CategoryWeb Development

October 28, 2015 — You’ve probably heard about ECMAScript 6 (or ES6) already. It’s the next version of JavaScript, and it has some great new features. The features have varying degrees of complexity and are useful in both simple scripts and complex applications. Read more…

July 9, 2015 — Today, Rachel Andrew will be taking a look at how to build a simple yet robust workflow for developing sites that require PHP and MySQL. She’lI also demonstrate a process for using a hosted service to deploy files in a robust way to your live server. By the end of this article, you should be in a position to develop one or many sites locally, using a setup similar to how the site will run on the live server. You will deploy in the confidence that what ends up on the live server is exactly what should be on that server — no more, no less. Once you understand this type of workflow, you can explore how to streamline it further, making time to do more interesting things than fight with servers and hosting! Read more…

April 14, 2015 — In the first part of this series, David Tucker walked through a messaging application demo powered by the Kinvey application. He explored how to leverage user management, file storage and the data store. To complete the demo, you need to leverage two key pieces of Kinvey functionality: the permissions provided by the data store, and push notifications, which are enabled through the business logic functionality. With this article, you will have seen ways that an MBaaS solution can help you to create compelling business- and consumer-focused mobile experiences. This certainly is a space with a lot of focus at the moment, and David expects rapid maturity and evolution of these services over the next year. Read more…

March 30, 2015 — In this article, David Tucker will walk you through a messaging application demo powered by the Kinvey application and explore how to leverage user management, file storage and the data store. Through this process, you will complete the core of Kinvey interactions for the application. In the second part of this article, David will explore the permissions model in Kinvey, as well as the business logic functionality provided by the platform. Read more…

February 18, 2015 — Static analyzers look at code and find problems before you run it. They do simple checks, like enforcing syntax, 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 ===. In large projects and on big teams, you’ll be happy to have a little help finding those “simple” bugs that turn out to be a lot less simple than they looked. Read more…

January 20, 2015 — As developers and designers it’s our job to make the web welcoming, not overwhelming. The HTML5 Page Visibility API is used effectively in recent projects by Active Theory, such as their work for Under Armor and A Spacecraft For All: click to another tab and you’ll find that the multimedia presentation pauses and the music fades away. This behavior typifies what I like to call the “polite web”: sites that are considerate of users’ attention, bandwidth and abilities. Read more…

December 15, 2014 — Creating a new cross-platform native and web applications seamlessly on an entire back end for your mobile applications that is feature-complete in data synchronization, push-notification support, user management and file-handling before you even started building the mobile experience is exactly what providers of mobile back end as a service (MBaaS) are aiming to give app developers. It is up to you to determine whether that is true for the experiences you are creating. Read more…

November 24, 2014 — Testing is a critical process that developers should integrate into their workflow to minimize the number of bugs that get caught in the quality assurance phase. In this article, Lawrence Howlett shows you what to consider when creating a front-end testing plan and how to test efficiently accross browsers, devices and web pages. Front-end testing also needs to be budgeted for — with time, resources and money. Whichever tool you pick, stick with it, define a process and put the effort in. The result will be a better website, with significantly fewer bugs. Read more…

June 18, 2012 — brand new Smashing Books #3 and #3⅓ have been released last month and we’re sincerely grateful for the tremendous feedback, reviews and photos submitted by our truly smashing readers across the world. Read more…

August 30, 2011 — Rian Van Der Merwe explores the consequences of working in isolated environments, and ways to build collaborative environments. Read more…