Slack Talk

Phoning It In General web First up, if you’re still on holiday (*shakes fist*) but still want to get your code on, CodeOnMobile [github/dai-shi] can help. Also, this is a pretty great screencast on some advanced JavaScript techniques made possible with recent advances in the language [glenmaddern]. If that sounds a bit dry, the intro to the vid talks about beatmatching GIFs while DJing, so that’s gotta be worth a click at least. Meanwhile, here’s a pretty good post detailing some stuff you should learn this year [revillweb], including ECMAScript 6, AtScript and more. Here’s an intro to cloxp, a development environment for programming Clojure [robert.kra.hn]. Apparently Shuttle [martineau], a Mac menubar app, can really supercharge your development process.

Slack Talk Design Team Sketch [teamsketch] is a Slack-powered community for Sketch users. Here are the most popular fonts of 2014 [myfonts]. When it comes to CSS, just try and do a good job [css-tricks]. That also applies to every other aspect of your life, btw.

The IEmpire Strikes Back SitePoint First on SitePoint today: fill out our survey! It's an opportunity to tell us who you are and what you like and maybe win a tablet. Even if you don't win the tablet (and you probably will, let's face it), it's an opportunity to remake SitePoint in your own image. Good deal! Meanwhile, here’s a great guide to using chart.js to create beautiful charts. Then we have a quick screencast on building smarter UI interactions using the :checked pseudo-class. Here’s your daily dose of schadenfreude: three disastrous site redesigns. Craig Buckler is back with his latest browser share report, with some pretty disturbing news: IE8 usage tripled in December.

Babel On News/business Here’s a great piece on the top five mistakes in launching digital media products[elizabethspiers]. MailChimp (Mail… Kimp?) is now offering automatic newsletter translations via Unbabel [translations.unbabel]. Muy bien! This 2014 report from iOS and Mac app maker Panic [panic] is really frank, honest and interesting. Here’s a teenager’s take on social media [medium/backchannel]. Bad news for Facebook, but good news for Instagram (so, good news for Facebook).

Quick Flick Off-topic There’s apparently a camera that captures 100 billion frames a second and can take photos of actual photons [arstechnica]. Wait until the Mythbusters crew gets ahold of one of those. You can now install North Korea’s operating system [motherboard.vice] and feel kind of weird about the world. Here’s 2014 in the world of Kickstarter [kickstarter]. No mention of Zach Braff [buzzfeed], which is weird. Here’s the Verge with an amazing story of how the Columbian army sent a secret message to hostages via a pop song [theverge]. You’ll never listen to Lady Gaga the same way again. Finally, do you want to write using emoji? That’s kind of a weird thing to want to do, but you’re actually in luck, cos now you can! [emoji]

That's it for our links today, we're going to install that North Korean operating system and see if it can run Crysis [knowyourmeme].