In the most recent build of Known, I’ve made some modifications to the developer tool chain that should help us out going forward.

None of this should affect you if you’re just using known, but if you’re a developer it should make things a little bit better.

I’ve switched the SASS compiler to using LibSASS, which is a little bit more “standard” than the ruby one, although doesn’t really affect us yet. But more importantly, javascript compilation is passed through Babel.

Babel is a javascript compiler, which is most widely used to transcode “modern” javascript code written in ES6 so that it can target legacy browsers. Meaning you can write your fancy code, taking advantage of cool stuff, using a version of Javascript that is actually starting to become useful, while still supporting some of the older (yet inexplicably widely installed) browsers out there.

Again, not much is changing right now, but I hope to make much more use of this facility going forward. For a start, Promises are great.

Anyway, hope this is useful!