CategoryCoding

October 19, 2010 — There are tools that make our lives much easier. However, finding those obscure time-savers which would save time in every single project isn’t easy and requires a lot of time. At Smashing Magazine, we are regularly looking for such useful tools, gather them, review them and eventually prepare for a truly smashing round-up. Such posts are quite lengthy and extensive, but they are always worth checking out. Read more…

October 18, 2010 — Web application developers today need to be skilled in a multitude of disciplines. It’s necessary to build an application that is user friendly, highly performant, accessible and secure, all while executing partially in an untrusted environment that you, the developer, have no control over. I speak, of course, about the User Agent. Most commonly seen in the form of a web browser, but in reality, one never really knows what’s on the other end of the HTTP connection. Read more…

October 12, 2010 — These are great times for front-end developers. After months of exaggerated excitement about HTML5 and CSS3, the web design community now starts coming up with CSS techniques that actually put newly available technologies to practical use instead of abusing them for pure aesthetic purposes. We see fewer “pure CSS images” and more advanced, clever CSS techniques that can actually improve the Web browsing experience of users. And that’s a good thing! In this post we present recently released CSS techniques, tutorials and tools for you to use and enhance your workflow, thus improving your skills. Please don’t hesitate to comment on this post and let us know how exactly you are using them in your workflow. However, please avoid link dropping, but share your insights and your experience instead. Also, notice that some techniques are not only CSS-based, but use JavaScript, or JavaScript-libraries as well. Our job is to promote good, high-quality content and resources. If you wrote or developed something useful, contact us — we will do our best to spread the word and help you out. Read more…

October 11, 2010 — Storing information locally on a user’s computer is a powerful strategy for a developer who is creating something for the Web. In this article, we’ll look at how easy it is to store information on a computer to read later and explain what you can use that for. Read more…

October 7, 2010 — As designers, we have to create an intuitive user experience, solve design problems and provide a beautiful and functional user interfaces. Unlike print design, we don’t have the luxury of designing in a static area; rather, our canvas is ever-changing in its content, browser width, page length and more. We do need to be able to code to some extent and be able to build a design around a structure of code. Yet, with these complications comes an opportunity for unique functionality, interactive effects and better user experience. Read more…

September 23, 2010 — You can’t escape it. Everyone’s talking about HTML5. it’s perhaps the most hyped technology since people started putting rounded corners on everything and using unnecessary gradients. In fact, a lot of what people call HTML5 is actually just old-fashioned DHTML or AJAX. Mixed in with all the information is a lot of misinformation, so here, JavaScript expert Remy Sharp and Opera’s Bruce Lawson look at some of the myths and sort the truth from the common misconceptions. Once upon a time, there was a lovely language called HTML, which was so simple that writing websites with it was very easy. So, everyone did, and the Web transformed from a linked collection of physics papers to what we know and love today. Most pages didn’t conform to the simple rules of the language (because their authors were rightly concerned more with the message than the medium), so every browser had to be forgiving with bad code and do its best to work out what its author wanted to display. Read more…

September 21, 2010 — Interactivity can transform a dull static website into a dynamic tool that not only delights users but conveys information more effectively. In this post, we’ll walk through five different coding techniques that can be easily implemented on any website to provide a richer user experience. These techniques will allow you to better display difficult content, help users find information more effectively and provide meaningful UI cues without overwhelming the user: on-page text search, drag controls for oversized content, subtle hover effects, comment count bars and a full-page slider. Read more…

September 17, 2010 — In the previous part of this tutorial we’ve discussed how to create an animated sliding menu with Javascript using the jQuery framework. In this tutorial, we’ll continue to develop our application by enhancing the sliding effect in various ways and make it even more customizable. When we finish with this article, we should have a full-fledged animated Javascript menu that will enable you to display your menus in a great number of creative ways. So let’s continue right where we left off! Read more…

September 5, 2010 — One of the great advantages of creating interactive websites is being able to dynamically hide and reveal parts of your content. Not only does it make for a more interesting user experience, but it allows you to stuff more onto a single page than would otherwise be possible, but in a very elegant, non-obtrusive way, and without overwhelming the user with too much information at once. In this tutorial, we’ll create a sliding menu using the jQuery framework. You will find the downloadable source files at the end of the tutorial if you wish to use them on your website. But the main goal of this article is to show you some basic techniques for creating these kinds of effects and to provide you with the tools you need to realize your own creative ideas. This tutorial is aimed at beginner jQuery developers and those just getting into client-side scripting. You’ll learn how to progressively build this simple effect from scratch. Read more…

August 26, 2010 — jQuery plug-ins provide an excellent way to save time and streamline development, allowing programmers to avoid having to build every component from scratch. But plug-ins are also a wild card that introduce an element of uncertainty into any code base. A good plug-in saves countless development hours; a bad plug-in leads to bug fixes that take longer than actually building the component from scratch. Read more…