You know, we use ad-blockers as well. 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. our upcoming SmashingConf New York, dedicated to smart front-end techniques and design patterns.
This tutorial gives you hands-on access to my journey of creating a digital assistant capable of connecting with any system via a RESTful API to perform various tasks.
Here, I’ll be demonstrating how to save a user’s basic information and create a new project on their behalf via natural language processing (NLP).
Read more...For the holidays, the owner of (and my boss at) thirteen23 gave each employee a Google Home device. If you don’t already know, Google Home is a voice-activated speaker powered by Google Assistant and is a competing product to Amazon’s line of Alexa products.
I already have the Amazon Echo, and as Director of Technology at thirteen23, I love tinkering with software for new products. For the Amazon Echo, you can create what are called "skills", which allow you to build custom interactions when speaking to the device.
Read more...How about an icon set that gives your UI designs just that finishing touch they need? One that stands out while keeping the design clear and legible? Vincent Le Moign spent two years on designing such a set, and we are very happy to feature part of it as a freebie today.
The EGO icon collection shines with its well-balanced, geometric style — perfect to make a bold statement without being obtrusive. To prepare you for nearly everything that an app or web interface could ask for, EGO covers tech- and office-themed icons, just like commerce, transport, nature, and leisure motifs. 100 icons in total that can be resized and customized to your liking (AI, EPS, SVG, Sketch, Iconjar, and PDF versions are available). Black and duo-tone blue versions are already on board when you download the set.
Read more...Websites with long or infinite scrolling are becoming more and more common lately, and it’s no mere trend or coincidence. The technique of long scrolling allows users to traverse chunks of content without any interruption or additional interaction — information simply appear as the user scrolls down the page.
Infinite scrolling is a variety of long scrolling that allows users to scroll through a massive chunk of content with no finish line in sight (it’s the endless scrolling you see on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr feeds).
Read more...As designers, we often use imagery that resonates with our audience. Yet, often we also end up with stock photos and generic icons that come across as mere decoration. Or we bypass imagery altogether. But custom images are a powerful design tool. They can tell a story and convey a distinct personality.
Custom illustrations can be especially impactful. They can make our audience feel personally connected to an app or website, while being an integral part of the design.
Read more...Imagine that it's a hot day. The sun is out, and the temperature is rising. Perhaps, every now and then, there's a cool breeze. A good song is playing on the radio. At some point, you get up to get a glass of water, but the exact reason why you did that at that particular time isn't easy to explain. It was "too hot" and you were "somewhat thirsty," but also maybe "a little bored." Each of these qualities isn't either/or, but instead fall on a spectrum of values.
In contrast, our software is usually built on Boolean values. We set isHot to true and if isHot && isThirsty && isBored, then we call getWater(). If we use code like this to control our game characters, then they will appear jerky and less natural. In this article, we'll learn how to add intelligent behavior to the non-player characters of a game using an alternative to conventional Boolean logic.
In 2008, I worked on Boots.com. They wanted a single-page checkout with the trendiest of techniques from that era, including accordions, AJAX and client-side validation.
Each step (delivery address, delivery options and credit-card details) had an accordion panel. Each panel was submitted via AJAX. Upon successful submission, the panel collapsed and the next one opened, with a sliding transition.
Read more...When was the last time you took some time to reflect? Constantly surrounded by news and notifications to keep up with and in a rush to get things done more efficiently, it’s important that we take a step back from time to time to reflect our actions and opinions.
Reflect if you are working the way you want to work, reflect if you live your life as you want it to be, but also everyday matters. Do you really need that one particular app or service, for example, or could you live without it? Sometimes less is more and efficiency isn’t everything. What counts is how you use your time.
Read more...As a front-end developer, for each and every application I work on, I need to decide how to manage the data. The problem can be broken down into the following three subproblems: Fetch data from the back end, store it somewhere locally in the front-end application, retrieve the data from the local store and format it as required by the particular view or screen.
This article sums up my experience with consuming data from JSON, the JSON API and GraphQL back ends, and it gives practical recommendations on how to manage a front-end application data.
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