Smashing Newsletter: Issue #345

Editorial

Finally: SmashingConfs are back, with in-person conferences on front-end & UX. This year, they will be taking place in San Francisco, Austin, Freiburg (our little hometown in Germany) and New York. 2 conference days, 13 speakers and plenty of kind and smart attendees. Get your ticket right away.

A preview of Upcoming Smashing Conferences in 2022

Recently we’ve launched “Smart Interface Design Patterns”, our new 9h-video course, focused on fine little details that make for better interface design. You’ll explore 100s of hand-picked examples — from complex navigation to intricate tables and filtering UX. Check the free preview.

It’s not just a video course, but a growing video library with 25 lessons available today, and more added every few months. If you’d like to dive a bit deeper, there is a live UX training with UX certification that happens twice a year. The next one will be taking place in a few weeks. Jump to the details.

For now though, let’s explore some little front-end helpers that might help you boost your workflow: from a resource hint validator and hidden npm packages to VS Code extensions and 3rd-party tools. We hope you’ll find them useful.

— Vitaly (@smashingmag)

1. Browser Resource Hint Validator

Resource hints improve page performance by giving the browser extra information that it can’t infer from the HTML. You can use preload to load content that’s required for the initial render, prefetch loads content that may be needed to render the next page, and preconnect establishes a server connection without loading a specific resource yet.

To help you check if resource hints are working as they should, DebugBear offers a free Browser Resource Hint Validator. All you need to do is enter a URL, and the validation will start. The test results show you the different resource hints detected on the site, their size, source, type, and if they are working correctly, or if you can consider removing a hint. Handy! (cm)

2. Hidden-Gem npm Packages

Do you have some “hidden gems” in your digital toolkit that you wouldn’t want to live without? Well, Josh W. Comeau uses a handful of NPM packages in his projects that have come in super useful but that aren’t that well known. He shares five of them in a Twitter thread.

First off, there’s Windups, a unique typewriter effect library for React. If you’re looking for a comprehensive and well-thought-out solution for converting between color formats, Chroma.js should have you covered. Artsy is a tool for responsive conditional rendering in React. Immer makes working with immutable objects/arrays less annoying, and, last but not least, Josh recommends Radix Primitives, a set of accessibility-focused UI primitives like dialogs, accordions, menus, and scroll containers. A treasure chest of goodies. (cm)

3. VS Code Extensions For A More Efficient Workflow

We spend so much time in our text editors, and every now and again we encounter those frustrating little issues that slow us down. It might be a forgotten HTML end tag or going to a function’s source to figure out what a function parameter does. We came across some useful VS Code extensions recently that are bound to fix annoyances like these — for good.

Inline Parameters, for example, can give you additional context when reading your code, making it easier to understand what different function parameters refer to by showing the parameter’s name inline. The extension currently supports JavaScript, TypeScript, React, PHP, and Lua. The axe Accessibility Linter checks your React, Vue, Angular, HTML, and Markdown files to help you avoid common accessibility issues. Path Intellisense autocompletes file names and HTML End Tag Labels labels, well, HTML end tags. Handy little helpers. (cm)

4. Upcoming Front-End & UX Workshops

You might have heard it: we run online workshops around frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, navigation, or landing pages. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.

Smashing Online Events — With online workshops, we aim to give you the same experience and access to experts as in an in-person workshop from wherever you are.

As always, here’s an overview of our upcoming workshops:

Designing For Complex UI Masterclass UX
Vitaly Friedman. Apr 6–14
Deep Dive On Accessibility Testing Dev
with Manuel Matuzović. Apr 7 – 21
Interface Design Patterns UX Training UX
Vitaly Friedman. Apr 15 – May 13
Successful Design Systems Workflow
with Brad Frost. Apr 18 – May 12
The TypeScript Masterclass Dev
with Stefan Baumgartner. Apr 19 – May 3
Jump to all online workshops →

5. Easy And Affordable User Testing

The team at Confrere attempts to make video calls easy to use for businesses who offer services and consulting via video — physicians or hospitals, for example. But how do you know if something really is intuitive if you’ve never tested it with actual users? Well, you can’t.

To help us embrace user testing even in projects that have a tight budget, Ida Aalen from the Confrere team shares their wealth of knowledge from running user testing sessions. She compiled practical tips, templates, research, and resources that make user testing easy and affordable while at the same time providing us with the insights we need to make our products easy to use for everyone. If you ever had concerns that user testing is too cost-intensive or too complex, this guide will show you that it doesn’t have to be. (cm)

6. The Impact Of Third-Party Scripts

Third-party apps are everywhere, fueling analytics, ads, payment processing, and much more. However, they account for more than 45% of website requests. How severe the impact of third-party scripts can be, is visualized on the site 3P Web. Visualized as a treemap or bar chart, you can assess how long an entity’s script takes to execute on average. The largest entities have the worst performance impact on the pages they are on.

If you’re looking for a solution to avoid performance bottlenecks, Partytown is worth looking into. The new, experimental library helps you relocate resource-intensive scripts into a web worker, and off the main thread.

Apart from performance, there’s another aspect worth considering when we talk about third-party scripts: CO2 emissions. It is estimated that information and communication technology accounts for around 4% of global CO2 emissions, which is more polluting than the civil aviation sector and the equivalent to Germany’s national emissions. So shaving off just a few kilobytes already has a positive effect. To help you find out how green your third parties are, the tool “Are my third parties green?” that Fershad Irani created shows you the number of third-party requests on a site, their size, as well as estimated CO2 emission. (cm)

7. A Tiny Script To Copy Text To Clipboard

Copying text to the clipboard shouldn’t require dozens of steps to configure or hundreds of kilobytes to load and it shouldn’t depend on any bloated frameworks either. A modern approach to copying text is clipboard.js. The script weighs in at only 3kb gzipped and gets by without any Flash or frameworks.

If you’d like to show some user feedback or capture what has been selected after a copy/cut operation, clipboard.js fires custom events such as success and error for you to listen and implement a custom logic. There’s no built-in tooltip solution, but if you want to include tooltips, you can refer to GitHub’s Primer, for example. clipboard.js is supported by all modern browsers and gracefully degrades if you need to support older browsers. Small but mighty. (cm)

8. Useful Roundups For Designers And Developers

There are so many fantastic little tools and resources out there that help designers and developers in their day-to-day work. In our series of roundup posts on Smashing Magazine, we highlight some of them. Here’s comes a little overview.

In our post on SVG generators, you’ll find everything from background generators to animation tools. If you want to fix all the little slowdowns you encounter in Figma, our guide to Figma has got you covered with useful plugins for all kinds of purposes. Louis Lazaris compiled a list of powerful command-line apps and utilities that he has come across in the past few years.

For guidelines, tips, and resources to help you create meaningful user experiences, our UX roundup is for you. And, last but not least, we also compiled interactive learning tools and apps to take your skills to the next level. A huge thank-you to everyone who creates tools and resources that make every web professionals life just a bit easier! The web wouldn’t be the same without you. (cm)

That’s All, Folks!

Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!

This newsletter issue was written and edited by Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf) and Iris Lješnjanin (il).

March 22, 2022 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #345

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