On Our Radar This Week: as Easy as 1.0, 2.0, 3.0

Welcome to On Our Radar, a weekly round-up of news, trends and other cool stuff from the world of web development.

Inbox by Gmail and design principles

Inbox by Gmail has been coming on by leaps and bounds since it was announced a few weeks ago. The app aims to improve on how we deal with our email, and it’s certainly made a splash. Here are details on how Inbox by Gmail onboards new users, and here’s a more in-depth look at details of its design.

It’s interesting to see to what degree the three laws of interaction design have been applied, and how much attention has been paid to designing for large screen smartphones. Do you think that future phones will be able to detect how you’re holding the phone and adjust their interface to accommodate?

Escape the 7th Circle of Hell

Eric delves in to the two Pillars of JavaScript starting with a guide to escaping the 7th circle of hell — a look at why classical inheritance has a much better JavaScript based solution. We also explore how to make your blog load in 560ms which is more challenging than it at first appears.

A desire to get ready for ES6 was also brought up this week, with a look at how you can write ES6 modules today with 6to5, learn unusual tricks via Array .some(), and explore working with immutable objects with Object.freeze. An introduction to the WebCrypto API also arrived this week too.

Other JavaScript articles of interest that came up this week are:

• BDD/TDD development from scratch with Node.js/Express
• Horseman – Run PhantomJS from Node
• Use burp’s JS static code analysis on code from your local system
• Understanding Delegated JavaScript Events

As easy as 1.0, 2.0, 3.0

Frameworks come and frameworks go, and finding one that best suits you can be challenging. This article: In search of the perfect JavaScript framework looks different frameworks to try to find what works and what doesn’t. We also have a good comparison of custom vs ready-to-use frameworks that delves in to the pros and cons of each type of system.

It seems that it’s time for many systems to update to a new x.0 version too.

1. Adobe have released version 1.0 of Brackets, their open-source editor, that we reviewed earlier in the year.
2. AngularJS have announced Angular 2 Core, with a look forward to Angular 2.0. There’s trouble brewing with the 2.0 update though, as Angular are making many changes that are not backwards compatible, sparking discussion about why web tools like AngularJS need to keep breaking themselves, and whether AngularJS can maintain its dominance. Regardless of those upcoming issues, you can help to improve your pre-2.0 skills and learn more about AngularJS by building a Gmail clone.
3. News about jQuery 3.0 arrived recently too, with details on how their system of version numbers are changing, and details on changes to their browser support policy.

Other articles of interest we came across this week are:

• Styling Cross-Browser Compatible Range Inputs with CSS
• The Specificity Graph
• Why Responsive Images Matter
• Walkway – An easy way to animate simple SVG elements
• 134 bytes for an optimized and very basic jQuery like function

Over to you

I’ll leave you this week with Glumpy for beautiful scientific visualizations, reflective puzzling with the browser-based Mirror Isles, and the 100-year-old trick to writing at 240 Words per minute.

Which links caught your attention? Are you using AngularJS lately or other frameworks, are you going to start using the Brackets code editor, or try and stop using the new keyword? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Also, if you have any problems implementing anything covered here, or just want to discuss it some more, SitePoint’s forums are a great place to visit (you can sign in with your Google, Facebook, Twitter, GitHub or Yahoo account).