WDRL — Edition 243: Windows Edge 18, Developing Websites for Apple Watch, Free Fonts, and Being Behind Work.

Celý článek

Hey,

this morning I spent about one and a half hours in the forest nearby. Although it’s rare that I manage to go out of my door and into nature so early, every time I do it is amazing. Nature can boost your mind, your body. Being grounded in forest, just with nature and maybe some animals around you is a relief, a relaxing excercise to your mind. I’ll try to do this more often, even though it’s one of these things where you need to step out of your comfort zone — today we had five degree (Celsius) only.

One more thing: I’m very grateful for all of you who managed to raise my funding level for this newsletter this month to nearly 90%. I’ve never ever before got so much feedback from you and so much support. Thank you, this is really appreciated and makes me confident that not only ads and sponsored newsletters work (financially). Have a great weekend!

News

• Microsoft Edge 18 is out and brings the Web Authentication API, new autoplay policies, Service Worker updates, as well as CSS masking, background blend, and overscroll.

Generic

• Max Böck on the web when a hurricane happens or has happened and users are limited in bandwidth and available energy. Interestingly, CNN and NPR provided text-only pages for this situation recently in order to serve low traffic and without draining batteries. If we can move the default websites towards these goals — saving power and bandwidth — it would be amazing and improving not only the performance and load times but also help environment, or make users happier.

UI/UX

• The Best Contemporary Free Fonts is a great collection of freely available fonts on Behance.

Tooling

• Trix is an open source rich text editor by Basecamp which looks very nice. If you’re using Ruby already, this might be a great choice for any content editing field in your application.

HTML & SVG

• Marcus Herrmann shares insights how we can optimize our websites for the Apple Watch which as of now supports browsing websites in their latest OS. This is quite interesting as the website will be rendered on an extremely small display and still needs to be usable.

Work & Life

• You’re working hard to finish that project in expectation that it’ll feel so good and relaxing when it’s live. Itamar Turner-Trauring shares why this is wrong thinking and how we can avoid burning out our motivation for work.
• Leo Babauta on why we feel that we’re always behind on work and some strategies to avoid these feelings and instead work happily. This is certainly something I should keep in mind and try to do as I’m constantly feeling behind, and thus, lowering my performance and my happiness.
• Remote work is still very hyped and compared to companies who hire on-site, job applications have extremely higher numbers for remote jobs. But most companies (and developers as well) only praise the cool and good parts of working remotely, only a few talk about the challenges, the negative experiences such as a higher risk of feeling isolated, facing anxiety or even depression.

Go beyond…

• It’s cool to turn down twenty billion dollars, of course this is. But the interesting point in this article and the story of the Whatsapp founder who just told the world how unhappy he is now with selling his service to Facebook is that it seems that he believed to be able to control his service despite selling it.

—Anselm