danpeddle

Just to share one example - visual studio has an amazing developer experience for exploring and debugging node apps. I wonder if there's anything else out there which comes close..?

Cross pollination of ideas from working with different languages is a very powerful thing. Coders often, sadly, regard 'their language' as a walled garden, whereas in fact there is so much crossover in terms of technique, it only makes your knowledge deeper and more solid seeing how solutions are achieved in different ways.

At least, that's been my experience as an average/middling dev - there may well be some level of zen where this doesn't apply, but I'm hard pressed to think of one right now.

Server side rendering is mentioned in the post - for me, angular 1.x was a dead end because it did not run on the server (disregarding the confusion around services, factories etc, and all the horror in templating logic, debugging it etc) - can anyone give some insights into what this is like?

I've previously written & been part of teams for a few non-trivial 'full stack' js apps that run both on the client and server, and react's abstraction from the DOM is perfect for such things. Wondering what the 2.x approach is here.

As an aside, seems to me that the days of running JS purely in the client are coming to an end, for projects when developers can have a free hand on the tech stack.

About the keyboard being hidden behind a developer flag - actually it looks like the keyboard that pops up when using the ChromeOS accessibility options. Handy when interacting with the device from a distance with only a pointing device.

Sigh, that's sad.

It baffles me that there are still so many services that try to 'automagically' intuit which language someone wants to have a service in, instead of just simply .. asking.

Google play is a prime culprit, for example, showing a mixture of language content on the play store. See also subtitles, dubbed content, books..

Another one - Sony's Playstation store, where if you choose a country, then the language (despite them having the assets available through their international presence) is permanently set and impossible to change.

If there is a user group, then purchasing together and dividing costs might make life a little easier. could be a fun base to work on for making more hardware available too.

Why the huge difference in costs..? International shipping..?

totally off topic, but also a lovely song by the band pinback.

Feel your pain - I remember vividly struggling with these things when beginning. here's a few hints..

- Avoid floats as much as possible. They are useful, but understanding where and when to use them takes time. Using display: inline-block will take you a long way.

- Height comes from the parent element, in general. A really common mistake is trying to do something like 'height: 100%;' when the parent element has a height of zero and not getting why it doesn't work. Here's an example that uses 80%/20% height layout, without any craziness: http://codepen.io/dazld/pen/jbrLoa

- Whitespace is important with inline elements. Trying to figure out why inline-block stuff has a gap? Check if there is any whitespace around the markup, remove it and see if that helps.

Playing with CSS & HTML is incredibly rewarding and fun once you develop fluency - and not as complex & arbitrary as may seem at first. Stick with it!

Great comparison.

As a sidenote, basic authentication is part of the HTTP standard, so suggesting a truly open, standards based way of identifying a user for the purpose of accessing a service/system is not such a crazy idea.

It's not a dying concept, so there's scope still there.

Neat, saw in an issue that there's an implementation for mori users too - https://github.com/roman01la/mori-devtools

There are similarities here to the adblocking debate, in terms of having to load 3rd party scripts. Disqus, FB etc - load through another request once the page is up and running, degrading the experience. Removing these parts will mean a quicker web, if as others have mentioned, at the cost of less immediate interaction.

Vice seem to have correctly identified that the quality of that discussion (and the branding) was not adding much to their content. Thumbs up for trying something different.

UX in its rawest sense, although with a programmer slant. That said, programmers are a subset of a wider group (spoiler: it's us!) and it would be nice to see these patterns break out of the developer world, so they can evolve further.

Consider, when was the last time you saw a website with perfect keyboard integration..? The lack of universal patterns does get in the way (as does keyboard-less devices, which are clearly a whole other paradigm), but still..

Great idea! Repurposing old tablets / mobiles is the cherry on top. Fascinating how combining otherwise dumb material with smart technology produces something so compelling.

localStorage works quite well for this - the main difference being that data is not sent to the server when you make a request, as cookies are.

Traditional color choice tools tend to show the full RGB / HSL etc color space. This, to me, doesn't help when trying to find interesting combinations. Other approaches, such as on Adobe's Kuler where you have the ability to apply a triad while exploring a color space, also don't really seem to produce pleasing results for me. Simple linear gradients between two colors also don't seem to have enough movement in there - but that could be a choice of the kind of color blending used, I suppose.

Anyway, taking visual inspiration from Goethe's color triangle, I made this tool to explore some other ways of displaying color choices, and to see what the results might be.

It really would be interesting to know if anyone took it beyond the (amazing) demo phase.

I took it to mean the way you can focus or highlight parts of a visual element, image, whatever, by cropping or repositioning it.

It's a shame that so many custom android roms either do not or have only very limited support for hardware acceleration in the browser. I do not know what percentage of users would fall into this category, but worth keeping in mind.

Absolutely agree - was just being a little facetious. Clearly not about to start uglifying everything running on the server just because of a random benchmark of unrepresentative functions running in a loop.

Correct to point this out, especially considering the predilection of devs to micro-optimise based on the most spurious of hypotheses. Putting a single IO operation in that loop will most likely completely change the picture, anyway - although have not run the test to check.

Ran the same test in node 0.10.33, and despite also using V8, does not have this behaviour.

https://gist.github.com/dazld/2a5dc58f5c9ce61bccae

Was about to start minifying all the server code too.. ;)

If you are building a service or API, then you can do that in whatever language you like. The natural language for writing client side apps is JS (ok, the only language, for now).

The same concept is currently being used by the Hex3 JAJA stylus to communicate pressure information - it is really quite elegant. http://www.hex3.co/products/jaja

About enabling experimental features via flags - I hope there will be an option buried in there somewhere for curious people to "go nuts" and enable a large slew of functionality in one step, appropriately warned. I can see that being a pain, but much easier than having to go one by one on obscure features with a non-technical audience.

I love seeing what creative devs are doing out on the fringes, and having to dig around in flags every time something new gets added could potentially get pretty annoying. The benefit of vendor prefixes was this - if you were on a latest version, not just dev/canary channel, there was a lot which was turned on by default, even if theoretically it wasn't stable. That was actually quite a good driver of fresh technique and innovation, seeing this straight away, despite the major hassle of bloated CSS.

It's inspirational seeing people who maybe aren't totally technical being able to get their hands on very fresh stuff without having to completely hand hold them on every step required to get it going.

Really, a lot to be said on this topic, but just wanted to mention this as didn't see it discussed yet.

Is it just the surface pro that has this tech built in..? Crazy that this feature has not been promoted more.