Life on the front-end side of the development tracks can be an exercise in patience and learning endurance. When it comes to front-end package managers, there is definitely no lack of choices. In this article I will be focusing on two of the hottest front-end tools: JSPM and Webpack. With Jspm coming to providence thanks to Angular 2 and Aurelia and Webpack being the preference of a large number of React developers.
As much as I love my new Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge, it does suffer from some bad performance issues at times. Even playing non graphically intensive games or applications can produce noticeable lag. While the hardware in the phone is definitely not sub-par, a certain feature on Samsung phones since Jellybean called Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) can have an effect on the phones performance. Without going into too greater detail, DVFS causes the phone to scale down CPU performance to prevent the phone from getting too hot. The more power being consumed, the more heat generated. As a result, the phone will encounter lag when playing a 3D intensive game or CPU intensive application.
As Javascript slowly becomes a less salty language thanks in part to ECMAScript 2015 (formerly ES6) amd ECMAScript 2016 (formerly ES7), the question of whether to choose a superset of the Javascript language or write POJ (Plain Old Javascript) is a question we need to ask ourselves. My experience with TypeScript is rather minimal, whilst investigating Javascript frameworks a few months ago I used TypeScript for a little while to get a feel for it and see what it would offer me in terms of workflow and efficiency. The fact the project would be built in .NET which means using Visual Studio 2013 was also a point towards TypeScript (of which Visual Studio fully supports).
You’re probably aware of Facebook’s pride image overlay effect which allows you to add a gay pride flag overlay on your Facebook profile image. Today we are going to be recreating this incredibly simple effect, three different ways. First we will do it the Facebook way, followed by a couple of other approaches. To demonstrate the effect I have created three Codepen’s so you can see the effect in action and fittingly used a picture of Donald Trump and his son to demonstrate the pride effect.
Modern Javascript is a lot different to Javascript of 2010. We have considerably more methods and means of doing things that we did not have previously. Some of those include classes, generators, arrow functions and a few other high-profile additions. One aspect of Javascript that not even ES2015 nor ES2016 covers is the concept of abstract classes. The ability to specify a class that defines how child classes should look, more specifically ensuring they specify certain methods.
This isn’t a tutorial but rather a public service announcement. If you’re building a website that is going to be viewed in multiple languages, then you should be developing the site in a language other than the native language (in most cases English). It seems like common sense, but you would be surprised how often different languages and responsive development are not considered at the same time. Whilst working with an American video streaming platform startup last year the audience was going to be English and Spanish speaking countries. Naturally the designers only bothered to design everything in English, so when it came to building the site a lot of issues were encountered thanks to many single English words being two or more different words in Spanish.
For about six months or so I have been consuming a homemade green smoothie every morning for breakfast. Some people are on the fence about them which is understandable, from the outset they look like cups of fruit and vegetables. The reason I decided to start having them was due to the fact I did some contracting for a startup in the US and I ate a lot of bad food. The startup lunch culture is intriguing, nobody brings their own lunch, you all go out and eat out as a team. I am guilty of having Mexican food a few too many times for lunch, not the healthiest option either.
You might know there is a bit of a conflict happening in the South China Sea. China are currently (and some would say aggressively) reclaiming parts of the reef to build man-made islands supposedly part of which will be for military purposes. The US government have been quite vocal about their disdain for China’s activities and up until recently Australia was quiet on the subject. Until recently when Australian defence minister Kevin Andrews tactfully and carefully voiced his concerns over China’s activities at the Shangri-La Dialogue talks taking place in Singapore.
Some great news for the Javascript community today. The popular and controversial fork of Node.js, Io.js today announced they had voted and agreed to joining the Node Foundation. This means that we have avoided what I was worried could have been a serious fragmentation train-wreck in a year or two when both projects were so misaligned that we started seeing module incompatibilities and one or both of the projects suffering as a result of the incoherence.
Purchased a shiny Galaxy S6 Edge and you were excited for the night edge display feature which allows you to display a clock on one of the edges of the screen while the rest of the screen remained off? You want a night clock, not a night light! In theory it is a good idea, but if you are like me, your Edge didn’t do that. In-fact, your whole screen would glow, the night edge clock would show but the whole point of it was lost. This means your battery if your phone is not charging over night would drain quite a lot.