WDRL — Edition 263: Edged Chromium, API Linting with Spectral, AutoComplete Rules, and UI Patents.

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Hey,

“Ethics” and Ethics is more than a normal article to read. It’s a long essay about what the word ethics means, how its meaning changed in recent time, and the difficulty of diffusion of responsibility in companies. It makes it hard to address and fix problems in big organizations, which is the reason why it’s easy — yet not very effective — to declare a design ethics, tech ethics, business ethics as indidvidual responsibilities as they all lack context without having the support from other people who provide the foundation for their work. Only if a company’s business analysts, bookkeepers, investors, PR, marketing and sales people as well as the CEO itself contribute all together to build an ethical product, this will become successful. And because it requires so many people to be on board, it’s rarely seen in the wild.
And by reading Basecamp’s “It doesn’t have to be crazy at work” book we can get a glance how much effort and good will it needs to build a company that follows an ethical approach. We will understand why it’s so much easier to build a non-ethical company and why even if a couple of people in a company strive for better ethics, the product or company won’t reflect this individual path. Oliver Reichenstein, the author of the above mentioned article, shares why we might want designers to busy themselves with philosophy and how to keep the morales and ethics right in a world and environment where it’s hard to see how.

News

• We’ve heard the announcement some months ago and now the first builds are out: Microsoft’s new Chromium based Edge browser is there and here’s what that means for us frontend developers.
• Safari 12.1 is included with macOS Mojave 10.14.4 and iOS 12.2 and with it, all users get Dark Mode for the Web, Intelligent Tracking Prevention 2.1, Payment Request API improvements, WebRTC Improvements, Intersection Observer support, Web Share API, Color Input, and <datalist> support.

UI/UX

• Taras Bakusevych shows in about twenty examples how we can simplify our design and what simplicity means in design.
• Public Sans is an open source sans-serif font, licensed under SIL Open Font, made by the people of U.S. Web Design System.
• Patents are all over the world but we forget that design patterns can also be patented — Christie Tang collected a few of the most prominent patterns that we cannot use for designing products due to big companies like Apple, Facebook, Samsung having patents on them.

Tooling

• Spectral is an open source, flexible JSON linter with out of the box support for the OpenAPI Specification and, as such, promotes consistency in API designs.

Privacy

• This article explains why all your Alexa traffic is analysed and probably heard by someone who works on the product software in an effort to help the voice-activated assistant respond to commands.

JavaScript

• Jeremy Mikkola wrote a good list of rules for autocomplete that totally make sense and we should try to implement as many of them when we build any auto complete feature ourselves.
• Jeremy Wagner on responsible JavaScript with unsustainable patterns by frameworks, the difference between web-apps and websites.

Go beyond…

• Google Maps is something most of us use daily. And yet it’s the one product by Google that doesn’t obviously make money — yet. As it seems, the makers are now trying to include ads into Maps in order to bring more profits to Alphabet. No wonder, have they built a robust, well used product first and now can get tons of money from it. And even better, as most use it on a mobile app, ad blockers are not as common as in a browser.

—Anselm