Design
Designers have been coming out of the woodwork since the new year and we’re inundated with many great articles, and Medium seems to be quite favoured recently which makes the writing experience quite effortless.
A lot of care and attention has been put into every detail, nicely expressed in the article Fixing Icons for Medium, which takes you through refinements to their SVG icon sets and Illustrating for Medium where some of the background illustration work is delved into. Meatier content is had too with Our Content Feed is Broken, which explores some potentially better ways for news feeds to occur.
It can be challenging to foster a collaborative design process, but it’s made easier with the right people and inspiration from places such as 365 awesome designers that showcases something new and interesting every day.
3D curtains and the God Login
Designers have been showcasing some interesting designs and techniques recently too, such as the 3D curtain template and useful text input effects. I’ve been intrigued too by the God Login, which takes us through ideas for what the perfect one might be, and if you’re after CSS-only icons then icono has got your back.
Taking styles further, you can (ab)use CSS3’s :nth-child selector to invent new ones. Meanwhile we’re giving further details on Sass basics: the mixin directive and have a good screencast on how to speed up your web development process with Less.
Dirty tricks
This week we give a good introduction to the Beacon API, which makes it easier to send data back to the server when the page is unloading, which has us asking, do you need an API for your own project? The answer is no doubt a foregone conclusion but even with that in place, games development can have its tricky issues. We’re not proud of them but when faced with tricky game bugs, dirty coding tricks are sometimes employed, which can make the difference between successfully shipping or not at all.
Robots are getting smarter
Someday we may have to bow down to our robot overlords, and the work that we’re doing here is likely to help in that regard. This robot is the best Limit Texas Hold’Em player in the world, and we’re attempting to have bots interpret art starting with the novice art blogger. We may have to do something if they start getting too smart and NASA has the right idea on how to deal with them – NASA robot plunges into volcano to explore fissure.
Which links caught your attention? What do you think of the 3D curtains? Have you needed to apply your own dirty tricks to get things done, and is the robot in the corner eyeing you up when you’re not watching? 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.
