December 23, 2016 — 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…

December 22, 2016 — Building a genuinely helpful and attractive chatbot is still a challenge from a UX standpoint. While chatbots can be a great tool for creating more personalized customer experience, conversational design still have certain limitations. There are clear cases when a conversation can help or hurt the UX. Before building a chatbot for your business, you should clearly define its purpose and the exact value it could bring to the user. Teach the bot to do one thing extremely good, such as delivering weather forecasts or introducing the company’s scope of service before experimenting further with more advanced features. Read more…

December 21, 2016 — Are you using progressive booting already? What about tree-shaking and code-splitting in React and Angular? Have you set up Brotli or Zopfli compression, OCSP stapling and HPACK compression? Also, how about resource hints, client hints and CSS containment — not to mention IPv6, HTTP/2 and service workers? A front-end performance checklist of things to keep in mind when optimizing for performance. Read more…

December 20, 2016 — Back in 2007, the world met the iPhone for the very first time. After Apple’s product debut, it took less than six months for work to begin on PhoneGap, which would become one of the first and most adopted frameworks for hybrid mobile app development — that is, for apps written simultaneously for multiple platforms using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, rather than coded in native languages. When compared with the prospect of learning an entirely new language and development environment in order to program iOS (and soon Android) apps, the appeal of this type of development to the already huge population of web developers in the world was palpable. Read more…

December 19, 2016 — What would Apple gain by letting developers build web apps that don’t need to go in the App Store? Is iOS holding us back? In this article, Stéphanie Walter presents some of the cool things you can do with APIs and other technologies to make your users’ lives easier. The future of the mobile browser is bright, shiny and fun. We can and will be able to build incredibly powerful things with web technologies. Read more…

December 16, 2016 — 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…

December 16, 2016 — How do designers design a website? Do they just mess around in Photoshop or Sketch for a while until a pretty design appears? You don’t have to be blessed by the design gods with special talent. So, how should you, a developer, learn design? This article is for design beginners. So, throughout the piece, Mason Gentry will use simplified definitions of user experience (UX) and visual design. Read more…

December 16, 2016 — In this article, you’ll find an overview of all of the obscure little things that I forget about every year; so, I decided to gather them all in one place once and for all. The list below serves as a personal reminder for yours truly, and I thought that it might be useful for you as well. In fact, I set up a yearly reminder on December 28th just to have a couple of days to free the mind for the more important things in life and to start the next year without second thoughts or unresolved issues. Curious? Well, let’s dive in! Read more…

December 15, 2016 — The web community has assembled some fantastic advent calendars this year, and to make the choice of which ones to follow a bit easier, Cosima Mielke collected a selection of advent calendars in this Quick Tip for you. No matter if you’re a front-end dev, UX designer, or content strategist, we’re certain you’ll find something to inspire you for the upcoming year. So prepare yourself a nice cup of coffee, cozy up in your favorite chair and, well, enjoy! Read more…

December 15, 2016 — By using the shadow DOM, you can encapsulate the web component and not have to worry about specificity wars with any other style sheet on the page. However, web components and style guides currently seem to be at odds with each other. How can the two co-exist, with global style guides continuing to provide consistency and styles, even to web components with the shadow DOM? In this article, Steven Lambert brings solutions that work today, and there are more solutions to come, that enable global style guides to provide styling to web components. Read more…