Spotify supports unicode usernames which we are a bit proud of (not many services allow you to have ☃, the unicode snowman, as a username). However, it has also been a reliable source of pain over the years. This is the story of one time when it bit us pretty badly and how we spent Easter dealing with it.

Downloads and online tools for testing cross-browser web design. Focuses strongly on MSIE but may still be useful.

Sitespeed.io is an open source tool that helps you analyze and optimize your website speed and performance based on performance best practices. It collects data from multiple pages on your website, analyze the pages using performance best practices rules and output the result as HTML-files or JUnit XML.

There’s a strong case to be made that as Facebook and Twitter have amassed such huge user bases we should take advantage of the fact that so many of their users are already logged in and just one click away from entering your app. I know that argument all too well, because I made it to my colleagues. We tried that experiment, and found that while there are some marginal improvements to login failure rate, they come with a price. Do you want to NASCAR-up your login page? Do you want to have your users’ login credentials stored in a third-party service? Do you want your brand closely associated with other brands, over which you have no control? Do you want to add additional confusion about login methods on your app? Is it worth it? Nope, it’s not to us.

Two.js is a two-dimensional drawing api geared towards modern web browsers. It is renderer agnostic enabling the same api to draw in multiple contexts: svg, canvas, and webgl.

Magnific Popup is a free responsive jQuery lightbox plugin that is focused on performance and providing best experience for user with any device (Zepto.js compatible).

Catch common usability problems before user testing.

So what characters can you count on nearly everyone being able to see? To answer this question, I looked at the characters in the intersection of several common fonts: Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New, and Droid Sans. My thought was that this would make a very conservative set of characters. There are 585 characters supported by all the fonts listed above. Most of the characters with code points up to U+01FF are included. This range includes the code blocks for Basic Latin, Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, and some of Latin Extended-B. The rest of the characters in the intersection are Greek and Cyrillic letters and a few scattered symbols. Flat, natural, sharp, and gradient didn’t make the cut.

Ever wanted to pin something to the side of a text? Ever needed a subtle sticky element to quietly hang around as you scroll down? jQuery.Pin is here to help! Pin any element to the top of a container. Easily disable it for smaller screen-sizes where there's no room for that kind of shenanigans.

Visualise your data in different ways. Each of them animated, fully customisable and look great, even on retina displays.