Let’s start into the new year with a little inspiration boost: wallpapers created with love by the community for the community. Happy 2019! Please note that sll images can be clicked on and lead to the preview of the wallpaper, and you can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our Desktop Wallpaper Calendar series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?
Read more…
The mobile web has definitely improved from where it was just a couple years ago. When it comes to the mobile user experience, are mobile websites all that bad? You hear so much about the benefits of building a dedicated native app, but that can become an incredibly costly gamble if users don’t take to it. That said, is the progressive web app the best choice? And will it eventually replace the mobile web and native apps? In this article, Suzanne Scacca explores this idea.
Read more…
Rendering and interaction have become a lot more consistent across browsers in recent years. It’s still not perfectly uniform, however, and a lot of small issues can trip you up. Add on top of these issues the variables of different screen sizes, language preferences and plain human error, and we find a lot of small things to trip up a developer. When implementing a user interface in a browser, it’s good to minimize those differences and issues wherever you can, so that the UI is predictable. In this article, Ahmad Shadeed has put together a list of common issues, with their solutions, as a handy reference guide for when you’re working on a new project. Let’s begin.
Read more…
An old cliché says that “may you get everything you wish for” makes for a particularly insidious curse. As all the other browsers got easier and easier to deal with, Mat Marquis attempted to convince himself that there was at least still a challenge to quirky old IE. That even became something of a point of pride: he had gotten so good at fixing obscure IE issues that he’d learned to dodge them during the course of my everyday development, leaving nothing to dread come the big “open it up in IE and see what broke” phase. With Edge soon making the switch to Chrome’s rendering engine — well, for better or worse, a bitter wish is coming true.
Read more…
With the advent of responsive web design and the mobile-first approach, it’s been seven wonderful years since any new concepts have compelled us to adapt the way in which we write CSS at the base level. These techniques are at the bedrock of most web developers lives, and they’ve served us well, but alas, times change, and developers constantly iterate. As we increase the efficiency of our methods and the project requirements become more complex, new frustrations emerge. Well, today, Alastair Hodgson has a small surprise. Behold: Generic First CSS.
Read more…
Ever heard of a text adventure? Text adventures have been replaced over the years by games that present better visuals and, especially in the past few years, the increasing ability to collaborate with other friends and play together. This particular feature is one that the original text adventures lacked, and one that we want to bring back in this series of articles. Today, Fernando Doglio explains the process of how to create an entire engine that is capable of letting you play any text adventure you and your friends enjoy. That’s right, we’re going to spice it up a bit by adding multiplayer to the text adventure genre!
Read more…
A sighted user puts himself in the shoes of a non-sighted user. In this series, Chris Ashton attempts to use the web under various constraints, representing a given demographic of user. I hope to raise the profile of difficulties faced by real people, which are avoidable if we design and develop in a way that is sympathetic to their needs. Today, Chris experiences first-hand difficulties that visually impaired users face and describes what we can do as web developers to help.
Read more…
We’re at the dawn of a UI revolution. Not only will multimodal interfaces give users more power, but they will also change the way users interact with systems. In this article, Nick Babich will show you how to build your own multimodal UI using Adobe XD. You will explore the concept of a voice-enabled interface and review different types of voice-enabled interfaces; find out why voice-enabled, multimodal user interfaces will be the preferred user experience; see how you can build a multimodal UI using Adobe XD.
Read more…
The state of commercial web conferences is utterly broken. Setting up a conference isn’t an easy undertaking. It takes time and attention to all the little details that make up a truly memorable experience. It’s not something one can take lightly, and it’s often a major personal and financial commitment. But what lurks behind the scenes of such events is a widely spread, toxic culture despite the hefty ticket price. And more often than not, speakers bear the burden of all of their conference-related expenses, flights, and accommodation from their own pockets. This isn’t right, and it shouldn’t be acceptable in our industry.
Read more…
For his last monthly update in 2018, Anselm summarized what has happened in the web development community in the past few weeks. Get ready for browser news, handy tools, lessons learned, and thought-provoking reads. Let’s recap that and remind us of what each of us learned this year: What was the most useful feature, API, library we used? And how have we personally changed?
Read more…
