How I built a local-first app for planning trips, and what I learned about the current state of the local-first ecosystem along the way. #f:article #javascript #svelte #webdev

Colima is a Docker Desktop alternative for macOS and Linux that's now supported by DDEV.

Figma recently announced its new Variables product, allowing you to define and manage your design tokens directly within Figma. I have been experimenting with Figma Variables for a few weeks and am reasonably impressed with how it works. In this article, I'll share how I've been using Figma Variables to support my design projects and how I've been syncing them with my codebase with GitHub Actions and StyleDictionary, utilising a dev preview of the Figma API. For this article, I’ll focus primarily on syncing these variables one way from Figma to GitHub, making Figma the source of truth for all my design tokens.

How to add TinyPNG image compression to your macOS Finder contextual menu

I have been committing to free my hand from mouse for a very long time. As a programmer, it’s easy to get frustrated when I have to switch from mouse and keyboard. That’s why I use Hammerspoon – a perfect solution for macOS automation. I will list some of my most useful features when I use Hammerspoon in this post.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that, over the past year, Obsidian has become as essential to my workflow as Shortcuts. As I have been thoroughly documenting in the My Obsidian Setup series for Club MacStories members, Obsidian – which is the MacStories Selects 2021 App of the Year – is more than a text editor: it’s something more similar to an OS for writers that encompasses note-taking, Markdown writing, journaling, research, and more. At this point, just like I can’t imagine using Apple devices without Shortcuts, I can’t imagine taking notes or writing articles without Obsidian.

I am a Karabiner Elements user and had donated to it previously and even talked about some custom key mappings I use. Things had a been a bit spotty with it since macOS Big Sur but with the latest version 13.0 and macOS 11.0, 11.1, and 11.2 things were fine. However, yesterday I updated one of my Macs to 11.3 Beta and that broke Karabiner. In addition to it I noticed that my M1 Mac always reports that it restarted due to a kernel panic whenever I restart; and when I Googled for the panic report entries the first hit was Karabiner. Looks like things aren’t entirely with Karabiner and macOS Big Sur after all.

We’re a truly multi-brand organisation, which is why being able to create individually branded customer experiences while re-using our technical knowledge, digital assets and business processes is so important. This article explains how we achieve this using the GEL Design System, its tools and resources.

Measuring a design system is both essential and challenging to ensure its longevity and success. There are already some ways to measure it, but mainly from a design point of view. Still, developers play a critical role in the success of a design system. They are responsible for implementing the design system's components and patterns into the projects, and thus, are the cornerstone of the design system’s efficiency. By reducing efforts and saving time, design systems can reduce development time.

ACF 6.0 includes a major improvement to the way blocks are built. It now supports using block.json, which aligns with WordPress core’s preferred method for block registration.

Take advantage of the core block editor color picker, add margin and padding, or set custom borders on your ACF block.

If you're building a web experience and want to stay fast, a performance budget can be critical. For success, embrace performance budgets and learn to live within them. Network & CPU limits on mobile can require asking hard questions like, "what is really important to my users?"

Design tokens are being used by companies like Amazon and Adobe to solve the pitfalls of coding a design system. I provide an introduction to design tokens.

Recently I've been writing web components and found several gotchas that make working with them, that much more difficult. In this post, I'll describe some gotchas you can experience when using web components.

In May - June 2021, WebAIM surveyed preferences of screen reader users. We received 1568 valid responses. This was a follow-up to 8 previous surveys that were conducted between January 2009 and September 2019.

Over the weekend, I finished migrating Shoelace from Stencil to LitElement. Even though consumers of the library won't see much of a difference, this was a major overhaul of Shoelace's internals.

In this article I'll explore using Web Components for a design system and what kind of benefits and limitations it introduces.

How has Encore grown and evolved over the last few years? Find out what our design systems team has been up to and the learnings along the way.
#accessibility #design-systems #f:article

In this article, Adrian Bece shares more about the benefits and caveats of code-splitting and how page performance and load times can be improved by dynamically loading expensive, non-critical JavaScript bundles. #javascript #performance #f:article

Ad Hoc brings small teams of skilled professionals together to build government digital services that are fast, efficient, and usable by everyone. #design-systems #f:article #accessibility