In this article, James Miller and Mate Marschalko cover the basics of how to get started building for your own IoT devices using JavaScript. When building IoT devices, the task is typically divided between two roles: A hardware engineer creates the physical device, and a developer the ecosystem. However, this is not always necessary. In the case of JavaScript, its isomorphic nature allows for one language to be used across multiple platforms — including hardware. While the prospect of building your own hardware can be daunting, hopefully, after working through these two examples, you’ll be already thinking about the possibilities and planning your next project. Many components are compatible with the Johnny-Five library, meaning that the only limit is your imagination.
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Ideally, we’d love to have one tool that would either generate “smart enough” crops and plug in the responsive images markup in the build automatically, or provide one interface to visually adjust the focal point of images and output “ready-to-go” markup. We aren’t quite there yet, but we might be soon. In the meantime, the tools listed in this article could be good enough options to consider when tackling a quite daunting task of producing art-directed variants of images — either manually or by building custom CMS plugins.
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In practice, mock-ups usually represent a perfect experience in a perfect context with perfect data which doesn’t really exist. A good example for it are “optimal” usernames which are perfectly short, fit on a single line on mobile and wrap nicely, or perfect photography that allows for perfectly legible text overlays. Nothing is perfect on the web. We need to craft future-proof experiences. We use little helpers all the time, and they prove to be great tools to build websites that are prepared for everything that comes their way. They also reflect reality much better than perfect mock-ups with perfect heights and perfect names and email addresses ever would. Stay resilient — that’s the true power of the web.
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What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at.
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Enter the amazing world of rational agents, supervised learning and unsupervised learning. Start developing algorithms that can solve daily life problems by simulating the thinking of the human mind. In this article, Arnaldo Perez Castano will describe an artificial intelligence by means of an A* search algorithm for the sliding tiles puzzle. You will be able to compete with friends and create artificial intelligences for this and many other puzzles and games!
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Smashing Magazine is known for lengthy, comprehensive articles. But what about something different for a change? What about shorter, concise pieces with useful tips that you could easily read over a short coffee break? As an experiment, this is one of the shorter Quick Tips-kind-of articles — shorter posts prepared and edited by our editorial team.
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In this article, Manuela Langella will teach you how to work digitally on an image you draw by hand. You will be able to distinguish how Illustrator works with Live Trace and with the Pen Tool. Two different results from the same image, the first close to hand-drawing, the second more of a cartoon style. First you’ll need to know how to manage your drawing in Photoshop and which are the best ways to prepare it for Illustrator. If you are not comfortable drawing in Photoshop, don’t worry! You can download her drawing in high-resolution, skip the Photoshop step and go straight to step 2 to begin with Illustrator.
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There have been some amazing quantum leaps in JavaScript tooling which have made it possible for you to dive head first into writing fully ES6 modules, without compromising on the essentials like testing, linting and (most importantly) the ability for others to easily consume what we write. In this article, Jim Cowart is going to focus on how to create a JavaScript package written in ES6 that’s usable in a site or app regardless of whether you’re using CommonJS, asynchronous module definition (AMD) or plain browser global modules.
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Service workers do a lot of different things; there are myriad ways to harness their powers. In this article, Lyza Danger Gardner explains what a service worker is and how to put together your own by registering, installing, and activating it without any hassle. She decided to build a simple service worker for her website that roughly mirrors the features (provide a customized offline fallback experience, make the website function offline, and increase online performance by reducing network requests for certain assets) that the obsolete Application Cache API used to provide.
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Today’s post features a collection of unique desktop wallpapers for February 2016. Each wallpaper comes in two versions, with and without a calendar, and can be downloaded for free. Created by designers and artists from across the globe, they are just waiting to give your desktop a makeover and provide you with some fresh inspiration. Now you only need to decide which one will accompany you through the month — and that won’t be easy given all the creative ideas the community has come up with. A big thank-you to everyone who participated!
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