application. As a developer, getting feedback quickly about the state of your code allows for a much quicker development turnaround. Here we are going to run through …

The ghosts of technology in today’s language

I like this post by Marcin Wichary in which he looks for remnant expressions in our language which are based on technologies that no longer exist, but that we still use. A typical example is “dialing a number”. We dial a number — or dial someone — even though dials disappeared from phones decades ago. And we hang up …

Create beautiful menus on iOS with Codea’s iOS “Menu” pod

The folks who created Codea — an app for creative coding — recently adjusted it to make it also run on the iPhone. While Autolayout tackles most of the screen adapations, they were in need of menus. I realised six months ago as I was using my Mac, using the menus, that I need these …

quicklink – Prefetch links (during idle time) based on what is in the user’s viewport

Great little piece of JavaScript which prefetches links, but only when the browser is idle (and when the user is on a “fast” connection). Uses the aforementioned Intersection Observer to detect which links are in-view. Install it per NPM and call its quicklink(); method – for example after the DOM has loaded – to initialize …

@dailyhomealone, an Instagram bot posting one frame from Home Alone per day

Tim Broddin has created @dailyhomealone, an Instagram bot which does a daily post containing one frame – taken at a 5 seconds interval – from Home Alone. Along with that he has done a writeup on how he created the bot. This paragraph resonated quite well with me: A lot has happened to the openness …

Easily create iOS Mockups (photo/ video) with Design Camera for macOS

Design Camera is an app for your Mac that lets you create, capture, and animate 3D mockups for your digital designs in a matter of seconds. Using just a few clicks – using screenshots taken in the iPhone Simulator – I created this render/mockup: Video and more input formats – such as Sketch – also …

What’s new in the upcoming PHP 7.4?

Good overview by Brent on the new features that will be landing in PHP 7.4, which is due somewhere December 2019. I’m especially looking forward to Typed properties. New in PHP 7.4 → 💭 One thing I personally find missing in PHP’s typehinting, is a way to typehint array contents — e.g. “I’d like an …

The Cost Of JavaScript In 2018

Addy Osmani: Building interactive sites can involve sending JavaScript to your users. Often, too much of it. Have you been on a mobile page that looked like it had loaded only to tap on a link or tried to scroll and nothing happens? Byte-for-byte, JavaScript is still the most expensive resource we send to mobile …