Mulukkenstuff

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The future of browser history

https://medium.com/@patrykadas/browserhistory-2abad38022b1#.erf921oka

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Interactive shadows by phode

Last night, after I got home around 2 o’clock, I just want to check my mails... bad idea. I found a interesting site on awwwards, where a circle has interactive shadows. The code was very simple, but it was only an image that spins around when the user moves his mouse. How cool it would be, if this also works for logos or stuff like that... Yeah...What can I say... At half past six in the morning it works... :D

Check out the livedemo (currently Chrome only)

http://phode.net/phodedrops/shadows/

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Almost complete guide to flexbox (without flexbox)

Some useful tips by Kenan Yusuf on how to provide CSS flexbox fallbacks.

Unfortunately, not everyone has a browser/device capable of viewing flexbox layouts. So he provides a cheatsheet-esque guide that offers backwards compatible alternatives to flexbox properties.

Whilst some of the CSS in this guide may seem obvious, he is looking to challenge the use of flexbox as well as provide simple solutions to problems were around before it became popular.

http://kyusuf.com/post/almost-complete-guide-to-flexbox-without-flexbox

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What every browser knows about you!

Get an idea of the amount and type of information a browser can collect. Pretty scary.

Robin Linus give a short demonstration which types of data every browser can collect, for example: the current geolocation, your ip, your computer configuration, your browser plugins, on which socialmediapages you are logged in and many more...

Check it out on:

http://webkay.robinlinus.com/

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Exhibition Review HAUS DER NATUR SALZBURG

Last week, within the course interface design with Julian Stadon, we visited the Museum „House of Nature“ in the old part of Salzburg. The museum offers a wide –sometimes act a bit arbitrary– range of subjects, from dinosaurs, about fish, gems, to aerospace. Our task was to develop fresher and more interactive representation methods for free selected exhibits, to and make them more attractive for the visitors.

We started our tour at the dinosaurs. Authentic replicas of various types, such as a smaller, but  also 6 meter long relative predator of Tiranosaurus Rex, which even was capable to do slight movements and a probably still existing Giant Squid with meter long tentacles were the main attractions of this department.

Then we passed through various rooms whose walls almost entirely was made of aquariums with whimsical fish and sea creatures from around the world.

Between fish and dinosaurs, there was a small unit where the traditional life of Tibetan mountain people was illustrated. Costly models of the Dalai Lama temple or live large tents illustrated well the hard life of the natives.

One floor above the museum dealt with the noble metals of our planet and the rock formations. A low gear shows precious stones and metals from all around the world in its pure form. Besides a tour through the history of our Earth's creation and the different layers of rock begins with the largest rock crystals in the world, one of the stones weighs about 600kg.

Next to this in one room various recreations endangered species such as tigers, elephants or orangutans can be seen.

Another floor up, there are terrain poisonous snakes and amphibians. In addition, the history of marine mammals such as the whale is told in an interactive way.

A side room deals with the issue of sound. Various experiments like a scream chamber, a sound wave simulation or a music room explain the topic playfully.

The floor above is engaged in the solar system and the planets, as well as the history of space travel.

The highlight for smaller visitors is probably the attached Science Lab. Here can be played and tested. In a wheelchair parkour illustrates the difficulties of people in wheelchairs, a ski simulator measures the forces of the own bounce or a drum with liquid illustrated interactively the effect of centrifugal forces, to name only a few stations.

Our group spent over five hours at the museum and has not seen nearly everything. The museum is an interesting mix of zoo, art, cinema and playground and is expected to be worth for each audience to visit.

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CSSCO

Photographic filters made with CSS, inspired by VSCO and CSSgram. Made by Lauren Waller.

It is not a secret that you can use CSS filters to change the look of an image. But if you are a fan of Instagram or others try this precomposed filters by Lauren Waller. He lift the whole to a new level:

http://www.cssco.co/

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A Year Without jQuery

Patrick Kunka discribes how dropping jQuery from the front-end of "We Are Colony" has led to a faster, leaner platform. He shows some interesting alternatives for some bricks like function helpers or other typical jQuerystuff.

If you also interested in looking forward to moving away from jQuery read the full article:

http://blog.wearecolony.com/a-year-without-jquery/

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Finally the time has come: CSS variables arrived!

CSS variables, more accurately known as CSS custom properties, are landing in Chrome 49. They can be useful for reducing repetition in CSS, and also for powerful runtime effects like theme switching and potentially extending/polyfilling future CSS features.

:root {  --main-color: #06c; } #foo h1 {  color: var(--main-color); }

Check out the Google developers guide:

https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2016/02/css-variables-why-should-you-care

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The future of loading CSS

by Jake Archibald

It's common to bundle all of a site's CSS into one or two resources, meaning the user downloads a large number of rules that don't apply to the current page. This is because sites can contain many types of pages with a variety of "components", and delivering CSS at a component level hurts performance in HTTP/1. This isn't the case with SPDY and HTTP/2. The plan is for each <link rel="stylesheet"> to block rendering of subsequent content while the stylesheet loads, but allow the rendering of content before it. The stylesheets load in parallel, but they apply in series (look at the image on top). This behaviour is backwards compatible in Chrome and Safari. Because Firefox doesn't always block rendering for link-in-body, we'll need to work around it a bit to avoid a FOUC. Thankfully this is pretty easy, as <script> blocks parsing, but also waits for pending stylesheets to load:<link rel="stylesheet" href="/article.css"><script> </script> <main>…</main>.

For more information visit:

https://jakearchibald.com/2016/link-in-body/

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Best article I have read this year

(and when I say this year I mean 2015, not just the few days since sylvester)

Espen Brunborg answers the question “Is The Internet Killing Creativity?” in this write-up from his talk at the SmashingConf 2015 in Barcelona. Read it, it is worth it.

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2016/01/is-the-internet-killing-creativity/

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Web Speech API

If you have no more desire to implement complex keycombination on your webside, try speechcomands. The following article explains how they are to implement:

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2016/01/firefox-and-the-web-speech-api/

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Everything I know about responsive web typography with CSS

by zell-weekeat

Cool article about fundamental typography-knowledge in web. With chapters like “Increase font-size and line-height of your body copy as screen sizes increase”, “Use a modular scale for your typography”, “Use relative typography units” or “Apply vertical rhythms”. So if you're not fit in webtypo, chick this link:

http://www.zell-weekeat.com/responsive-typography

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Free online book: Designing for performance by Lara Callender Hogan on:

http://designingforperformance.com/?utm_source=codrops

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Understanding Critical CSS

by Dean Hume

Critical CSS means the styles for all element which can be seen on the header part on a website, before the user scrolls down the page. This is important because most users wait some seconds before scrolling down, so the content at the bottom has more time to load than the top parts. For better performance and faster loading all critical CSS parts should be placed at top of the stylesheet. For more read the full article at Smashing Magazine:

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/08/understanding-critical-css/

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A Guide To Building SVG Maps From Natural Earth Data

Chris Youderian wrote a cool guide to build interactive SVG Maps from natural earth data. If you intereted in, check this link:

https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2015/09/making-svg-maps-from-natural-earth-data/

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Logodesign for german cancercenter 2015

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Tips to Make Your Websites Load Faster

One of the most important considerations of building websites is to make sure they load quickly. Before you begin to optimize your site(s), it´s important to see how well they are functioning, first. One way to do this is to make use of the Make the Web Faster tools, by Google. Two other options you can use are Pingdom and YSlow. Each of these tools will help you to establish a baseline of performance.

Minify HTML, CSS and JavaScript: To do so, remove all unnecessary comments, white space and code. This will improve performance because the file size will be reduced. To minify HTML, check out HTML Compress. For JavaScript, use YUI Compressor, and for CSS, test out CSS Compressor. A fourth option is to make use of the PageSpeedInsights Chrome Extension to create an optimized version of your HTML code. The PageSpeed Insights page also lists other programs you can use.

Make CSS and JavaScript External: Using external files will generally make the pages load faster because JavaScript and CSS files are cached by the browser.

Alternatively, if you use CSS in a web page, place the CSS in the HEAD element. This makes the page appear load faster and it can do so progressively. With JavaScript, move the scripts to the bottom of the page.

Eliminate Duplicate Scripts in a Web Page: This issue might seem strange but it is actually quite common. Duplicate JavaScript and CSS files degrade performance by creating unnecessary HTTP requests and wasted JavaScript execution. It´s also important to check and see if scripts have been duplicated in external files, as well. To avoid this problem is to use a script management module with your templates.

Optimize Images: Reduce image sizes using either GIF, PNG-8. orJPEG as the file formats. Make sure the size matches your usage and set the size for each page with the height and width. Do not make use of scaling, especially from larger to smaller images. The image result might look fine on screen but the file size will be the same. To truly take advantage of the smaller dimensions, use an image editing program and scale the image accordingly. The resulting file size will be smaller. It´s also important to experiment with compression for with all of these file formats. At some point you will obtain an acceptable compression with a minimum loss of quality. Experimentation is key.

Avoid CSS Expressions: CSS expressions (introduced in IE5) allow you to set CSS properties dynamically. The down side is that the expressions are evaluated whenever the page is rendered, resized, scrolled and when the user moves the mouse over the page. These ongoing (and frequent) evaluations erode the user experience.

Add Expires Headers: Due to web page complexity, many HTTP requests could be required to load all of the components. When you use Expires headers those components can be cached and this avoids unnecessary HTTP requests on successive page views. While Expires headers are most commonly associated with images, they can also be used for scripts, style sheets, and Flash.

As you can see, there are many things you can do to improve the performance of your web pages. Some solutions might be simple, while others can be time-intensive. Still, implementing them is important. If your pages don´t load fast enough you run the risk of losing your audience – and no one wants that.