We use ad-blockers as well, you know. We gotta keep those servers running though. Did you know that we publish useful books and run friendly conferences — crafted for pros like yourself? E.g. upcoming SmashingConf New York, dedicated to smart front-end techniques and design patterns.
What has been your biggest web development challenge recently? Was it a development issue, a communication issue or an education issue in your team?
Facing so many things that don't work as expected these days in many different teams and projects, I now realize that we all are part of a very young industry, and by challenging not only our technical foundations but also traditional working habits, we have yet to find how we want to work. Share your challenges in the comments to this post, and enjoy the weekend!
Like many others, I was initially skeptical of Facebook and Instagram's React. Initial demos of React's JavaScript language extension, JSX, made many developers uneasy. For years we had worked to separate HTML and JavaScript, but React seemed to combine them. Many also questioned the need for yet another client-side library in an ocean full of them.
As it turns out, React has proved tremendously successful, both on my own projects, and with many others around the web, including large companies like Netflix. And now with React Native, the framework has been brought to mobile. React Native is a great option for creating performant iOS and Android apps that feel at home on their respective platforms, all while building on any previous web development experience.
Real-time technology delivers information to your users as it happens. But how does it help improve your product and align with your customers' expectations?
Only a few years ago words like WebSockets, low latency and real-time functionality were at the forefront of bleeding-edge development. Fast-forward a couple of years and this technology has become an integral part of many of our favourite apps: e.g. Facebook with its in-app notifications, or Uber with its real-time location tracking effect.
I’ve never been a fan of color theory. I think it’s because I’ve always been a bit hopeless at it. I’d love to be able to sit there, color wheel in hand, and pick out complementary, split-complementary and triad color schemes, impressing all of my friends, family and clients in the process.
But the theory has always eluded me, and, truthfully, I’ve never found it useful when trying to use color in my projects. Somewhat ironically, I’ve been finding that the better I get at choosing and using color, the better I become in the theory behind it.
One of the most popular tools for screen design and illustration in the last couple of years has undoubtedly been Sketch, which became an important part of many designers’ responsive web design and mobile design and prototyping workflows.
However, an increasing number of other tools are becoming available. In this article, I will explore the first browser-based app to be viable in the vector illustration and UI design space: Gravit.
Although it’s April 1st, and people go all crazy making up jokes and spreading hoaxes, I’m sending out this edition to you without any April fools. Instead, I want to challenge you to put more effort, more thoughts into your code.
Instead of blindly following a given path to build the solution with the least effort, what about thinking more about your users? Wouldn’t a lot more users benefit from you spending an additional hour on building a form on your own instead of relying on a third party that involves tracking? Wouldn’t they benefit from a smaller website that doesn’t contain big libraries?
Since eight years, we start into the new month with a collection of desktop wallpapers — the best way to fuel some fresh inspiration, as we find. And it’s not any different this time around. Designers and artists from across the globe shared their creations with us for April 2016. The result is a collection of desktop wallpapers with a unique mix of ideas and styles, eye candy that is bound to cater for new idea sparks.
We are very thankful to everyone who has contributed to this challenge and who keeps the steady stream of wallpapers flowing by sharing their artworks each month anew. The wallpapers all come in versions with and without a calendar and can be downloaded for free. It’s time to get your desktop ready for spring!
What makes a great conference? It fuels your ideas and polishes up your skills. It fosters your professional growth and takes your work to the next level. Luckily, a lot of conferences provide videos of their talks after the event has ended, some do even stream live to pass on their knowledge even if you couldn’t attend.
The videos collected in this round-up revive the spirit of the conferences they were recorded at and cater for a lot of fresh insights and light-bulb moments to make the learning never stop. As a very special goodie, we’re very pleased to also feature the live stream of this year’s Build 2016 Conference, taking place at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, CA, right here on Smashing.
If you’ve ever had to move your iPad from one hand to the other just to tap a button you couldn’t reach, then you may have already guessed why we began this study in our UX lab.
Our Mail.Ru Group’s UX lab team carries out many usability studies of our apps for smartphones and tablets. We address users’ needs by introducing features in our products. We carefully test all of the functions to ensure users notice and understand them well. Nevertheless, this was the first time we had looked at the physiological aspect of our app’s usage.
