On Our Radar This Week: RebeccaPurple, Animations and More!

Welcome to On Our Radar, a weekly round-up of trends and themes that have come to our attention in the ever-changing world of web development.

Every week, we’ll put together a collection of articles and resources that will make your lives as designers and developers easier, and help you you stay up-to-date in this fast-paced industry.

Web Development

This week we hear that the web is just getting started, which is interesting since there have been some historical changes in the role of a web developer. We also learn that 99% of problems have been solved before.

Github have released a collection of interface icons called Octicons. We also have some tips for you to push your Git skills to the next level and, speaking of which, you can see what’s new in Git 2.0 too.

Also worthwhile:

• Getting Started With Visual Composer
• Create a Simple CRM in WordPress: Advanced Custom Fields
• A markdown CMS/Wiki completely built in HTML5/Javascript

CSS

As some of you may know from CSS Guru Eric Meyer’s recent blog posts, devastating news occurred recently, with his daughter losing her fight with cancer. The community wants to honor his loss by naming her in the CSS4 specs after her favourite colour. Eric has requested that instead of beccapurple it should be named rebeccapurple as she wanted everyone to call her Rebecca when she turned six, and she made it there. Rebecca was six years old for nearly twelve hours. Rebeccapurple is something that we can all get behind.

Sass has been on everyone’s mind this week too. We have some different Sass output styles, there are some preferred Sass mixins from Chris Coiyer, sharing JSON between Sass and JavaScript, and now that Sass is in its third revision, we have for you details on using Sass maps.

Also interesting:

• Muted colour generator
• CSS Shack – a Chrome Web / Desktop App to create layers styles
• Prefilling Forms with a Custom Bookmarklet
• Homeless fonts
• Modern Clean CSS “Sticky Footer”

JavaScript

JavaScript Cryptography is bad, but when done right JS Crypto is useful too. Others have already solved this problem (as mentioned above). There’s some good details on authentication for single page apps, as well as info on how to build a better user registration page with jQuery.

Animation has also been a focus this week, with swooop, an excellent canvas flight challenge, MotorCortex for easy web animations, Velocity for fast UI animation, and AniJS, providing a declarative library for CSS animations.

Mobile

Guidelines are good for designers to follow. Also, good details on how to do a product critique came up this week. There are some good app development resources for learning iOS design and Xcode too, and improving the hamburger button is definitely a great idea.

Also useful:

• Creating a Cloud Backend for Your iOS App Using Parse

Further Reading

• Changes in online editorial design
• Microsoft launches IE Developer Channel browser with early next-gen features
• Open Source 101: What is it?

So Long, Until Next Week

We hope that you enjoyed catching up with the latest news. My co-author James will be bringing you more highlights next week.

In the meantime, the World Cup is still underway, and even for someone like me who’s more interested in other things, this New York Times piece on the geometry of the World’s Ball is worth a look too.