When we started out with riddles, we wanted to have an entertaining yet challenging game that wouldn’t be easy to crack, and would keep our dear readers busy for quite some time. So, let’s get to the bottom of this! It was quite a journey, but we hope it was worth it. Also, a kind “thank you” to all the friends who sent out quite ridiculous, spammy and unrelated tweets at just the right time, so that this game would become possible in the first place.
Read more…
In this article, Shawn Jansepar will guide you through his experience in building an app for Beyond the Rack in which he and his team mix native and web content to create an app that “feels” native. With Beyond the Rack, he set out to build an app in which he could easily ship value to users without sacrificing the experience. By following an approach that puts technology in the back seat, allowing them to use the right technology for the task, they believe they have achieved just that.
Read more…
Small companies with newer brands suffer from not yet having established a culture and the difficulty of conveying their inner values in external communication Working so closely with a large enterprise such as Lufthansa can be overwhelming for any small startup. In this article, Josip Budzaki explains how the project with Lufthansa and their way of thinking really facilitated the process and enabled the team to follow their vision — that’s not something you encounter in many companies!
Read more…
Today we’re happy to release a lovely free icon set with 72 related icons. The set includes icons in 4 sizes and in 8 formats: AI, CSH, EPS, SVG, PDF, PNG, Sketch and Webfont. The icon set is free to use in personal and commercial projects. We’d kindly like to ask you to provide credits to the creator and link to this article if you would like to spread the word. A big thank you to the team over at Round Icons for designing this wonderful icon set — we sincerely appreciate your time and efforts! Keep up the great work!
Read more…
In this article, James Miller and Mate Marschalko cover the basics of how to get started building for your own IoT devices using JavaScript. When building IoT devices, the task is typically divided between two roles: A hardware engineer creates the physical device, and a developer the ecosystem. However, this is not always necessary. In the case of JavaScript, its isomorphic nature allows for one language to be used across multiple platforms — including hardware. While the prospect of building your own hardware can be daunting, hopefully, after working through these two examples, you’ll be already thinking about the possibilities and planning your next project. Many components are compatible with the Johnny-Five library, meaning that the only limit is your imagination.
Read more…
Ideally, we’d love to have one tool that would either generate “smart enough” crops and plug in the responsive images markup in the build automatically, or provide one interface to visually adjust the focal point of images and output “ready-to-go” markup. We aren’t quite there yet, but we might be soon. In the meantime, the tools listed in this article could be good enough options to consider when tackling a quite daunting task of producing art-directed variants of images — either manually or by building custom CMS plugins.
Read more…
In practice, mock-ups usually represent a perfect experience in a perfect context with perfect data which doesn’t really exist. A good example for it are “optimal” usernames which are perfectly short, fit on a single line on mobile and wrap nicely, or perfect photography that allows for perfectly legible text overlays. Nothing is perfect on the web. We need to craft future-proof experiences. We use little helpers all the time, and they prove to be great tools to build websites that are prepared for everything that comes their way. They also reflect reality much better than perfect mock-ups with perfect heights and perfect names and email addresses ever would. Stay resilient — that’s the true power of the web.
Read more…
What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? 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…
Enter the amazing world of rational agents, supervised learning and unsupervised learning. Start developing algorithms that can solve daily life problems by simulating the thinking of the human mind. In this article, Arnaldo Perez Castano will describe an artificial intelligence by means of an A* search algorithm for the sliding tiles puzzle. You will be able to compete with friends and create artificial intelligences for this and many other puzzles and games!
Read more…
Smashing Magazine is known for lengthy, comprehensive articles. But what about something different for a change? What about shorter, concise pieces with useful tips that you could easily read over a short coffee break? As an experiment, this is one of the shorter Quick Tips-kind-of articles — shorter posts prepared and edited by our editorial team.
Read more…
