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Four years ago, Jason Grigsby asked a surprisingly difficult question: How do you pick responsive image breakpoints? A year later, he had an answer: Ideally, we’d set responsive image performance budgets to achieve "sensible jumps in file size."
Cloudinary built a tool that implements this idea, and the response from the community was universal: "Great! Now, what else can it do?" Today, we have an answer: art direction!
There are many reasons why one may want to embed JavaScript capabilities into an app. One example may be to take a dependency on a JavaScript library that has not yet been ported to the language you’re developing in. Another may be that you want to allow users to “eval” small routines or functions in JavaScript, e.g., in data processing applications.
The key reason for our investigation of ChakraCore was to support the React Native framework on the Universal Windows Platform, which is a framework for declaring applications using JavaScript and the React programming model.
We talk a lot about progressive enhancement and how it improves backwards compatibility. But how straightforward is it to apply progressive enhancement concepts to a real-life project? When designing a rich interactive experience, it can be difficult to determine what can be implemented purely using HTML and CSS and what absolutely requires JavaScript.
Through this case study on redesigning the Building Social website, we’ll share some simple yet often overlooked front-end techniques that defer the use of JavaScript as much as possible, while providing some neat JavaScript enhancements, too.
With the tools getting more user-friendly and affordable, virtual reality (VR) development is easier to get involved in than ever before. Our team at Clearbridge Mobile recently jumped on the opportunity to develop immersive VR content for the Samsung Gear VR, using Samsung’s 360 camera.
The result is ClearVR, a mobile application demo that enables users to explore the features, pricing, interiors and exteriors of listed vehicles. Developing this demo project gave us a better understanding of VR development for our future projects, including scaling, stereoscopic display and motion-tracking practices. This article is an introductory guide to developing for VR, with the lessons we learned along the way.
Designing with “big data” is a challenging task. Matan Stauber, however, took it to the next level. With an impressive outcome. Having studied Visual Communication at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Israel's national school of art, Matan realized a very ambitious final project: an interactive timeline of our galaxy's history — 14 billion years, from the Big Bang to today.
We talked to Matan about Histography, about the idea behind it, and how he managed to bring it to life. An interview about stretching the limits of what's possible.
When it comes to creating prototypes, so many tools and methods are out there that choosing one is no easy task. Which one is the best? Spoiler alert: There is no "best" because it all depends on what you need at the moment! Here I'll share some insight into what to consider when you need to pick up a prototyping solution.
I've always wanted to stay up to date on the latest design and prototyping tools, testing them shortly after they launch, just to see if any of them might improve my workflow and enable me to achieve better results. In the beginning, a few years ago, I think it was easier than it is now to decide whether a new tool was useful. Nowadays, apps are being released every day, and it's kind of difficult to give them all a proper try.
To err is human. Errors occur when people engage with user interfaces. Sometimes, they happen because users make mistakes. Sometimes, they happen because an app fails. Whatever the cause, these errors and how they are handled, have a huge impact on the user experience. Bad error handling paired with useless error messages can fill users with frustration, and can lead to users abandoning your app.
In this article, we’ll examine how the design of apps can be optimized to prevent user errors and how to create effective error messages in cases when errors occur independently of user input. We’ll also see how well-crafted error handling can turn a moment of failure into a moment of delight.
For the last few years, whenever somebody wants to start building an HTTP API, they pretty much exclusively use REST as the go-to architectural style, over alternative approaches such as XML-RPC, SOAP and JSON-RPC. REST is made out by many to be ultimately superior to the other “RPC-based” approaches, which is a bit misleading because they are just different.
This article discusses these two approaches in the context of building HTTP APIs, because that is how they are most commonly used. REST and RPC can both be used via other transportation protocols, such as AMQP, but that is another topic entirely.
If there is one thing that will stand the test of time, it's thumb placement on mobile devices. This makes consideration of the "thumb zone", a term coined in Steven Hoober's research, an important factor in the design and development of mobile interfaces.
Have you ever interacted with a mobile website or app that simply didn't play nice with your thumbs? Perhaps you've had to stretch to get to an important menu, or swiping turned into a battle with multiple swiping elements. Mishaps such as these reveal poor consideration of the thumb zone.
