To be successful in designing the first major Apple Watch app for launch, the entire way Cole Sletten thought about app design needed an overhaul. The patterns and processes that became standard for other devices were of little help and, in many cases, could actively hinder efforts to create a beautiful, functional and user-centric watch experience. Designing apps for the Apple Watch requires thinking in a way that’s unlike the way you design for any other device. As you get familiar with these new patterns of interaction, there is a huge opportunity for designers and brands that harness the power of this device and deliver on its promise — a seamless user experience that carefully balances information, intimacy and interruption.
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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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Building persuasive user experiences is like a relationship and you need to treat it like one. So, what do you want? A one-night stand or a lasting partnership? There are three common challenges when engaging users with a product: Sign-up challenge: seducing your users, first-time use challenge: falling in love with your product, and ongoing engagement challenge: staying in love. Your approach to engaging users should be appropriately adjusted to the relationship you have with them. We will examine the three stages of a user relationship and what tools are appropriate to use for each challenge. This article is a summary of Anders’ talk on designing with persuasive patterns at the Push Conference 2015.
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Starting with version 2.1, WordPress provides the Walker abstract class, with the specific function of traversing these tree-like data structures. But an abstract class does not produce any output by itself. It has to be extended with a concrete child class that builds the HTML bricks for specific lists of items. In this article, Carlo Daniele will explore some of the most common uses of the Walker class. Note, however, that the following examples do not cover all possible applications and alternative ways to take advantage of the class. But you’ll discover more just by making use of your imagination and your skills as a programmer.
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From a high-level perspective, web components will enable better composability, reusability and interoperability of front-end web application elements by providing a common way to write components in HTML.
In this article, Sebastian Metzger will show you why this will be such an important step, by showing off what can be accomplished right now using Polymer. Polymer is currently the most advanced and (self-proclaimed) production-ready library based on web components.
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In this article, Maximiliano Firtman will review the platforms available today, what you can do on each of them, how to plan the architecture, and how to develop apps or companion services for these new devices.
Do you remember the shoe phone from Get Smart? The shoe phone you saw on TV was followed by many other wearable devices on TV. Many years later, we can say that wearable devices are here and ready to use. We, as designers and developers, need to be ready to develop successful experiences for them. Today, Maximiliano will cover the most important platforms ready to support our content and services, what we can do on them and where to start in terms of languages, SDKs and emulators.
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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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How do you maintain that momentum and ensure that your app keeps gaining in popularity? In this article, Ryan Bateman covers some practical approaches to keeping users interested in and using your app, including talking to your users, keep on launching features, making the first impression count and using all functionalities of the operating system. The following tips are all long-term approaches to maximizing user retention, driving daily usage and getting users hooked on your app, but they don’t have to be deployed simultaneously. Your general aim, and best approach, should simply be to demonstrate that you know and care about your users’ needs and requests.
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My hope is for you to see that Make is an automation/orchestration tool that can be used in place of other modern build tools, and will help to strengthen your understanding and ability to use the terminal/shell environment (which is a big plus in my opinion, and helps open up many avenues of technical progression). Whole books have been written on the topic of Make and writing Makefiles so Mark will leave it up to you to investigate further beyond this post if he manages to kindle your interest.
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From specific usability testing and scrutiny of Google Analytics data to more generalized but larger-scale projects, you can quite easily gain access to statistics that illustrate how users interact with our websites. While such straightforward guidelines are emerging as we move forward in the mobile age, they are not the only behaviors that website visitors exhibit on mobile. Mobile users also use social media extensively, play games and download scanned coupons. When you look closely at the behavior of mobile users, it’s very surprising how much you learn.
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