Building a mobile app usually costs a lot of money and takes months to launch. Well, there’s a fast and more simple way to create your own native app. In this article, Nick Babich explains how you can use Dropsource (a free visual platform for building mobile apps) by creating an Android app for a chain of restaurants.
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In this article, Huijing Chen covers known and obscure features of Firefox DevTools that can come in handy when you’re building and debugging CSS Grid layouts. You may have heard quite a bit of talk about a CSS feature called “Grid” this year. If you are someone who cringes when you hear the words “CSS” and “grid” in the same sentence, then I highly suggest you check out this new CSS module called CSS Grid.
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How do you get insight into all of your content at a glance? WordPress’ admin area does not show you much about your pages, posts, users and comments. In this article, David Mosterd and Jesper van Engelen will demonstrate some simple custom solutions and a ready-to-deploy plugin to overcome this problem. In this tutorial, they’ll tackle this problem by showing you some easy-to-implement custom code. For those of you who don’t want to code, they’ll show you how to configure the Admin Columns plugin to do the job for you.
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What better way could there be to celebrate the last few weeks and the upcoming holiday season as with some cheerful wallpapers? To get you in the right mood for December and the upcoming holiday season, artists and designers from across the globe once again got their creative ideas bubbling and created festive and inspiring desktop wallpapers for you. Wallpapers that are a bit more distinctive as the usual crowd and that are bound to add some holiday cheer to your screen. You can feature your work in our magazine by taking part in our Desktop Wallpaper Calendars series. We are regularly looking for creative designers and artists to be featured on Smashing Magazine. Are you one of them?
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Building your own app really gives you the ability to create anything you can imagine. If you are a designer, surely you have seen plenty of designs that are not perfect, and you should feel OK with your app’s design not being perfect too. You have to start somewhere, and with the help of other designers and developers, you will improve. In this tutorial, Craig Clayton is going to look at one page of an existing app and teach you how to get the design into Xcode. The design for this app was done using an app called Sketch. Sketch allows you to design anything from websites to mobile apps. It is my preference for designing mobile apps.
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Conversations about ethics are often difficult and awkward. Nevertheless, designers can play a vital role in finding new ways for people to relate to and communicate with each other. In this article, Ciara and Samantha set out to understand how ethics is used in contemporary design.
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Users couldn’t care less about whether a technology is native, an installed web app or a website. What makes users engage and makes shoppers convert is really the experience itself. In this article, Mitch Lenton takes a closer look at PWAs on Android devices and explains how we can pave the way for a new era of browserless web browsing.
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Creating inclusive experiences is a question of using the right menu patterns in the right places, with the right markup and behavior. In design, we often make the mistake of giving different things the same name. They appear similar, but appearances can be deceptive. In terms of inclusion, it may lead you to repurpose a semantically and behaviorally inappropriate component. Users will expect one thing and get another. In this article, Heydon Pickering will give you an insight into inclusive menus and menu buttons.
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This article is a part of the series about how we work and design and build and play. Today is the day when everything changes. Meet Smashing Membership, a community effort dedicated to support and highlight new and old voices of the community side by side. And you can be a part of it. A safe, friendly place where together we can share, learn and decide on the future of the web. But also an effort to move away from an ad-ridden, noisy, clicks-driven web to a friendlier, cleaner and calmer place.
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Designers and developers have to take a lot of things into account when designing a website, from visual appearance to functional design. In this article, Nick Babich will focus on the main principles, heuristics and approaches that will help you to create a great user experience for your website. Treat your website as a continually evolving project, and use analytics and user feedback to constantly improve the experience. And remember that design isn’t just for designers — it’s for users.
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