Text-to-speech can help you create more versatile, accessible content. You could purchase recording equipment and spend hours recording and editing each narration, but if you want most of the benefit for only a couple of minutes and a few pennies per post, consider using AWS instead. In this article, Philip Kiely will demonstrate how to use Amazon Polly to narrate your content. In the next article, he will embark on the return journey, from speech-to-text, and consider the accuracy of these transcriptions by sending various samples through a round-trip translation.
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Until now, the designer-developer handoff has been fraught with inefficiencies. It’s not that software teams don’t know how to collaborate or communicate well with one another. It’s just that disparate platforms (namely, Sketch and Visual Studio Code) and incompatible workflows created tons of issues in how design was translated into code. In this article, Suzanne Scacca will show you Indigo.Design, which offers a simple solution to fix this costly and time-consuming problem for software teams.
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Do you need a little inspiration boost? Well, then our new batch of wallpapers is for you. Designed with love by the community for the community, the wallpapers come in versions with and without a calendar for August 2019.
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In this article, Ben Frain concludes a three-part series about the trials and tribulations of designing and writing a basic web application with vanilla JavaScript. In part one he covered the why, part two dealt mostly with the how and this part concludes by looking at how the project was drawn to a close and what was learned from the experience. Ben will cover turning a basic web application into a Progressive Web Application (PWA) and ‘shipping’ the application before looking at the most valuable lessons learned by making the simple web application In/Out.
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In this series Chris Ashton attempts to use the web under various constraints, representing a given demographic of user. Data can be prohibitively expensive, especially in developing countries. Reducing the data footprint of your website goes hand in hand with improving frontend performance. It is the single most reliable thing you can do to speed up your site. In this article, Chris puts himself in the shoes of someone on a tight data budget and offers practical tips for reducing our websites’ data footprint.
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Apps are no small undertaking. Nor are they cheap to build and maintain. So, before you move ahead with creating a new mobile app or SaaS for your client, perhaps you should consider launching a minimum viable product (MVP) instead. With an MVP, you have a low-risk and lower cost way of testing your concept on the market. What’s not to love about that? In this article, Suzanne Scacca will show you what you need to know.
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In the first article of this series, your author, a JavaScript novice, had set themselves the goal of designing and coding a basic web application. The ‘app’ was to be called ‘In/Out’ — an application to organize team-based games. In this article, Ben Frain is going to concentrate on how the application ‘In/Out’ actually got made.
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Short-living trends don’t matter much, but the way we design and build things for the web does. That’s why we created Smashing Magazine Print, our brand-new printed magazine, with practical and thought-provoking articles, written to make us all think. Download a free PDF sample (3 MB) or jump to table of contents. Also, free for Smashing Members.
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Dark patterns are prevailing many of the interfaces we use, and our data is collected, evaluated and handed over to third-parties left and right, often without us noticing at all. Can we fix it? Watch an informal panel discussion, moderated by Vitaly Friedman, exploring questions you have, and the problems that we all need to address. Watch the recording (Vimeo).
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You don’t need to be a Computer Science graduate or know a JavaScript framework to create a Progressive Web Application. With some HTML and CSS knowledge and basic competency with JavaScript, you have all the skills you need. In three parts, Ben Frain is going to share the journey of designing and building a simple Progressive Web Application called ‘In/Out’, built without a framework. You can view it here.
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