We use ad-blockers as well, you know. We gotta keep those servers running though. Did you know that we publish useful books and run friendly conferences — crafted for pros like yourself? E.g. upcoming SmashingConf Barcelona, dedicated to smart front-end techniques and design patterns.
Remember the days when hovering and clicking using the mouse were the most used trigger for interaction with site or app? Those days are gone. When Apple introduced the iPhone, multi-touch technology became mainstream and users learned that they could not only point and tap on the interface, but also pinch, spread, and swipe. Gestures are the new clicks.
The rise of touch and gesture-driven devices has dramatically changed the way we think about interaction. Gestures are more than merely entertaining, they are very useful and feel familiar. Today, the success of a mobile app significantly depends on how well gestures are implemented into the user experience. Even Adobe introduced a new design and wireframing app called Experience Design CC (Adobe XD) that lets you prototype on everything from simple wireframes to multi-screen experiences.
Chances are pretty good that you’ve worked with, or at least understand the concept of, server compression. By compressing website assets on the server prior to transferring them to the browser, we’ve been able to achieve substantial performance gains.
For quite some time, the venerable gzip algorithm has been the go-to solution for reducing the size of page assets. A new kid on the block has been gaining support in modern browsers, and its name is Brotli. In this article, you’ll get hands-on with Brotli by writing a Node.js-powered HTTP server that implements this new algorithm, and we’ll compare its performance to gzip.
Whenever I work on an illustration, the objects don’t always have to look like they do in real life. They can look like how I perceive them in my mind. Breaking away from reality is the privilege you have as an illustrator. There are, in fact, no boundaries. Illustrating is creativity in its pure form. It is endless and that’s why I love it so much.
The illustration above is an inspiring example of using geometric shapes to create a bicycle with a minimum of detail. Sit back, relax, and feed your appetite. Here’s your monthly dose.
React.js is a popular JavaScript library for building reusable UI components. React Native takes all the great features of React, from the one-way binding and virtual DOM to debugging tools, and applies them to mobile app development on iOS and Android.
With the React Native Universal Windows platform extension, you can now make your React Native applications run on the Universal Windows families of devices, including desktop, mobile, and Xbox, as well as Windows IoT, Surface Hub, and HoloLens.
When creating a mobile application, a developer imagines a model and the way users will use the application. One problem that developers face is that users do not always use an app the way it was envisaged by the developer.
How do users interact with the app? What do they do in the app? Do they do what the developer wants them to do? Mobile analytics help to answer these questions. Analytics allow the developer to understand what happens with the app in real life and provide an opportunity to adjust and improve the app after seeing how users actually use it. To put it simply, analytics is the study of user behavior.
A new month means new wallpapers! This journey has been going on for eight years now, and each time anew artists and designers from across the globe challenge their artistic skills to cater for some fresh inspiration on your desktop. And, well, it wasn’t any different this time around.
This post features their designs for October 2016. The collection is a mix of ideas and styles, of wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. All wallpapers come in versions with and without a calendar and can be downloaded for free — just choose your favorite. A big thank-you to everyone who shared their ideas with us! Happy October!
There are many reasons why one may want to embed JavaScript capabilities into an app. One example may be to take a dependency on a JavaScript library that has not yet been ported to the language you’re developing in. Another may be that you want to allow users to “eval” small routines or functions in JavaScript, e.g., in data processing applications.
The key reason for our investigation of ChakraCore was to support the React Native framework on the Universal Windows Platform, which is a framework for declaring applications using JavaScript and the React programming model.
Four years ago, Jason Grigsby asked a surprisingly difficult question: How do you pick responsive image breakpoints? A year later, he had an answer: Ideally, we’d set responsive image performance budgets to achieve "sensible jumps in file size."
Cloudinary built a tool that implements this idea, and the response from the community was universal: "Great! Now, what else can it do?" Today, we have an answer: art direction!
We talk a lot about progressive enhancement and how it improves backwards compatibility. But how straightforward is it to apply progressive enhancement concepts to a real-life project? When designing a rich interactive experience, it can be difficult to determine what can be implemented purely using HTML and CSS and what absolutely requires JavaScript.
Through this case study on redesigning the Building Social website, we’ll share some simple yet often overlooked front-end techniques that defer the use of JavaScript as much as possible, while providing some neat JavaScript enhancements, too.
