The Snap.svg JavaScript library makes working with your SVG assets as easy as jQuery makes working with the DOM.

Looks slightly more useful than flash.

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Ryan Seddon introduces a technique for getting 60fps scrolling on a page littered with elements having a hover state applied to them.

The trick is disabling pointer events on the body tag during scroll, which turns out to be a simple enhancement with big performance gains. His demo goes from 30fps without disabling pointer events, to 60fps with them disabled.

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We need to work as a community to develop a language of transformation so we can talk to one another. And we probably need to steal these words from places like animation, theater, puppetry, dance, and choreography.

Words matter. They are abstractions, too—an interface to thought and understanding by communication. The words we use mold our perception of our work and the world around us. They become a frame, just like the interfaces we design.

I can’t agree more on with Frank about this. Having to prototype something because we aren’t able to accurately describe the behavior isn’t a great place to find ourselves in.

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Frank is also making another print run of his book, The Shape of Design. I suggest picking up a copy if you can, or it’s free to read online or download as an e-pub.

Definitely worth 140 seconds of your time.

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The open web follows standards. Our tools should too.

I would love to see some standards develop out of this initiative. It’s unnecessarily painful to jump between developer tools, and there’s got to be a lot of duplicate work being done by browser vendors.

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Mobile advertising revenue represented approximately 49% of advertising revenue for the third quarter of 2013.

Pretty sure this cements the “Facebook doesn’t get mobile” argument as pure nonsense now.

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A jQuery library for animations inspired by Keynote’s Magic Move effect.

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(GitHub)

It’s one of Silicon Valley’s great oddities that start-up founders refer to themselves as “entrepreneurs.” More often than not, the people who come up with company ideas have no understanding of how to run a business or turn a profit. Partly as a result, the relationship between the entrepreneurs, who have the ideas, and the venture capitalists, who finance them, can become tense.

Nick talks about the history Twitter, it’s founders, and how it got to where it is today. I’m very curious to know how much of this story is true—but regardless it’s an incredibly fun read.

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Updates while you sleep: With WordPress 3.7, you don’t have to lift a finger to apply maintenance and security updates. Most sites are now able to automatically apply these updates in the background. The update process also has been made even more reliable and secure, with dozens of new checks and safeguards.

This is a huge feature and another great reason to be developing on WordPress. It’s amazing to see how far this platform has come.

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CSS features that can degrade gracefully (E.g. border-radius) are set by default to adhere to the $graceful-usage-threshold variable. This variable defaults to 0.1 which means that when 0.1% of users (1 in 1,000) would be affected by removing the prefix for that feature, it will be removed.

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This is one of the main reasons I continue to use Compass instead of SASS by itself. It’s a very smart system that derives its use threshold variables off of Can I Use data.

UPDATE: I use vanilla sass now days in combination with Autoprefixer.

That’s a significant number. Should be interesting to see where they’re at next year and I wouldn’t be surprised if they tip the 50% marker.

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If you learn and fol­low these five ty­pog­ra­phy rules, you will be a bet­ter ty­pog­ra­ph­er than 95% of pro­fes­sion­al writ­ers and 70% of pro­fes­sion­al de­sign­ers.

The world would be a better place if everyone would take ten minutes to read this.

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Start blogging, right now. It’s the single highest-return strategy that we’ve used for user acquisition.

It’s hard to argue with numbers.

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(Via Ian Stewart)

The time has come to simply acknowledge that the PC era peaked two years ago, and has started to irreversibly contract. The only question is how fast.

Yep.

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