It's Complicated

Great Scott! General web First up, McFly [github] is a ReactJS library to make working with Facebook’s Flux architecture easier. Just don’t call it chicken. Meanwhile, CodeShare [codeshare] looks like a useful ad-hoc collaboration tool for developers who don’t already have a chat environment established. Brackets is up to version 1.0 [github], so go check out what’s new if you’re Brackets fan. If you haven’t used it yet, here’s a review from earlier in the year [sitepoint]. TL:DR — it’s very useful for front-end work, but maybe not so much for backend stuff? Here’s an Ubuntu post on their vision for the next hypervisor [ubuntu]. A post-hypervisor, if you will.

Size Up Design Size Marks [github] is a clever little Photoshop script to convert a regular marquee to a labelled measurement mark. Excellent for quickly marking up the dimensions of page elements. Here are the three laws of interaction design [uxdiogenes]. ColorRun [colorrun] is a fun(?) game where you have to choose the lighter color of two available. That’s… kind of it… But it’s fun, somehow.

Force of Habit SitePoint First in our SitePoint roundup today, here’s a look at the UX of infinite scroll. Is it good, bad, or ugly? Or maybe all three? Then we have a first peek at what will probably be a very addictive book: Hooked: How to Build Habit-forming Products. Here are six good options for CSS preprocessors. Options all over the place! Semi-related, here’s a guide to choosing between front-end frameworks, specifically the custom vs ready-to-use solutions. This is a guide to making a blog load in 560ms. Writing will still take longer, unfortunately.

It’s Complicated News/business Mozilla is preparing to launch a new browser aimed squarely at developers [thenextweb], integrating its existing development tools like WebIDE. Your emoji are maybe about to get a little more diverse, with a new draft at the Unicode Consortium proposing a combination of existing emoji with new skin color swatches in the backend [arstechnica]. Here’s an interesting post from Facebook which looks at the company’s top open data problems [research.facebook]. Mo’ data, mo’ problems. Facebook has also been working on making push notifications easier, with its mobile app backend Parse’s Push feature [parse]. Meanwhile, Ars Technica takes a look at the Yosemite/iOS 8 feature ‘Continuity’, and investigates which type of network powers each Continuity feature [arstechnica].

Open the Pod Bay Doors Off-topic Want to share some links with people? Well, you could start a daily newsletter, or you could try Bundlin [bundlin], a site allowing you to create and share “bundles” of links about particular topics or themes. The National University of Singapore has staged a demo of some autonomous golf carts in a public garden [robohub], with the public able to book rides online and then summon and direct the carts with their phones. Eat your heart out, Google. Finally, and speaking of autonomous robots, we’re getting a sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey [kottke]. A miniseries set 1000 years after the events of the film? Sign us up! (If you can’t wait, there’s a link to the book the series will be based on in that post.)