Static typing is great because it keeps you out of trouble. Dynamic typing is great because it gets out of your way and lets you get your work done faster. The debate between strongly and dynamically typed languages rages on, but understanding the issue starts with weak typing and languages such as C.
C treats everything like a number. A character like a or 7 or % is the number of the ASCII symbol representing it; “true” and “false” are just 1 and 0. C defines variables with types such as int for integer and char for character, but that just defines how much memory to use. To access the variable and print it out, I need to know the type.
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In my previous article on Smashing Magazine (“Understanding the Difference Between Typography and Lettering”), I wrote about how understanding type terminology can help us better appreciate the arts of typography and lettering.
This article again deals with terminology, probably more specifically than most designers are used to, and the title gets to the heart of what I’m communicating in this article. Everyone knows their serifs and sans, slabs and scripts, but most classifications go much deeper than that.
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For a few years, Smashing Magazine has been my first tab to start every browsing session (right after checking Gmail and Facebook). Assuming that the company was based somewhere in the US, I was quite surprised to discover that its headquarters are — from a global perspective — just around the corner from me.
I was halfway through a “reasonable” degree in philosophy, politics and economics and still could not get the passion for Web design out of my head. Aside from being a pure designer or developer, I had no idea how one could pursue a career in that field, and I needed some inspiration.
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Animation makes games real. Movement adds excitement to a game and makes the characters more realistic. In this article, we’ll look at the Cocos2D library and how it supports programmatic animations in iPhone games.
This article is part of a series that teaches you how to create iPhone games based on the open-source game Seven Bridges. Make sure to check out the first article in the series, “Designing an Open-Source iPhone Game” and look at the source code in the Seven Bridges GitHub repository.
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As WordPress matures into a full-fledged CMS and more and more large online publishers come to rely on the platform, the practice of developing and deploying websites becomes increasingly important.
High-profile members of the WordPress community, such as core developer Mark Jaquith and Cristi Burca, have spoken on the topic and built tools such as WP-CLI and WP Stack to improve the professionalism of our administration and deployment.
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Generated content was first introduced in the CSS2 specification. For several years, the feature was used by relatively few Web authors due to inconsistent browser support.
With the release of Internet Explorer 8 in 2009, generated content was rediscovered, and many interesting implementations were adopted for the first time. In this article, we’ll discuss some possible uses of generated content.
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Recently, we had the pleasure of sitting down to pick the brain of Nancy Dickenson, talented UX designer and the Executive in Residence for Bentley University’s HFID Graduate Program.
With a bit of back and forth, we got some wonderful insight into the UX field from this long-time field participant and shaper, who looks back over her time in UX design.
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Liverpool FC fans sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” to their players during matches. UX research is best done when a team is involved. When you run UX research on your own without active observers, you are missing its point.
This article describes and gives you a tool I created called the Rainbow Spreadsheet. With it, you will be able to collaboratively observe UX research sessions with team members (or clients). You will be able to conduct research that involves the entire product team, with results that are turned around quickly and that team members will be committed to acting on.
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In many ways, responsive Web design (RWD) deserves a big share of the honor for making the Web more usable on non-desktop devices. This trend of letting the browser determine more about how a Web page should be displayed makes sense, especially now that mobile browsers are slightly more trustworthy than in the old days of mobile.
However, a responsive website is not automatically a mobile-friendly website. Amid the buzz of trendy Web development techniques, the good ol’ Web server doesn’t get the spotlight it deserves. Modern Web development should be about finding the right balance between server-side and client-side implementation.
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