Productivity Future Vision
Any sufficiently advanced vision piece is indistinguishable from Black Mirror.
Link archive: March 2nd, 2015
Harnessing Flexbox For Today’s Web Apps - Smashing Magazine
More flexbox!
This time it’s a great article by Karen Menezes filled with practical examples showing where you can use flexbox today.
flexbox in 5 minutes
A really handy interactive intro to flexbox. Playing around with the properties and immediately seeing the result is a real help.
Futures of text by Jonathan Libov
This would be better titled “Futures of texting” but it’s an interesting grab-bag of observations. I’ve always felt that SMS has been overlooked as an input mechanism.
(Conversely, I’ve always felt that voice is really over-rated as input mechanism, but under-rated for output.)
Password Masking
A great investigation into the usability benefits of allowing users to fill in their passwords in plain text.
Major caveat: make sure you still offer the ability to mask passwords too.
Google’s experimental new “slow” label could revolutionize how we tackle web performance - Web Performance Today
It looks like Google is going to start explicitly labelling slow sites as such in their search results (much like they recently started explicitly labelling mobile-friendly sites). So far it’s limited to Google’s own properties but it could be expanded.
Personally, I think this is a fair move. If the speed of a site were used to rank sites differently, I think that might be going too far. But giving the user advanced knowledge and leaving the final decision up to them …that feels good.