October 6, 2016 — Are gestures a powerful mode of interaction? The rise of touch and gesture-driven devices has dramatically changed the way we think about interaction. Gestures are more than merely entertaining, they are very useful and feel familiar. Today, the success of a mobile app significantly depends on how well gestures are implemented into the user experience. There’s no way to design a mobile app without thinking about gestures. They should serve as facilitators and time savers. In order to design a meaningful gesture you should tie it to an action and allow the gesture to stand with the action. Read more…

October 5, 2016 —

If you can’t live without a high quality wallpaper on your desktop you might need to invest many hours in the search for the perfect one - that fits to your resolution and has an appealing theme. The quality of the desktop images is often not the one you’d praise over and over again looking at your desktop.

The best wallpapers aren’t cheap photos, but are works of art in their own right. Wallpapers can be creative, inspiring, gorgeous and hilarious. However, there is more to showcase. And these desktop background graphics are definitely worth a look. Now it’s time for something fresh, original and creative. [Last updated Nov/13/2016]

October 5, 2016 — For quite some time, the venerable gzip algorithm has been the go-to solution for reducing the size of page assets. A new kid on the block has been gaining support in modern browsers, and its name is Brotli. In this article, Jeremy Wagner will get hands-on with Brotli by writing a Node.js-powered HTTP server that implements this new algorithm, and will compare its performance to gzip. Read more…

October 4, 2016 — Simple design is hard, since it requires much more thought and inspiration. Colors play a major role, and today Vitaly Friedman would like to show you a couple of illustrations that may motivate you to try out some new color combinations and techniques. Illustrating is creativity in its pure form. It is endless and that’s why Vitaly Friedman loves it so much. Read more…

October 4, 2016 — With the React Native Universal Windows platform extension, you can now make your React Native applications run on the Universal Windows families of devices, including desktop, mobile, and Xbox. In this code story, Eric Rozell will walk you through the process of setting up a Universal Windows project for React Native, importing core Windows-specific modules to your JavaScript components, and running the app with Visual Studio. Read more…

October 3, 2016 — How do users interact with the app? What do they do in the app? In this article, Eduard Khorkov will compare some of the most popular mobile analytics systems. The process of adding analytics to an app involves consideration of many details, and his aim is to provide you with useful tips on implementing analytics. This information should help you find a mobile analytics system that fits your needs and should help you to properly implement it in your app. Read more…

October 2, 2016 — When it comes to elections, we are each given a choice in how to express our opinions and beliefs. Some designers and developers use their skills to further articulate their choice in one person. Here’s a glimpse into how Topple Trump!, an interactive responsive quiz game, was designed and built — combined with some valuable lessons learned along the way. This article is about techniques and strategies, so please avoid political flame in the comments. Read more…

September 30, 2016 — This post features designs of artists and designers from across the globe for October 2016. The collection is a mix of ideas and styles, of wallpapers that are a little more distinctive than the usual crowd. The themes of the wallpapers weren’t anyhow influenced by us, but rather designed from scratch by the artists themselves. A big thank you to all designers for their participation. Join in next month! Read more…

September 30, 2016 — The key reason for Eric Rozell’s investigation of ChakraCore was to support the React Native framework on the Universal Windows Platform, which is a framework for declaring applications using JavaScript and the React programming model. Embedding ChakraCore in a C# application is quite easy and in this article, Eric Rozell will show you how. Read more…

September 29, 2016 — Four years ago, Jason Grigsby asked a surprisingly difficult question: How do you pick responsive image breakpoints? A year later, he had an answer: Ideally, we’d set responsive image performance budgets to achieve “sensible jumps in file size.” Read more…