Extensible and customizable tools are nothing new. Most of what we use can be extended in one way or another, whether in the form of add-ons, plugins or specialist languages. Christian Heilmann wrote a lot of extensions and toolbars, which very much boosted the productivity of his company back then. Thankfully, these days, companies understand that offering specialist languages is time wasted, when the web stack has grown to become much more interesting to build applications with. If you download Visual Studio Code now, you will see that my autocomplete feature is a part of it. And here is how Christian did that.
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Many people think localization is as simple as translating in-app content and app store pages. It’s more complex than that. In this article, Bruce Wong and Anna Pratskevich will look at the top Chinese apps, including local market leaders such as Dianping, the Yelp of China, and the few US apps that are successful in China, such as the NBA app and Uber, and discuss how content, graphics and tone can make or break an app’s success, providing you with a few valuable tips to get you started on the right path.
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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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One of the upcoming features of JavaScript that I especially like is the support for asynchronous functions. In this article, I would like to show you a very practical example of building a server-side application using Koa 2, a new version of the web framework, which relies heavily on this feature.
First, I’ll recap what async functions are and how they work. Then, I’ll highlight the differences between Koa 1 and Koa 2. After that, I will describe my demo app for Koa 2, covering all aspects of development, including testing (using Mocha, Chai and Supertest) and deployment (using PM2).
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In 2011, the traditional comp-to-HTML workflow was only beginning to be critiqued, and since then, we’ve seen a myriad of alternatives. Style Tiles, Style Prototypes, Visual Inventories, Element Collages, style guides, and even designing in the browser have all been suitable approaches to multi-device design. Also, applications like Webflow and Macaw have made breakpoint visualization digestible for the code-averse. Many designers have moved on from Photoshop as their workhorse to Sketch, Affinity Designer, or similar. Others have adopted apps like Keynote for prototyping.
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Currently, GitHub Pages doesn’t offer a route-handling solution; the Pages system is intended to be a flat, simple mechanism for serving basic project content. GitHub does provide one morsel of customization for your project website: the ability to add a 404.html file and have it served as your custom error page. Turns out that many folks have experienced the same issue with GitHub Pages and liked the general idea. However, the problem that some folks on Twitter correctly raised was that the 404.html page is still served with a status code of 404. The gauntlet had been thrown down, and in this article, Daniel Bauchner decided to answer — and answer with vigor!
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Design critiques are an important part of any product exploration. A good design critique is meant to explore the design, find where it is working and where it could be improved. If done well, design critiques allow everyone on the team to feel as if they have been heard and allow clients to give valuable feedback. In an agile environment, you will often have coders, project managers, product managers and people from other disciplines sitting in to give feedback, and you need to know how to quickly get them up to speed on the expectations if you want to get anywhere fast.
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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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PWAs take advantage of the latest technologies to combine the best of web and mobile apps. Think of it as a website built using web technologies but that acts and feels like an app. In this article, Kevin Farrugia will look into recent advancements in the browser and the opportunities you, as developers, have to build a new generation of web apps. This is merely an appetizer for progressive web apps. You could do a lot more to create that app-like experience users are looking for, whether by supporting push notifications with the Push API, making the app re-engageable, or using IndexedDB and background syncing to improve the offline experience.
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Designers love to get the big picture right, but if the details aren’t handled properly, the solution will fail. That’s why well-designed microinteractions make experiences feel crafted. As Charles Eames once said, “The details are not the details. They make the design.” Every element of the design matters. Details make your app stand out from the competition because they can be either practical and forgettable or impressive, useful and unforgettable.
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