Hey, lovely to have you back here. Facebook announced that they built their first cross-platform React Native app. After nearly three years of development, Modernizr 3 is out now. Heydon Pickering explains how to re-create the goodness of gifs in a vector format with SVG. Our dear friend Anselm Hannemann is keeping track of everything in the web development reading list, so you don’t have to. The result is a carefully collected list of articles that popped up over the last week and which might interest you.
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The industry wants us to waste broken gadgets and buy new ones, even if it would only take minutes for anyone to repair it. But without companies sharing how we can repair things, it’s a tough task. We, including the gadget vendors need to start thinking about how to produce less waste. Our dear friend Anselm Hannemann is keeping track of everything in the web development reading list, so you don’t have to. The result is a carefully collected list of articles that popped up over the last week and which might interest you.
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Mmost products contain at least one element of anticipation. Aaron Shapiro from HUGE defined anticipatory design as a method where it’s up to the designer to simplify processes as much as possible for users, minimizing difficulty by making decisions on their behalf. Look at the examples in this article, and consider the checklist to spot opportunities for improvement in your current user experience. If you are starting out from scratch, you have a unique opportunity to embed these principles from the outset.
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We’ve hidden secret keys in different (physical) locations across the world. To move from one level to another, you’ll have to find a hidden print-out in all (four) locations. Watch out for GIF file names. Below you’ll find the first animated GIF that contains a location clue. Identify the location, go there and find a hidden print-out. Once you’ve reached the last level (you’ll know when), just tweet out all the keys in one single hashtag to @smashingmag on Twitter! Alright, let’s get down to business. Are you ready? Action!
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Chrome introduces custom tabs and smooth transitions, allowing apps to preload specific URLs in the in-app browser for a faster user experience. Facebook released a complete rewrite of their React developer tools, now available for Firefox as well. Our dear friend Anselm Hannemann is keeping track of everything in the web development reading list so you don’t have to. The result is a carefully collected list of articles that popped up over the last week and which might interest you.
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Welcome back to the Web Development Reading List (WDRL) for this week! Our dear friend Anselm Hannemann is keeping track of everything in the web development reading list so you don’t have to. The reaction on the first post last week was quite overwhelming. Instead of the previously announced biweekly schedule here on Smashing Magazine, Anselm will post it in sync with the original WDRL; so, expect content to appear weekly here from now on.
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So far, most of the responsive design thinking has revolved around covering the range of experiences from mobile to desktop. Yet little attention has been paid to the opportunities for expanding that range beyond the standard desktop screen, to create an experience optimized for modern large-scale displays. In this article, Christian Holst will explore how e-commerce designers could use responsive upscaling to craft a tailored experience for users with big screens. He’ll cover one core principle, along with 11 ideas for upscaling different parts of the e-commerce experience to deal with the various usability challenges observed during our e-commerce usability studies.
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Our dear friend Anselm Hannemann is keeping track of everything that’s happening in the industry so you don’t have to. Starting from today, we are happy and honored to feature a bi-monthly web development reading list here on Smashing Magazine. Now it should be a bit easier to stay up to date! Welcome to the one hundredth edition and the first one to appear on Smashing Magazine. Anselm is very happy to keep you up to date with the web development industry. If you have any feedback, please let us know in the comments or write him an email.
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The future of web layout is bright, thanks to flexbox. The CSS layout mechanism lets us arrange elements in a truly web-like way. Some elements can be fixed, while others scroll. The order in which they appear can be independent of the source order. And everything can fit a range of screen sizes. Yep, it’s a great time to jump into flexbox if you haven’t done so yet. But flexbox has a dizzying array of features, and in this article, Ben Gremillion will take a look at how you could create a basic Gmail-like, flexbox-based interface. If you haven’t explored or fully understood flexbox yet, this piece will revisit and explain a few things that might be confusing at first.
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Chris Coyier has published a fantastic post recently covering the debate on the role of CSS in light of growing popularity of React.js, extensively and objectively. That’s the quality discussions we need, and that’s what keeps us evolving as a growing and maturing community. Web technologies are fantastic. Our tools, libraries, techniques and methodologies are quite fantastic, too. Sometimes they contain mistakes, but we can fix them due to the nature of open source. There are far too many badly designed experiences out there, and there is so much work for us to do. It’s up to us to decide whether we keep separating ourselves into small camps, or build the web together, seeking pragmatic solutions that work well within given contexts.
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