The web has the power to bring virtual reality to the world, to every consumer, to every developer. Recently, there has been a proliferation of virtual reality (VR) web browsers and VR capabilities added to traditional browsers. In this article, Ada Rose Cannon will look at the state of browsers in VR and the state of VR on the web via the WebVR APIs. It is still early days for VR on the web, but now is the time to get building, to see what works and what doesn’t.
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We embarked on a special creativity mission nine years ago: to provide you with inspiring and unique desktop wallpapers every month. Wallpapers that are a bit more distinctive as the usual crowd and that are bound to fuel your ideas. In this post, Cosima Mielke brings amazing artworks for September 2017. All wallpapers come in two versions — with and without a calendar — and can be downloaded for free. Time to freshen up your desktop! We are very thankful to all artists and designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing to this mission, who challenge their artistic abilities each month anew to keep the steady stream of wallpapers flowing.
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Welcome back to the second part of this tutorial on Gravit Designer. In the first part Christian Krammer took you through a general look at Gravit and set everything up, created the background image in the weather app and the status bar, and then started to make the initial elements of the design’s content. Having created the main text layers of the content area in part one, let’s continue with the weather conditions for the different times of day.
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Success means many things to many people. However you choose to define success, it will require other people’s cooperation. It will involve landing the right job, winning the right kind of work and being able to charge enough money for your services. It would be great if that were all defined by the quality of your work, but it’s not. There is another factor at play here; your reputation. Think of reputation as a currency. A currency that you can spend to advance your career, win new clients or ensure projects run that little bit easier. It a currency that you can spend to achieve your version of success. People should respect ability, not reputation. But most clients don’t know what good looks like and so have to fall back on how other people talk about you.
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In this article, Aidan Sliney is not going to make you the next Instagram, but he will hopefully help you get a nice base level of users that you can grow from. The example app in this article received 100,000 downloads in eight weeks. This is with a marketing budget of zero and very little work since launch. Aidan will cover the basic app store optimizations that will help bring people to your Google Play page. Getting them to download and stay is up to you and up to the value your app provides. Of course, to get traction, you need to pick a topic in which enough people are interested, and then the quality of your build is what is going to help keep these users.
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Finding a hotel and flight is relatively easy, but when it comes to tours and activities, the problem is that late or last-minute bookings are not always available, and the mobile experience can be limited because many websites are slow or their booking process is long and complex. Building a great mobile experience is really hard and time-consuming, but with enough attention to detail, you can succeed. In this article, Einar Þór Gústafsson will present a case study and share observations on the project he designed and built: GetLocal, an online travel-agency and booking platform in Iceland.
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Today there are plenty of applications available for modern design that let you easily bring your ideas to the screen: Sketch, Affinity Designer, Adobe XD (beta) and Figma, to name just a few. Gravit Designer is a quite new app, that gives you all of the tools needed to create functional and elegant screen designs. It can also be used to make icons, designs for print, presentations and much more. In this tutorial, Christian Krammer will walk you through the creation of a neat weather app.
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Most BFA and MFA programs don’t cover traditional business skills, and companies certainly aren’t investing in cross-functional training for creative professionals. McLean Donnelly shares his personal experience.
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Sketch has delivered a robust design platform with a refreshing, simple user interface. The open nature of the Sketch plugin system means that anyone can identify a need, write a plugin and share it with the community. A major barrier is stopping those eager to take part: Designers and front-end developers must learn how to write a plugin. What if users could write plugins using technologies they are already familiar with? In this article, Zachary Schuessler covers the usage of WebView technology to create a plugin using HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
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You might have noticed it already: in the past few weeks you might have missed Anselm’s Web Development Reading List issues here on SmashingMag. No worries, from now on, we’ll switch to collecting the most important news of each month in one handy, monthly summary for you. If you’d like to continue reading Anselm’s weekly reading list (and we encourage you to!), you can still do so via email, on wdrl.info or via RSS. — Editorial Team
Hello again! I’ll continue publishing this resource and am grateful for everyone who supports my ongoing work. And to celebrate the last weekly edition, I found a lot of great articles for you: Biohacking news that sound like science fiction, advances in deep learning with JavaScript, and a lot more. Happy reading!
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