Welcome to On Our Radar, a weekly round-up of news, trends, and other cool stuff from the world of web development.
Designer tools
This week we find that many articles are focusing on the needs of designers. Don’t blame the designer helps people to understand the role of a designer and how it’s not an easy task, and a good look is taken at a Designer’s Sublime Text setup.
Lorem Ipsum is one type of text that’s used to provide temporary text for a layout, and now you can meet the Ipsums, with a wide range of fun types of temporary text for you to use. Another type of content is also explored at Content, Forever where you can generate an endless stream of nonsense based on any topic you desire – but don’t try to use it for any essays.
Improving the look of things
What color is it creates a background color from the current time, but perhaps more useful is the Labelauty jQuery Plugin which gives you beautiful checkboxes and radio buttons. Taking things further, we have elastic SVG Elements, which will make it much easier to convey the illusion of life (video).
Elsewhere we look at the UX of Error Messages and explore a new version of Semantic UI 1.2 which has lots of new features. You can also delve deeper too at a separate website they’ve set up so you can learn more.
Diagnosing complex issues
Google have been revealing some interesting details about how they diagnose and fix complex problems. Gmail had some memory issues and we’re taken through how they effectively manage memory at Gmail scale and the tools they use to diagnose the issue. Elsewhere, we learn how to lazy-load Google Maps on your web page.
We also take a look at getting started with Slack Bots by combining Slack instant messaging with a hellobot, and we ask would you implement passwordless login? Notable security expert Steve Gibson is also working on a Secure Quick Reliable Login (SQRL) that promises to remove the need for passwords and has a nice visual guide to help us understand what’s going on.
Go to the moon!
Lastly this week we have Moonjs, an online Apollo guidance computer (AGC) simulator built in JavaScript, allowing you to explore the computer systems that were used for landing on the moon.
Which links caught your attention? Are you going to investigate some of those Sublime Text tools for designers? Either way, we would love to hear your thoughts.
Paul WilkinsI'm a web developer living in Christchurch (thanks for all the quakes) where JavaScript is my forte. When off the computer I volunteer down at the local community centre, or enjoy playing tabletop games such as Carcassonne or Stone Age with friends.
