How can we evaluate an existing project? Whether we’re reviewing code, auditing CSS or interviewing candidates for a role on our team, here are a number of principles that will provide good guidance.
Read more…
Have you ever wanted to make a website that non-technical folks can edit right in the browser? Or have you ever wanted to make a website that presents an editable collection of items (e.g. your portfolio)? Or simply upload images to a website you made, right from the browser?
Well, what if I told you, that you can do these things (and more!), just with HTML and CSS? No programming code to write, no servers to manage. You can make any element editable and saveable just by adding one HTML attribute to it. In fact, you can store your data locally in the browser, on Github, on Dropbox, or any other service just by changing an HTML attribute.
Read more…
As JavaScript developers, we often forget that not everyone has the same knowledge as us. It’s called the curse of knowledge: When we’re an expert on something, we cannot remember how confused we felt as newbies. We overestimate what people will find easy.
Therefore, we think that requiring a bunch of JavaScript to initialize or configure the libraries we write is OK. Meanwhile, some of our users struggle to use them, frantically copying and pasting examples from the documentation, tweaking them at random until they work.
Read more…
Email is one of the best ways to engage with your users, especially during the holiday season. However, if you want to stand out, no matter how beautiful your emails are, you need to make sure they render correctly in your reader’s inbox, regardless of what email client they’re using. Creating responsive email is not an easy task, and there are various reasons for that.
First, there is no standard in the way email clients render HTML. This is true for email clients from different companies, such as Outlook and Apple Mail, but not only. Even different versions of Outlook, such as Outlook 2003, Outlook 2013 and Outlook.com, render HTML differently.
Read more…
Email design and development is a beast. Email client vendors haven’t been as progressive as web browser vendors in adopting new standards. Here’s an insight into the world of building and sending email.
Read more…
Editor’s Note: Designers could learn how to code, and developers could learn how to design. Sometimes it might not be an option. In this article, the author makes a suggestion to designers without coding skills on how to start crafting code. You might want to take the suggested tool with a grain of salt (or not) but the idea might be worth looking into.
Designers have widely adopted HTML and CSS for a while now. They usually feel comfortable enough to implement their own designs, at least in a static form. However, they’re often intimidated by JavaScript — and rightly so! HTML and CSS are declarative and, I’d argue, closer to design than programming.
JavaScript, on the other hand, is “real” programming. This means you not only have to learn a whole new and complex syntax but also have to “learn how to think.” The barriers to entry are high and prevent many designers from taking the plunge. uilang tries to fix that.
Read more…
In this series of articles, we’ll cover in depth a practical implementation of session storage by creating a complete e-commerce shopping cart with the sessionStorage object and jQuery.
Read more…
Federico was the only other kid on the block with a dedicated ISDN line, so I gave him a call. It had taken six hours of interminable waiting (peppered with frantic bouts of cursing), but I had just watched 60 choppy seconds of the original Macintosh TV commercial in Firefox, and I had to tell someone. It blew my mind.
Read more…
The Web has succeeded at interoperability and scale in a way that no other technology has before or since. Still, the Web remains far from “state of the art”, and it is being increasingly threatened by walled gardens. The Web platform often lags competitors in delivering new system and device capabilities to developers.
Read more…
With the release of Ember.js 1.0, it’s just about time to consider giving it a try. This article aims to introduce Ember.js to newcomers who want to learn more about the framework. Users often say that the learning curve is steep, but once you’ve overcome the difficulties, then this framework is tremendous.
Read more…