February 15, 2019 — For the past few months, Cory Shaw has been building a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, and throughout the development process he’s realized what a powerful tool Slack (or team chat in general) can be to monitor user and application behavior. After a bit of integration, it’s provided a real-time view into our application that previously didn’t exist, and it’s been so invaluable that he couldn’t help but write up this show-and-tell. Read more…

February 15, 2019 — Browser news, valuable lessons learned, best practices, inspiring coding experiments. In his monthly reading list, Anselm Hannemann summarized the most important things that happened in the web development world in the past few weeks. Read more…

February 14, 2019 — A built-in Angular feature called BreakPoint Observer gives us a powerful interface for dealing with responsive images. In this article, Tamas Piros will take a closer look at image breakpoints, their use-cases and throughout a hands-on example; you’ll implement them in an Angular application using Angular’s own BreakPoint Observer. Having such compelling tools at our hands helps us create immersive visual web experiences — without losing visitors. Read more…

February 13, 2019 — With Progressive Web Apps, you can now use the web to build full-blown apps. Thanks to an enormous amount of new specifications and features, we can do things with the web that you used to need to write native apps for. However, talking to hardware devices was still a bridge too far up till now. Today, Niels Leenheer will introduce you to WebBluetooth. Thanks to this tool, we can now build PWAs that can control your lights, drive a car or even control a drone. Read more…

February 12, 2019 — Did you know that the average website is offline for 3 hours per month due to web hosting downtime? This case study by HostingFacts compares 32 web hosting services and their average uptime in 2018. To run this series of tests, John Stevens and his team have signed up for all of the 32 web hosting providers as a regular user, using the cheapest plan available. After that, they set up a basic WordPress website and start monitoring them with Pingdom.com. Their uptime check interval was set to 1 minute, which means all of the sites are scanned every minute to get the most accurate statistics. Read more…

February 11, 2019 — In this mobile-first world, there is no such thing as designing a website near-perfectly the first time around. While we know that more experiences with websites begin on mobile, converting those users continues to be problematic. The goal in mobile-first A/B testing is to inspire mobile visitors to keep moving through the experience. Even if the element you’ve chosen to test doesn’t directly lead to conversion, the improvements you make should eventually trickle down to that final step. Today, Suzanne Scacca will show you how with proper A/B testing for mobile-first experiences, you can change that outcome for your clients. Read more…

February 8, 2019 — Regular expressions have been part of the JavaScript language since the third edition of the ECMAScript standard, which was introduced in 1999. ECMAScript 2018 (or ES2018 for short) is the ninth edition of the standard and further improves the text processing capability of JavaScript. If you have ever done any sort of sophisticated text processing and manipulation in JavaScript, you’ll appreciate the new features introduced in ES2018. In this article, Faraz Kelhini is going to take a good look at how the ninth edition of the standard improves the text processing capability of JavaScript. Read more…

February 7, 2019 — It’s important to understand that all decisions involve emotions. In this article, Susan Weinschenk explains how you can make your users feel confident of their decisions and why it’s a bad idea to provide more than four options to choose from. For example, if someone is making a habit-based decision, do not give them a lot of information, and always limit the number of choices people have to make to one, two or three. If you provide too many choices then people likely won’t choose at all. Read more…

February 6, 2019 — Tables frequently appear on the web but aren’t easy to design and code. People will expect tables. Not those fancy ones from design inspiration sites but Excel-looking monsters with hundreds of cells and complex interaction. In this case, a designer faces many challenges. With this illustrated guide, Slava Shestopalov explains the table anatomy and how to build a table, keeping in mind its future elaboration. Read more…

February 5, 2019 — Good performance is critical to delivering a good user experience, and iOS users often have high expectations of their apps. A slow and unresponsive app might make users give up on using your app or, worse, leave a bad rating. In this article, Axel Kee is going to look into five optimization tricks that will make your app feel more responsive. Read more…