I haven’t published anything in a while, which is a shame because I have a couple of good things to write about. That said, today’s post is going to be a short one. I wasn’t sure if theme is interesting enough. But in the end I decided to write it anyway. And it will help me get back in the writing shape.

While setting up a new project on Netlify, I was going through the logs and noticed they are using old school As far as I know people started using it back in the 80s. text only loader. It is a very simple animation swapping between four text characters (—, \, |, /).

This time I want to share a small range slider (progress bar) I built. Check the demo. Code and documentation are available here.

Same story again, on a React project we needed a media progress bar, and I ended up writing one myself.

Why I didn’t like anything I found? Well, everything I tried was missing one of the things we considered mandatory - good touch support, accessibility (aria attributes, keyboard control), callbacks or easy styling.

Let me start with a little disclaimer. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should use it. Hiding scrollbars can be bad for accessibility and user experience.

But there are rare cases where it makes sense, usually when you have scrolling effects or when modal is opened. So use it wisely.

Check the demo. And find the cross browser code below:

Exactly ten years ago, on my my friend’s blog I published a blog post about Internet Explorer 6 CSS hacks. I remembered it recently, and thought it would be really cool if I republished that same post, on it’s 10th anniversary.

I added comments about the hacks from today’s perspective to give you some context. Cited parts are from the original post. Younger developers may find some things unbelievable, because browsers came a long way in the last ten years :)

So here it is.

Few days ago, I was chatting with our design team, and we were wondering how hard would be to create a fake audio spectrum (that mimics human speech) and visualize it. I immediately said it should be easy, and that I will play with it over the weekend. Of course, I didn’t wait for the weekend, but wrote it the same evening. It was fairly straightforward, but it had few gotchas.

Result

Before you start playing with the checkboxes I advise you to read the rest of this post.

Use random value Use static sample Use perlin noise value