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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One of the upcoming features of JavaScript that I especially like is the support for asynchronous functions. In this article, I would like to show you a very practical example of building a server-side application using Koa 2, a new version of the web framework, which relies heavily on this feature.
First, I’ll recap what async functions are and how they work. Then, I’ll highlight the differences between Koa 1 and Koa 2. After that, I will describe my demo app for Koa 2, covering all aspects of development, including testing (using Mocha, Chai and Supertest) and deployment (using PM2).
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In 2011, the traditional comp-to-HTML workflow was only beginning to be critiqued, and since then, we’ve seen a myriad of alternatives. Style Tiles, Style Prototypes, Visual Inventories, Element Collages, style guides, and even designing in the browser have all been suitable approaches to multi-device design. Also, applications like Webflow and Macaw have made breakpoint visualization digestible for the code-averse. Many designers have moved on from Photoshop as their workhorse to Sketch, Affinity Designer, or similar. Others have adopted apps like Keynote for prototyping.
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Currently, GitHub Pages doesn’t offer a route-handling solution; the Pages system is intended to be a flat, simple mechanism for serving basic project content. GitHub does provide one morsel of customization for your project website: the ability to add a 404.html file and have it served as your custom error page. Turns out that many folks have experienced the same issue with GitHub Pages and liked the general idea. However, the problem that some folks on Twitter correctly raised was that the 404.html page is still served with a status code of 404. The gauntlet had been thrown down, and in this article, Daniel Bauchner decided to answer — and answer with vigor!
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Design critiques are an important part of any product exploration. A good design critique is meant to explore the design, find where it is working and where it could be improved. If done well, design critiques allow everyone on the team to feel as if they have been heard and allow clients to give valuable feedback. In an agile environment, you will often have coders, project managers, product managers and people from other disciplines sitting in to give feedback, and you need to know how to quickly get them up to speed on the expectations if you want to get anywhere fast.
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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.
Read more…
PWAs take advantage of the latest technologies to combine the best of web and mobile apps. Think of it as a website built using web technologies but that acts and feels like an app. In this article, Kevin Farrugia will look into recent advancements in the browser and the opportunities you, as developers, have to build a new generation of web apps. This is merely an appetizer for progressive web apps. You could do a lot more to create that app-like experience users are looking for, whether by supporting push notifications with the Push API, making the app re-engageable, or using IndexedDB and background syncing to improve the offline experience.
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Designers love to get the big picture right, but if the details aren’t handled properly, the solution will fail. That’s why well-designed microinteractions make experiences feel crafted. As Charles Eames once said, “The details are not the details. They make the design.” Every element of the design matters. Details make your app stand out from the competition because they can be either practical and forgettable or impressive, useful and unforgettable.
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Andy Budd is a firm believer in cross-functional pairing and thinks that some of the best usability solutions emanate from the tech team. However, at some point the experience needs to be owned, and it shouldn’t be owned by the last person to open the HTML file and “touch the truck”. If designers are happy for developers to “own the code”, why not show a similar amount of respect and let designers “own the experience”? After all, collaboration goes both ways. So if you don’t want designers to start “optimizing” your code on the live server, outside your version control processes, please stop doing the same to their design.
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In the previous article, Clayton Anderson showed you how React Native can help you make iOS and Android apps with a shared code base, without sacrifices in quality. But what about the web? React Native for Web is intended to let you write a single app that runs in a browser using standard web technologies, or on iOS and Android as a real native mobile app. While I don’t think the project is ready for production use yet, its potential success could mark a massive change in how large multi-platform applications are built. Let’s jump in!
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