CategoryCoding

October 25, 2013 — In this article, Zeno Rocha presents a series of workflows in Alfred that will boost your productivity! A collection of great tricks to automate your work. Hopefully, some will speed up your workflow. Maybe they will even inspire you to share some of your hidden secrets of productivity. Read more…

October 21, 2013 — When it comes to CSS, Thierry Koblentz is convinced that the only way to improve how to author style sheets is by moving away from the sacred principle of “separation of concerns”. CSS authors thrive on styling documents entirely through style sheets, an approach that has been sanctified by the CSS Zen Garden project (what most developers consider to be the standard for how to author style sheets). Read more…

October 11, 2013 — Konstantin Lebedev used to work at Mail.Ru, which had a Flash uploader that was rather good, but still had some problems. He and his team realized that they needed to build something new and different. This article covers all of their steps in creating what they considered to be a better tool for the job. Here’s a list of features that they wanted to have with a new approach to this problem! Read more…

October 7, 2013 — Sometimes the simplest JavaScript features are sitting right under our noses and we just haven’t had a lot of exposure to them. In this article, Louis Lazaris won’t be talking about jQuery, and he won’t be looking at structural code concepts or patterns. Instead, he is going to introduce you to some pure JavaScript features that you can use today and that you might not have ever considered before. Read more…

September 18, 2013 — While working for Simple Focus, a couple of our designers noticed how images always scaled perfectly. The line length of hypertext, on the other hand, changes based on its parent element’s width, which has a negative effect on readability. One of our designers asked, “wouldn’t it be nice, if text worked more like images?” and a few weeks later FlowType.JS was fully-developed and ready to be sent into the world. Here’s the process of how we got there. Read more…

September 17, 2013 — This article scratches the surface of the Three.js library. Once you are comfortable with the API, experimenting with particles, mapping and more complicated meshes can yield incredible results. Three.js is a gold mine for creating beautiful and complex Web experiments. Taking the extremely simple demonstration explained here and turning it into a mind-blowing experiment merely takes experimentation and the willingness to try new things. Read more…

September 3, 2013 — Progressive enhancement has become a bit of a hot topic recently, most recently with Tom Dale [conclusively showing it to be a futile act, but only by misrepresenting what progressive enhancement is and what its benefits are. Read more…

September 2, 2013 — Emotional interaction is an important, but frequently neglected, component that must be considered in Web design. Crafting an element of surprise on Web pages can raise visitor engagement without obfuscating important content, sidelining mobile visitors or disadvantaging users who require accessibility features. Naturally, this must always be balanced with the need to guide users through the website. Read more…

August 27, 2013 — Navigation Timing API provides easy access to accurate page timing information, but it is still insufficient to draw a complete picture. Whether we need to support browsers that do not currently implement the Navigation Timing or get information about resources not included in the current page, be sure to find out more about the user’s network bandwidth or whether their support for IPv6 is better or worse than their support for IPv4. All of the techniques presented here were developed while writing Boomerang though not all of them made it into the code yet. Read more…

August 20, 2013 — In this article, we will explore an alternative approach to styling Web documents. With the use of “intelligent” selectors, we’ll cover how to query the extant, functional nature of semantic HTML in such a way as to reward well-formed markup. If you code it right, you’ll get the design you were hoping for. Heydon Pickering hopes that employing some of these ideas will make your workflow simpler and more transferable between projects. Read more…