This is our weekly design news column where we share our favorite design related articles, resources and cool freebies from the past week. Enjoy :)
Tutorials
Raymond Camden shares a very cool proof of concept for drawing a shape on a map and getting back map data from Google Maps.
Using Drawing Tools and Maps to Find Data
Ariya Hidayat does a nice overview of some of changes coming to JavaScript in ECMAScript 6.
Toward Modern Web Apps with ECMAScript 6
Ariya Hidayat show how sometimes searching with Array.prototype.some can be more efficient than forEach.
Searching with Array.prototype.some
A nice Javascript best practices guide from Thinkful.
Javascript Best Practices Part 1
Mary Lou shares a very nice, experimental multi-level off-canvas navigation useful for responsive sites.
Multi-Level Push Menu
Bem Jones-Bey explains some changes to the spec regarding CSS Shapes and float positioning.
CSS Shapes and Float Positioning: What’s Old is New Again
Jarrod Overson explains how he built a JavaScript particle system in 200 lines of code and how it helped him become a better JavaScript developer.
Build a JavaScript Particle System in 200 Lines
Alan Greenblatt shows how to remap the colors of a black and white image to any color combination using SVG filters.
Implementing the Duotone Filter with an SVG Filter
Loktar recreates some Basic programming in JavaScript to create the appearance of 3D spheres using pixels.
3d Shading with Points
John Allsopp discusses ways of taking web sites apps using local storage, application cache and accessing the local file system.
Taking Websites and Apps Offline
Libraries and Frameworks
Rich Harris explains how reactive programming can make your JavaScript code more efficient and how Ractive.js expressions work.
Ractive.js Expressions and the New Wave of Reactive Programming
Krasimir Tsonev discusses a couple of useful features in Sass but also discusses their current limitations.
Two Useful Sass Features and Their Limitations
Hugo Giraudel shares an experiment to recreate the MetaFizzy effect with using pure CSS with Sass.
MetaFizzy Effect with Sass
Alex Young takes a brief look at Facebook’s React UI framework and how it works.
A Look at Facebook’s React
Codeship continues their video series on JavaScript testing with Jasmine, this edition on asynchronous operations.
How to test asynchronous JavaScript with Jasmine
Johnny Simpson shows how to create an animated image gallery using CSS3 animations and a jQuery plugin he created.
Creating Cool CSS3 Animated Modal Windows in an Image Gallery
David Tucker details the process he uses for automating the development and deployment of his static site solution using Grunt.
Automating The Development, Build, and Deployment Process with Grunt
Jack Franklin explains how to mock API calls in a Node application using Nock.
Mocking API Requests in Node tests
Krasimir Tsonev walks through building a complete website with a client side and control panel using ExpressJS.
Build a Complete MVC Website With ExpressJS
Mobile
Raymond Camden shows how to use changeVersion to update a local database in a PhoneGap app.
Updating PhoneGap Databases
New and Updated Libraries and Frameworks
The Brackets Sprint 29 build focused on improving the native shell and “find in files” improvements and “open with” on OSX.
Brackets Sprint 29 Build
JavaScriptMVC 3.3 was released and contains significant changes such as splitting jQueryMX into CanJS and jQuery++.
JavaScriptMVC 3.3 Released!
takeapeek is another Node-based simple static web server with a number of configuration options.
takeapeek
Ground is a Javascript framework for NodeJS written in TypeScript featuring persistence, client-server synchronization and offline support.
Ground Javascript Framework
Peppy is a fast CSS selector engine that has been around for years but has been completely rewritten for version 2.
Peppy
Other stuffs
Adobe released GCview, an open source web application to visualize and monitor memory usage in the V8 JavaScript engine.
GCview, an open source visualization framework for memory management systems
Just a few of the sites I admire most in the area of web development and why.
Sites I Admire in Web Development