Apps are no small undertaking. Nor are they cheap to build and maintain. So, before you move ahead with creating a new mobile app or SaaS for your client, perhaps you should consider launching a minimum viable product (MVP) instead. With an MVP, you have a low-risk and lower cost way of testing your concept on the market. What’s not to love about that? In this article, Suzanne Scacca will show you what you need to know.
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This tutorial will help you transform an app that doesn’t work offline into a PWA that works offline and shows an update available icon. In this article, Jad Joubran will show you a step-by-step tutorial for adding a service worker to an existing one-page website. You will learn how to precache assets with workbox, handle dynamic caching as well as handle updates to your PWA. Follow along and see how you can also apply these techniques on your website.
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We are still at the beginning stages of the new technological revolution — the exciting time when technologies like AR will be an expected part of our daily routines — and it’s our opportunity to create a solid foundation for the future generation of designers. Designers who work on AR projects have a role of explorers — they experiment and try various approaches in order to find the one that works best for their product and delivers the value for people who will use it. In this article, Gleb Kuznetsov shares his personal experience and advice on how to create and design AR apps.
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Styling applications is a world in itself, one not often given the importance and attention it deserves. With complex modern user interfaces, it’s only matter of time before your app becomes a mess of unordered styles, reducing consistency and making it harder for new code to be added or changes made to the existing codebase. In this article, Ajay NS welcomes you to take a detailed dive into the different ways of organizing styling in modern applications which often have complex interfaces and design patterns. Let’s walk through BEM, preprocessors, CSS-in-JS and even design systems to find out what works best for you.
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DOM changes can be frequent, and as a result, there are instances where your app might need to respond to a specific change to the DOM. Monitoring for changes to the DOM is sometimes needed in complex web apps and frameworks. By means of explanations along with interactive demos, Louis Lazaris will show you how you can use the MutationObserver API to make observing for DOM changes relatively easy.
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For a while now, Sketch has been the de facto application of choice for UX and UI designers. But in the last year or two, we have seen many new contenders for the Sketch’s crown. Two of them that have made the biggest strides are Figma and Adobe XD. In this article, Ashish Bogawat will try to summarize my thoughts on how Figma and Adobe XD compete with Sketch and what unique features each one of them brings to the table. He will also reference some other alternative apps that are aiming to become leaders in the same niche.
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WebAssembly is a new language that runs in the browser alongside JavaScript. In this article, Robert Aboukhalil explores how you can speed up web applications by replacing slow JavaScript calculations with compiled WebAssembly. This is a case study on using WebAssembly to speed up a data analysis web tool. To that end, Robert will take an existing tool written in C that performs the same computations, compile it to WebAssembly, and use it to replace slow JavaScript calculations.
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The z-index property, despite all that’s written about it, is still widely misunderstood and mishandled. Stacking issues in a complex single-page web application can become a major pain. Adhering to some principles, however, we can easily avoid these issues. In this article, Pavel Pomerantsev will recap what z-index actually is and how you can stop guessing whether it might work in any specific case and start treating it just like any other convenient tool.
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With Spotify, machine learning and social media has gone musical. With their app, your friends can check out what you’re jamming to. What if the rest of the Internet could experience your algo-rhythm, too? In this article, Cher Scarlett will show you how to compose your own application to share what you’re listening to on Spotify using Vue.js and Nuxt. This tutorial is moderately complex, and it requires knowledge of HTML, CSS, Javascript (ES6), but is broken down into very consumable sections.
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Take a gander at the revenues of the top mobile apps and it’s easy to get lost in dreams of what could be if only you built a mobile app today. Then again, have you ever considered how much it actually costs to build and maintain a mobile app? When you look at the big picture, you’ll soon realize that mobile apps aren’t a smart investment for most. That’s why you need to give serious consideration to building a PWA this year. In this article, Suzanne Scacca is going to talk about why app monetization needs to be one of the first things you think about before making a choice between designing a mobile app or PWA for your clients.
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