Eight years is a long time on the web, yet for us it really doesn’t feel like a long journey at all. We’d love to share a few things that we’ve learned over the last years about the performance challenges of this very website and about the work we’ve done recently. If you want to craft a fast responsive website, you might find a few interesting nuggets worth considering. In this article you will find a little story about the things that happened on this little website over the last year. Thanks for keeping us reading throughout all these years. It means a lot. You are quite smashing indeed. You should know that.
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To fully realize that creativity, successful developers need to continually improve their skills. The web industry has grown from this desire to learn. You only need to look at the unwavering demand for conferences, workshops and training days for evidence of this, but the cost of continually sending your team to workshops and training days can quickly become unsustainable. Within your team lies a wealth of skills, knowledge and experience that can be shared and developed further. With a little effort and using resources freely available on the web, you can increase the technical competence of the team organically, with much lighter demands on time and cost.
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JavaScript-based animation is often as fast as CSS-based animation — sometimes even faster. CSS animation only appears to have a leg up because it’s typically compared to jQuery’s $.animate(), which is, in fact, very slow. However, JavaScript animation libraries that bypass jQuery deliver incredible performance by avoiding DOM manipulation as much as possible. In this article, Julian Shapiro will smash some myths, dive into some real-world animation examples and improve your design skills in the process. If you love designing practical UI animations for your projects, this article is for you!
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With a distinct lack of debugging tools, developers turned to a variety of hacks. In general, these hacks were an attempt to recreate a given issue in a desktop browser and then debug with Chrome Developer Tools or a similar desktop toolkit. To put it bluntly, these hacks don’t work. If you’re recreating issues on the desktop, then you can’t be certain that any of your fixes will work. In this article, Jon Raasch will explore a variety of emulators and simulators that you can use for quick and easy testing. Then, he’ll look at remote debugging tools, which enable you to connect a desktop computer to a mobile device and leverage a rich debugging interface.
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In this article, Matthew Andrews, a lead developer behind FT Labs, shares a few insights he had learned along the way while building the FT application. You’re going to make a simple offline-first to-do application with HTML5 technology. Matthew will also be running a “Making It Work Offline workshop” at our upcoming Smashing Conference in Freiburg in mid-September 2014.
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Aspiring to beauty in our designs is admirable. But it doesn’t guarantee usability, nor is it a product or marketing strategy. “Beautiful” says very little about the product. How many people, fed up with PowerPoint, cry out in frustration, “If only it were more beautiful”? No one has figured out how to describe their product effectively. For example, Write, a note-taking app, describes itself as “a beautiful home for all your notes,” which doesn’t say much about why one might want it. Macworld describes it as “Easy Markdown Writing for Dropbox Users.” That’s both concise and specific: If you like Markdown and use Dropbox, you’ll read more. It wasn’t always this way. Indeed, when Dave Feldman became a designer, he had the opposite problem.
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As designers we usually turn to different sources of inspiration. As a matter of fact, we’ve discovered the best one—desktop wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. This post features free desktop wallpapers created by artists across the globe for September 2014. This creativity mission has been going on for six years now, and we are very thankful to all designers who have contributed and are still diligently contributing each month.
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Badges often look the same. So… is it really necessary to budge? If you have a little, different conference, you need different kinds of things. Badges included. In 2013, at the first Kerning conference, Maurizio Piacenza was asked to design the official notebook: he ended up with a really typographic design for the cover and a funny pattern on the back. And an Easter egg on the cover. It was a really funny project, so when a member of Kerning’s organizing committee, asked him to design the notebook and some printed materials for Kerning 2014 he immediately said “Yes, let’s start!”.
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As responsive design has evolved, we now more often start with the content and then set breakpoints when the content “breaks.” This means that you might end up with quite a few content-centric breakpoints and no particular devices or form factors on which to test your website. However, we need to continually monitor a design’s performance with real traffic. Content-centric breakpoints are definitely the way to go, but they also mean that monitoring your website to identify when it breaks is more important. In this article, Jon Arne Sæterås and Luca Passani will demonstrate how WURFL.js and Google Analytics can work together to show performance metrics across form factors. No more guessing.
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If you use custom post types in WordPress, you might need to organize them like categories and tags. Categories and tags are examples of taxonomies, and WordPress allows you to create as many custom taxonomies as you want. In this article, Josh Pollock will explain custom taxonomies and how to create them. He’ll also go over which template files in a WordPress theme control the archives of built-in and custom taxonomies, and some advanced techniques for customizing the behavior of taxonomy archives.
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