Imagine an archaic, alien workflow, with ancient tooling, and none of those things you love about the web. How would your career be affected? As a web developer, not only do you already possess all of the skills to make great modern desktop apps, but thanks to powerful new APIs at your disposal, the desktop is actually where your skills can be leveraged the most. In this article, Adam Lynch will look at the development of desktop applications using NW.js and Electron, the ups and downs of building one and living with one, using one code base for the desktop and the web, and more.
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With dozens of responsive design frameworks available to download, many web developers appear to be unaware of any except for Bootstrap. Like most of web development, responsive design frameworks are not one-size-fits-all. Let’s compare the latest versions of Bootstrap, Foundation and UIkit for their similarities and differences. These are popular frameworks with piles of features out of the box, making them attractive to many development firms wanting to work with “Bootstrap or a close equivalent.”
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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.
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Smashing Magazine is changing: a new design, a new layout, a new technical stack, a new printed magazine, a new Smashing Membership, and the same good ol’ obsession with quality content. Today, we are happy to announce the public open beta of the next Smashing Magazine, next.smashingmagazine.com, with a new design, but one with a few bugs and issues that have to be… you know, smashed first. The big-bang release is scheduled for later this year. Here’s a sneak preview of what’s coming up.
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As UX specialists, you have varied and diverse backgrounds, but visual interfaces are what you spend most of our time on. You are visual thinkers with a highly trained eye. That’s why it’s tempting sometimes to jump straight to the visual UI design stage when starting a new project, and one of the reasons why you may be bored by some other tasks. In this article, Javier will give you some hints and tips on how to put that app design you are working on to the test, and to see whether it’s ready to be released into the wild. Changing your workflow might be challenging in the beginning, but after a while you will enjoy working within the constraints. This will also transform the way you think, and hopefully help you to move away from focusing on the visual details.
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Today, most designers want to create prototypes with integrated pull-to-refresh animation, preferably a custom one. This tutorial explains how to build a prototype in Flinto, a tool that makes swipe-gesture animation possible, and obviously you cannot create a pull-to-refresh animation without a pull. In this article, Ellina Bereza & Simon Bronnikov will help you master Flinto, understand the logic of creating prototypes of this kind, and learn the process of coding these prototypes in your application. To follow the steps, you will need macOS, Sketch for Mac, Flinto for Mac to create the prototype, and Android Studio and JDK 7+ to write the code.
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Node.js has helped to bring uniformity to software development. Writing command line tools has also become easier than ever before because of Node.js. Tools such as Yeoman ask for runtime inputs that eventually help you to customize a project’s configuration as well. Some generators in Yeoman help you to deploy a project in your production environment. That is exactly what you are going to learn today. In this tutorial, Nihar Sawant will develop a command line application that accepts a CSV file of customer information, and using the SendGrid API, he will send emails to them.
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Making big changes doesn’t necessarily require big efforts — it’s just a matter of moving in the right direction. In his book User Experience Revolution and in this article, Paul shares just some of the little tricks and techniques to bring around a big UX revolution into your company — with a series of small, effective steps. This is a marathon and not a sprint. It will take time. We need to unite with others around this common aim and vision of the future. We need to work hard to raise the profile of the customer and to approach management with care.
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Previously, Bruce Lawson’s tried to make some supply-side improvements to web standards so that websites can be made to better serve the whole world, not just the wealthy West. But there are other challenges, such as ways to get over creaky infrastructure in developing markets, to surmount, and Bruce will also look at some of the reasons why some of the offline billions remain offline, and what can be done to address this.
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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.
Read more…
