CategoryTools

February 15, 2021 — Adding video to your application can increase customer engagement and satisfaction. But the exact opposite can occur when there are issues with the video playback: video stalls are frustrating and drive customers away. In this article, Doug Sillars will walk you through the steps to optimize the video on your website to ensure fast playback and reduce stalls. Read more…

February 15, 2021 — A couple of weeks ago, we organized a Form Design Masterclass, an online workshop with Adam Silver alongside 81 friendly and smart people. Today, Adam Silver shares his experience and details by highlighting what you as an attendee can expect from a Smashing Workshop, and things to keep in mind when running one. Read more…

February 9, 2021 — Git has so many powerful features under the hood! From Interactive Rebase to Submodules and from the Reflog to File History, these advanced features help you become more productive and make fewer mistakes. In this article, Tobias explores some of the less known but very useful features in Git. You’ll learn how to recover deleted commits, clean up your commit history, use submodules to manage third-party code and compose commits with precision — along with a friendly Git cheat sheet. Read more…

February 8, 2021 — We use abstractions and conventions to hide away the tricky and error-prone parts, which in turn makes it easier for everyone who needs to do the same task. The ideas Steven Frieson shares here should be actionable in most applications depending on your styling solution and browser support. Migrating to use this system is not very risky since stacking contexts are already scoped individually; you can migrate one context as it already exists at a time. Read more…

February 2, 2021 — On your list of places where people might access your web app, Teams is probably number “not-on-the-list”. But it turns out that making your app accessible where your users are already working has some profound benefits. In this article, Tomomi Imura and Daisy Chaussee will take a look at how Teams makes web apps a first-class citizen, and how it enables you to interact with those apps in completely new ways. Read more…

February 1, 2021 — The present and future of CSS are very bright indeed and if you take a pragmatic, progressive approach to your CSS, then things will continue to get better and better on your projects, too. Some of the really handy powers CSS gives you might have slipped you by, so in this article, Andy Bell will take a look into masonry layout, :is selector, clamp(), ch and ex units, updated text decoration, and a few other useful CSS properties. Read more…

January 29, 2021 — In this article, we look at some of the more advanced features of TypeScript, like union types, conditional types, template literal types, and generics. We want to formalize the most dynamic JavaScript behavior in a way that we can catch most bugs before they happen. We apply several learnings from all chapters of TypeScript in 50 Lessons, a book we’ve published here on Smashing Magazine late 2020. If you are interested in learning more, be sure to check it out! Read more…

January 26, 2021 — The promise of seamless design to code translation goes back to the early WYSIWYG page builders. Despite the admirable goal, their biggest flaw was the code that they generated. Skepticism remains to this day and whenever this idea reappears, the biggest concerns are always related to the quality and maintainability of the code. In this article, Miroslav Bekyarov will show you how to turn our static designs into a live, code-based prototype with real fields, forms, maps, and animations, and in turn, transform this prototype into React code — all integrated into one tool. Read more…

January 25, 2021 — How to stay creative, focused, and organized when working remotely? In this article, Cosima Mielke has compiled some useful tools and resources to help you tackle some of the challenges of working remotely. The collection is by no means complete, but rather a selection of things that we found useful and that we hope will make your day-to-day work more productive and efficient, too. Read more…

January 15, 2021 — Catch up on what’s been cookin’ at Smashing and explore some of the most popular community resources featured in our newsletter over the past few weeks. Spoiler: there are also new workshops, front-end & UX audits and truly smashing podcast episodes. This article covers pretty much everything you need to build fast experiences on the web today — from metrics to tooling and front-end techniques and strategies. Read more…