In this three-part series, Marc Vandehey will explore the basics of SpriteKit. He will touch on SKPhysics, collisions, texture management, interactions, sound effects, music, buttons and SKScenes. The aim of this series is to get a good understanding of what goes into making a simple game. You can check in with us later on and use the code as a reference for future projects. I will keep updating the code base with interesting additions and refactoring. To get a taste of what you will be creating, check out the completed project.
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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.
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Hand lettering, calligraphy, and really anything that is graphic and handmade is in increasingly resurgence. In this article, Alma Hoffmann will discuss brush lettering, its definition, its context, and the supplies you will need to get started. This is the first part of two articles which aim to provide you with a good foundation of why lettering is more than just drawing pretty letters and explains the principles behind the practice. Alma believes that knowing why we do things is important because it helps us create a mindful practice.
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Is chatting actually good for bots? Early user reviews of chatbots suggest not. How “chatty” your chatbot should be will depend on your users’ mental models of chatbots and the goals and needs your chatbot fulfills for them. Problems occur when designers do not decide up front who their audience is, how the chatbot fits into their business or brand strategy, what domains the chatbot will and will not cover, and what a successful experience should look like. Gizmodo writer Darren Orf describes Facebook’s chatbot user experiences as “frustrating and useless” and compares using them to “trying to talk politics with a toddler.” His criticisms are not unfair.
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In order to improve your workflow, in this article Edric Lapniramai provides a checklist to refer throughout the UX designer’s wireframing process. Divided in three sections — decisions to consider before wireframing, detailing the design elements, and annotations —, this guideline can help you perfect your wireframes and be practical with your time.
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If you don’t want your design to look like it’s made out of unrelated things, this article is for you. There is already a technology, called CSS, which is designed specifically to solve this problem. Using CSS, you can propagate styles that cross the borders of your HTML components, ensuring a consistent design with minimal effort. Today, Heydon Pickering is going to revisit inheritance, the cascade and scope here with respect to modular interface design. He aims to show you how to leverage these features so that your CSS code becomes more concise and self-regulating, and your interface more easily extensible.
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A while ago we asked on Twitter and Facebook what music the web community is listening to when coding and designing. The answers were as diverse as the community itself and Cosima Mielke has compiled those hand-crafted playlists, favorite artists, and loved soundtracks in this article to see which tunes fuel the web, and to provide you with some new ear candy to get you through lengthy coding and design sessions, of course. Get your headphones ready!
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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth takinga a closer look at.
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To those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving, we’ve got a nice set of 15 free icons created by the design team at ucraft for you today — all available in PNG, PSD, AI and SVG formats. You may modify the size, color or shape of the icons. No attribution is required, however, reselling of bundles or individual pictograms is not cool. Please provide credits to the creators and link to the article in which this freebie was released if you would like to spread the word in blog posts or anywhere else.
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Coming up in April next year, we have SmashingConf San Francisco 2017, featuring tasty front-end ingredients, UX recipes and neat design beats from the hidden, remote corners of the web. 1 track, 2 conference days, 8 workshops, 16 excellent speakers and just 500 available tickets, taking place on April 4–5, 2017. We’ve put aside 50 early-bird tickets, and if you book a workshop, too, you’ll save $100 off the conference and workshop price. That pretty smashing, isn’t it?
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