In this article, Marco Hengstenberg explains how he helped rebuild the mobile navigation in order to enhance the experience for the readers of Smashing Magazine.
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What if I told you there was an image format like GIF, but it worked with vectors? What if I said it was possible to reverse the direction of its animation? What if you could take one base image and animate different parts of it separately, at different speeds? Well, the image format, SVG, already exists. It just needs a little gentle encouragement.
In this article, I’ll be mixing old with new, taking a somewhat primitive art and breathing new life into it. With the help of Sass, I’ll be streamlining the necessary workflow and hopefully demonstrating that automation can, sometimes, be a friend to creativity.
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Often within a project, the presentation of our content changes based on certain needs. We see this when we use media queries to change our styles based on the user device. CSS quantity queries follow the same concept of changing the styles based on a condition: the condition within a quantity query being the number of sibling elements.
An example would be navigation where items are 25% wide when four items are available; yet when there are five items available, the width of the navigation items changes to 20%. This is a common problem with dynamic site frameworks like WordPress or Ghost. A client might not realize the complications that could arise, for example, by adding one more menu item when the CSS is not set up to fit it in.
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Pie charts have traditionally been anything but simple to create with web technologies, despite being incredibly common for information ranging from simple stats to progress indicators and timers.
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Here is your mission, should you choose to accept it: create a table of items. Each item should span a third of the content area, with the fourth item starting on a new row, much like floats. However, a particular item must always display the price at the end of the first row.
So if there are only two elements, the price element would be second. But if there are more than three items, the price would be the last element in the first row. You might assume that JavaScript would be the best solution — just loop over the items, and if there are more than three, update the styling. But what if I told you could do it with CSS alone?
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Web-based interactive experiences are widely used in the modern age for a variety of reasons, predominantly for the advertising of premium high-street products and services. After discovering the little-known clip-path property of CSS, I embarked upon a five-month interactive production journey of my own with a different purpose: to raise awareness of the struggles of 30 similarly little-known endangered species.
This article explores the inspiration for the project and aspects of how different parts were built, and I’ll dive into how you can use this greatly underrated line of CSS for your own projects.
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Mobile back end as a service (MBaaS) aims at giving app developers the ability to create seamlessly new feature-complete cross-platform native and web applications. In the first part of this series, I walked through a messaging application demo powered by the Kinvey application. We explored how to leverage user management, file storage and the data store.
To complete the demo, we 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.
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In a previous article I introduced mobile back end as a service (MBaaS) which aims at giving app developers the ability to create seamlessly new feature-complete cross-platform native and web applications.
The next step is implementing a complete demo application using those ideas. Through this real working application, you will be able to see the areas in which MBaaS provides value. This first part 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.
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The navigation system is often the most important and complex user interface component of modern websites. In recent years, small screens, responsive website techniques and ever-evolving hardware and software have only added to this complexity.
A quick query of “mobile navigation” returns thousands of opinions on navigation patterns, including the “hamburger” menu, front-end plugins, frameworks and plenty of other tools. Despite this changing landscape of tools and design trends, a successful navigation system sends users on the path to the exact content they need at the right time.
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Over in startup land, one of the big stories of 2014 was, without a doubt, the success of Product Hunt. It’s is a community where people post, vote on and comment on new products they’ve discovered or launched. Whether you’re looking for the next big thing to invest in or just want to find a better weather app, Product Hunt has got you covered.
Coincidentally, in addition to being a fan of the website, I also have a pretty personal connection to the company. I’ve been online friends with Product Hunt’s designer Jonno Riekwel for years, and I was part of founder Ryan Hoover’s previous project, Startup Edition.
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