Zack Grossbart is an engineer, designer, and author. He’s a Senior Technical Staff Member and Cloud Architect at IBM. He creates the IBM cloud user experience and focuses on making complex technologies easy. Zack began loading DOS from a floppy disk when he was five years old and hasn’t stopped coding since. Zack lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife and daughter.
OAuth2 makes it easy for users to log into your app, to not have to remember a password for every website, and to trust your security. OAuth2 dominates the industry as there is no other security protocol that comes close to the adoption of OAuth2.
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Let’s get a few things out of the way first. This isn’t your regular Smashing Magazine article. It’s not a “how to“; it won’t show you how to build a better menu or improve your project tomorrow. This article shows you how a core problem in computer science works and why we’re all pretending we know something for certain when we really have no idea.
You’re looking at Smashing Magazine right now because you’re standing on the shoulders of a giant assumption called “P versus NP”. It’s a math problem that protects governments, runs the Internet and makes online shopping possible.
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Hardly any line of my code comes out perfect the first time I write it. Well, most of the time… Some of the time… Um, hardly ever. The truth is that I spend more time chasing down my own stupid programming errors than I’d like to admit. That’s why I use static analyzers in every JavaScript file I write.
Static analyzers look at code and find problems before you run it. They do simple checks, like enforcing syntax (for example, tabs instead of spaces), and more holistic checks, like making sure your functions aren’t too complex. Static analyzers also find errors that you can’t find with testing, like instances of == when you meant ===.
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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.
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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.
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I love games and I’m a huge math nerd, so I made a new iPhone game based on a famous math problem called The Seven Bridges of Königsberg. I’m selling it in the App Store, but I also want to share it with everyone, so I made it open source.
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JavaScript has been called everything from great to awful to the assembly language of the Web, but we all use it. Love JavaScript or hate it: everyone admits there are serious flaws and not many other choices.
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You’ve presented the new website and everyone loves it. The design is crisp, the code is bug-free, and you’re ready to release. Then someone asks, “Does it work in Japanese?”
You break out in a cold sweat: you have no idea. The website works in English, and you figured other languages would come later. Now you have to rework the whole app to support other languages. Your release date slips, and you spend the next two months fixing bugs, only to find that you’ve missed half of them.
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Your website works. Now let’s make it work faster. Website performance is about two things: how fast the page loads, and how fast the code on it runs.
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E-commerce runs on secrets. Those secrets let you update your blog, shop at Amazon and share code on GitHub. Computer security is all about keeping your secrets known only to you and the people you choose to share them with.
We’ve been sharing secrets for centuries, but the Internet runs on a special kind of secret sharing called public-key cryptography. Most secret messages depend on a shared secret—a key or password that everyone agrees on ahead of time. Public-key cryptography shares secret messages without a shared secret key and makes technologies like SSL possible.
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When my WordPress plugin had only three users, it didn’t matter much if I broke it. By the time I reached 100,000 downloads, every new update made my palms sweat.
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Paper.js, Processing.js and Raphaël are the leading libraries for drawing on the Web right now. A couple of others are up and coming, and you can always use Flash, but these three work well with HTML5 and have the widest support among browser vendors.
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The Web is just starting to use animation well. For years, animated GIFs and Flash ruled. Text moved and flashed, but it was never seamless. Animations had boxes around them like YouTube videos. HTML5 canvas changes everything about Web animation.
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Google Search likes simple, easy-to-crawl websites. You like dynamic websites that show off your work and that really pop. But search engines can’t run your JavaScript. That cool AJAX routine that loads your content is hurting your SEO.
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