Roundup for many things

It’s totally not boring to watch client side programing language space these days. New libraries, frameworks and applications are being created almost daily. Not to mention constantly growing and evolving old ones. Lots of time all this information is getting buried because other, more important things float on top in overall information flow. For some time now I’m using tools like Instapaper and Toodledo to capture and organize all read worthy bits of information about interesting releases, updates and projects. So I thought it might be a good idea to share some of them in monthly roundups here on htmlcenter and accompany them with some short comments.
Lets just start and see how it goes.

Github now has mobile presence and this means that you can watch your favorite open source projects via mobile interfaces. What’s interesting is that iOS and Android apps have different functionality enabled, for example Android version has access to Gist code snippets and iOS version doesn’t.
CoffeScript appears to be much more expressive language then JavaScript, at least in this programming languages expressiveness ranking. Well, on the other hand JavaScript has its overapi own page and there are no signs of Coffee related language being present in there.
Folks from Edge Conf have released this year conference videos. Even with sound quality in video not being superb, nice to see smart people talking about edge of web technology. Other interesting thoughts on Internets are about letting users disable responsive layouts for web projects as responsive, media queries based layouts are becoming major solution to great fragmentation in mobile device world. Its about giving users a choice. However responsive design doesn’t make your web app fast runner on all these mobile devices by default. If you want speed you have to improve performance manually.

HTML5 support for old browsers is surely a pain but as you can see from this post, certain things can be done to reduce non-supportive environment for your HTML5 application.
Talking about non-support, Opera has announced that they are dropping their own browser rendering engine and are planning to use WebKit in the future releases. I guess it’s not an easy job to maintain your own rendering engine (it was called Presto but I’m sure soon will be forgotten). And with all this attention WebKit deserves an objective view and Robert Nyman does it nicely.

You have surely heard about Firefox OS for mobile? It even has its own marketplace for selling mobile apps. But have you already tried their simulator? It will soon be at version 3.0. Mobozi will nicely help HTML5 app developers to optimize images across range of mobile devices and operating systems. It also has API for photo uploading with working example.

Nomination for coolest and fastest hacked project to help client side developers goes to 5minfork.com, which Remy Sharp coded in 1.5 hours. This nice tool lets you quickly test client side code in GitHub repositories, so instead of source you actually see the html page.
So much for roundup this time. Next one is scheduled for end of April.