Making e-commerce work well on mobile is a headache, so this month we're intrigued by Relay, a new API from Stripe. It enables you to put 'Buy' buttons with instant purchase functionality in lots of interesting places, including tweets! People can then buy things quickly without using shopping carts or getting pushed to another site.
There are also tools for enhancing the functionality of Slack, exploring unusual fonts and a couple of utilities for working with colour.
01. Amazon Web Services in plain English
AWS is known for its non-standard nomenclature, so this handy guide has been put together to help you get to grips with things more easily. It starts with the basics and explains what all the jargon means and what each thing would have probably been called if it was part of any other service. A nice cheat sheet to get you going.
02. Write SVG
Developer Sara Soueidan was singing the praises of this PostCSS plugin that enables you to write SVGs directly in CSS. In her tweet, Soueidan appeals for someone to make an equivalent for Sass.
03. Awesome
Modestly titled Awesome is a 'sidekick' for Slack that adds loads of extra functionality such as conversation summaries, private groups, statuses, scheduled messages and more. It’s in private alpha at the moment, but you can put your name down to get an invitation.
04. Flowchart.js
Like flowcharts? Like JavaScript? Then you will probably like this. Enter simple text instructions and it will draw SVG flowchart diagrams based on those instructions. It depends on Raphaël, a small library that helps you to work with vector graphics.
05. Relay
The Relay API from Stripe aims to solve the problem of shopping carts on mobile being tedious to use. It provides a way for shops to enable instant purchases from within other people’s apps; Twitter, for example, is using Relay to allow people to sell things from within tweets via a 'Buy' button.
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06. color
This fun colour picker lets you explore colours by moving your mouse around the screen; left to right for hue, up and down for lightness and scroll for saturation. Click to keep your colour as a bar on the side, and keep on clicking to build up your palette.
07. rucksack
rucksack adds handy features to CSS that remove lots of hassle. There's responsive typography (just do font-size: responsive;), legacy fallbacks, automatic prefixing, hex RGBA shortcuts and many other interesting things. It's built on PostCSS.
08. Web Field Manual
Everything you need to immerse yourself in the plethora of online resources for web designers is contained within this beautifully designed site, along with inspirational quotes from great designers. Even if you stay up to date with the latest resources you’re bound to discover a new gem on here.
09. HTML Color Codes
This comprehensive guide to HTML colour codes will help you create palettes especially for Material Design and flat design, and has tutorials and other useful colour-related resources. There's also the web safe colour chart which helps you to choose colours that will be displayed consistently across all browser.
10. Use & Modify
If you're looking for an unusual typeface this could be a good starting point. The site bills itself as "a personal selection of beautiful, classy, punk, professional, incomplete, weird typefaces", and they're all open source so you can use and modify them, as the name suggests.
Words: Tanya Combrinck
Tanya Combrinck has been writing about the web for over four years, and the internet is actually her preferred method of interacting with humanity. You can find her on Twitter at @tanyacombrinck.
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